‘The Hunting Party’ Episode 2 Recap – Formula Is Already Beginning to Creep In

Is anybody there? Has the gap between the decent premiere of The Hunting Party and Episode 2, “Clayton Jessup”, been so needlessly big that everybody has forgotten this show exists? It’s a possibility that we – and indeed NBC – should probably consider.

If you need a refresher, here it is: There was a big secret underground prison nicknamed “The Pit”, full of the worst, most irredeemable murderers in the world, and they may or may not have been experimented on by the U.S. government. At the end of the pilot, we learned that an accident that collapsed the Pit and freed a good number of its cheery occupants was a deliberate jailbreak. We also learned that the protagonist’s former partner/mentor, Oliver Odell, was the prison’s warden.

This is the primary new thing in “Clayton Jessup”, which settles into a rhythm very quickly. Odell’s unique insight into the prison gives him authority over the military tech team that has been assembled to hunt the remaining escapees, while Bex, Shane, and Hassani zip around in their private plane hunting the suspects down. Since most of the prisoners are still trapped under the rubble, nobody has any idea how many survivors are currently at large, presumably giving NBC plenty of leeway if The Hunting Party proves popular enough for multiple seasons.

Bex keeps Odell’s claims of conspiracy to herself for the most part, but she is concerned about the potential of Eli Johnson, the friend of her high-school pal Naomi whom Bex successfully profiled as a teenager, being among those on the loose. And since her relationship with Odell soured when he set a suspect on fire like a crazy maniac, she doesn’t take his word for it until he later presents Eli to her in person, to prove he wasn’t incarcerated at the Pit. It’s like we’ve never seen a procedural before – the fact he’s here at all proves he’s going to have a deeper connection to the overarching plot. But no matter.

Eli does reveal that teenage Bex actually used Naomi to uncover the damning evidence against Eli, which Odell covered up because it would have ruined her chances of becoming an FBI agent. This is rather transparently intended to help Bex repair her relationship with Odell, and the timing is convenient since The Hunting Party Episode 2 ends with Hassani getting word that a considerable data breach that occurred right before the explosion and resulted in substantial amounts of classified information being stripped from the Pit’s servers can be traced directly to Odell’s office. Perhaps the reason he knows the explosion was a jailbreak is that he was in on it.

Anyway, as with the premiere, this outing is named after the criminal that the team is forced to hunt down. Clayton Jessup is effectively creepy. As a 16-year-old he poisoned his entire family with carbon monoxide and lived a happy fantasy life with their corpses for a few days to address his deep-rooted inability to form emotional attachments with people. Then he repeated the process with several other families he took a liking to, stalking and killing them and living amongst their dead bodies before moving on. He just wanted to be loved, I guess.

Melissa Roxburgh and Nick Wechsler in The Hunting Party | Image via NBC

The structure of this is a bit worryingly similar to the hunt for Richard Harris in Episode 1. Bex does some profiling, Hassani makes some calls, and Shane cracks a window into the inner workings of the Pit; Bex eventually finds herself stumbling right on top of the suspect in a dramatic “he’s here, isn’t he?” moment, which I can’t imagine will remain very dramatic if it happens every time.

But I did like the novelty of this case. Jessup is obsessed with happy families, but after spending so many years incarcerated, the only family he could project himself onto was a fake one in the educational videos – the kind of thing where a kid tells his concerned parents that he just likes to hurt people sometimes, and they have to patiently explain to him why that’s wrong – he used to obsessively rewatch. So, when he breaks out, he tracks down and kidnaps the actors who played the fake family and then takes them to the basement of his former therapist where they were filmed.

The therapist is in a wheelchair after having had his back accidentally broken by Jessup years prior. He’s oddly convinced that Jessup won’t hurt him and sees him as a kind of father figure, which isn’t quite the same thing as Richard Harris’s “final victim” being complicit in his crimes, but it’s close. And he’s wrong, anyway. When Bex pursues Jessup he hoists the therapist out of his wheelchair in a bear hug, with his legs dangling uselessly a couple of feet above the ground, an image so ridiculous and unexpected I laughed out loud. How tall is Jessup supposed to be?

Regardless, The Hunting Party Episode 2 is fine, if a little less mysterious than the premiere, but I can’t help but worry a little about how comfortably it seems to be settling into a formula. We’ll have to see how that goes as the show progresses, but so far there’s enough mystery underpinning everything that it’s difficult to mind.