Summary
The Hunting Party continues to develop multiple plot and character threads in Episode 4, while a decent case of the week opens new avenues.
Here, I think, is The Hunting Party starting to come into its own. Sure, Episode 4 isn’t a radical improvement over the previous installments, but it has a just-right balance of character drama, criminal thrills, and overarching development to feel like it’s all moving in a promising direction. I could still use more of The Pit, as a setting and a concept, but I think we’re getting there to a certain extent, and in the meantime, there’s enough interesting stuff going on to hold the audience’s attention.
For instance, Bex dies in this episode. She’s revived immediately afterward, to be fair, but it’s still a bold step to take to unlock a little more character backstory. There is a scuzzy, experimental vibe to The Hunting Party I like, and “Doctor Ezekiel Malak” is probably the best thus far at highlighting that.
It helps that Doctor Malak is properly bonkers, but also that he, like Brenda Lowe, was driven more mad by his experiences in The Pit. It’s fitting, then, that this episode opens with his execution. We already knew that The Pit was filling its cells with Death Row inmates who were supposedly executed at the behest of the state, but I had naively assumed their deaths were being faked by the government. But no such luck. Malak is executed at the start of the episode, and then immediately taken somewhere else and revived.
With this in mind, it’s very hard to consider The Pit as anything other than a mad science experiment. I assume this is how all the other prisoners were “acquired” too. But Malak was a bad choice. As Bex later explains, he was a hospital psychiatrist with a God complex, motivated by power and control. Allowing a guy like that to cheat death was always going to be a bad idea.
Malak killed 24 people before he was incarcerated, and racks up another couple of bodies almost immediately in The Hunting Party Episode 4. But his modus operandi is suddenly different. He’s now torturing his victims, lingering over their suffering as though he wants something from them, whereas before everything he did was all about having power over life and death. The transition to trying to understand death is a lot more complex, especially for Malak’s victims.
Bex quickly figures out that Malak is repeatedly killing and then resuscitating his victims, mimicking the process that was done to him and interrogating them about what they see at the moment of their demise. It’s a nasty plot, but it works because of how intimately connected it is to the idea of The Pit, continuing that theme from the previous episode and continuing to acknowledge by far the most interesting thing about this show. Any more development here is fine by me.
A still from The Hunting Party Episode 4 | Image via NBC
But cleverly this also shoves Bex’s character development along, since Malak kidnaps her and subjects her to the death and resuscitation process, triggering a deeply-held memory of her daughter, Sam, and… Oliver. More on this in a bit. In the meantime, Hassani and Shane are able to track Bex to her hotel room, where Malak is keeping her, right as she finesses her escape. Malak tries to take his own life but Bex brings him back to reality to answer for his crimes.
It’s worth mentioning that The Hunting Party Episode 4 is set on Bex’s birthday, which we learn right at the top since she gets into work to see Oliver has left her a little cupcake on her desk. He’s obviously flirting, and she reciprocates just a little. But their inappropriate workplace romance seems relatively unimportant until Hassani lets her know that the number that called Oliver on the day of the explosion is still calling him, and is coming from inside the Attorney General’s office.
Naturally, this creates a bit of a personal conflict, since Bex is still weirdly adamant about Oliver’s innocence — despite him having set a suspect on fire like a crazy person — and is keen on him personally, but Hassani wants her to plug a device into his heavily encrypted phone that’ll scrape his GPS data and figure out what he’s been up to. She knows she has to for the greater good, but doesn’t get a chance until the end of the episode. When Oliver comes to see her while she’s recuperating in hospital, she tells him that she saw him in the moment she died, and apologizes for downplaying their relationship. Suitably charmed, he lets her use his phone to make a call, and she seizes the opportunity.
The GPS data sends Bex and Hassani to a storage facility Oliver has been visiting, which contains a bunch of letters and drawings from Sam, Bex’s daughter, and also a list of six coordinates. One of them is the The Pit’s location. The others are currently unknown. Are there more prisons? More targets for sabotage? We’ll have to wait and see.
The closing scenes also reveal that Dr. Dulles, a former Pit employee who was loosely connected to Malak and is, according to Shane, dead, is actually Shane’s father, and very much alive, which he’s keeping a secret from the others. More on this, I’d imagine, in the next episode.
