‘The Hunting Party’ Episode 5 Recap – More Conventionality Feels Like A Slight Step Back

The Hunting Party unfortunately ends its run of improving form in Episode 5. “Roy Barber” isn’t a bad episode, by any means, but it is one that seems to miss the point of NBC’s high-concept procedural, which had started to put its best foot forward by tying its escaped killers to its overarching plot. There’s none of that here, and little development in the macro narrative in general, making this installment feel like a slight, if serviceable, step back.

I shouldn’t be too harsh, though, since if nothing else, this episode has a neat twist that livens up what feels like a very straightforward hunt for a very run-of-the-mill killer. There’s also a late reveal regarding who might be behind the destruction of The Pit and a few other, potentially even more secretive adjacent cover-ups, but given this show’s stance on things thus far, it isn’t that big of a surprise.

Still, we have some things to discuss.

For a start, Bex is still smarting about her discovery late in the previous episode that Samantha has apparently stayed in contact with Oliver over the years, as evidenced by all the cards she sent him that Bex and Hassani found in his secret lock-up. Bex has to keep this to herself, though, since it’s important Oliver isn’t tipped off. He can’t go to ground or destroy any more evidence until Hassani figures out who he’s working at the behest of, and also what might be hidden in all the other silos. Since the satellite photographs have been doctored, that means someone with an incredibly high security clearance is trying to protect a secret even more deeply-held than The Pit itself.

But we don’t get much more development in this area. Oliver does happen to mention to Bex that Sam still sends him birthday cards, which he makes sound very innocuous, but it’s hard to tell whether he’s being truthful or saying that because he knows his stash was likely uncovered. The “big reveal” at the end of The Hunting Party Episode 5 is that the woman bossing Oliver around is a high-ranking military official. Again, though, given how critical the show has been of The Pit, its unethical procedures, and the various government agencies that were complicit in its operation, this isn’t that much of a surprise.

Anyway, about Roy Barber. The title character this week is a standard serial killer who spent years bludgeoning couples to death up and down highways. His father had killed his mother in a murder-suicide and given him a warped relationship with love which he had tried to address by smacking happy campers around with a crowbar. Only there’s a little bit more to it than that.

Pictured: (l-r) Melissa Roxburgh as Rebecca ‘Bex’ Henderson, Patrick Sabongui as Jacob Hassani, Josh McKenzie as Shane Florence — (Photo by: David Astorga/NBC)

Roy was a talented caricaturist who graduated to being a talented police sketch artist, which meant he was often working with the teams who were investigating his own crimes. That’s an enjoyably brazen quirk for a killer to have, but the episode does a good job of weaving Roy’s passion for art into the progression of the case. It’s ultimately his drawings of his victims — very detailed portraits that clogged the walls of his cell at The Pit — that reveal the main subversion of the usual profile. In his drawings, many of his victims are inexplicably aging.

The twist ends up being that Roy was in cahoots with the women, all of whom were in abusive relationships and needed “freeing”. He’d kill their husbands and stage their deaths with their complicity, using his police connections to help them reinvent themselves. So, why is he killing his previous victims “again” now? Because several of them remarried. To Roy, their freedom was contingent on their solitude. Anyone who shacked up with someone else is, as far as he’s concerned, due another stern lesson.

I like this on multiple levels. It’s a nice, unexpected tweak on the usual crazy killer trope, and it fits together very neatly with Roy’s pathology, as explained to us by Oliver and then Bex. The downside is that it has nothing to do with The Pit at all. The Hunting Party is way better when it’s using its escaped killers to commentate on the experimental “treatment” that was occurring at The Pit, like the propagation of an idyllic fantasy that tipped Brenda Lowe over the edge. Roy’s crimes are interesting on their own terms but don’t inform the overarching story in any meaningful sense, which is a shame.

Still, Episode 5 nonetheless feels like a bit of a tipping point for The Hunting Party. Oliver knows Hassani is getting closer to the truth, and it’s obvious that the conspiracy goes all the way to the top. If I were a betting man, I’d suggest that the military and/or government are going to turn on Bex, Hassani, and Shane sooner rather than later, which will make their killer-hunting jobs even more difficult and potentially send the show off in a slightly new direction.

We can hope, anyway.