‘The Hunting Party’ Episode 6 Recap – We’re Getting Back on the Right Track

This is more like it. Not to say, “I told you so”, obviously, but after an episode that let conventionality creep in, to its detriment, The Hunting Party really gets back on the right track in Episode 6. A novel, intimidating killer helps, but the real secret is the return of that intriguing interplay we saw in earlier episodes between the perp of the week and The Pit’s controversial therapeutic techniques. Was America’s most secretive subterranean prison rehabilitating killers, or making them worse? Can anyone who was running that place even tell the difference?

There’s development in the overarching plot here, too, with more shape beginning to emerge and a few like-minded allies getting ready to trace it to some kind of new, presumably darker revelation, but crucially we’re still unable to really trust who’s committed and who’s playing both sides. The Hunting Party just works better in this mode than as a more conventional procedural. I hope it sticks with it.

Anyway, let’s talk about Arlo Brandt. This guy is an interesting figure for a few reasons – one of them being that, after his escape from the Pit, he doesn’t actually kill anyone. He’s a changed man, you see. And it’s the Pit’s fault.

Arlo is introduced in an obligatory cold open flashback that depicts him as a bumbling eccentric. He’s a hoarder, obsessed with consumerism and owning mountains of pointless tat. He graduated to killing initially to fund the habit; he’d set up traps outside his rural home to leave victims stranded, invite them inside to call a tow truck, and then kill them (often, it’s lightly implied, with one of his latest purchases.) Then he’d strip their vehicles and sell the parts on eBay.

This initial depiction of Arlo resembles the kind of generic hoarder caricature. He’s overweight and schlubby-looking and unkempt. But the Pit changes him. That transformation is revealed quite gradually, through dialogue and occasional archive footage from therapy sessions within the Pit itself. He was subjected to another experimental form of therapy where he was gradually compelled to abandon his possessions, steered by a disembodied voice. It’s framed as a kind of highfalutin spiritual wellness process, but the way it works is more darkly Pavlovian; every time he gives something up, he gets a treat. Eventually, he gives up everything, his cell stark and empty.

But Arlo takes the concept of “things” a bit far. He shaves his head and gives up his clothes aside from light robes, and with nothing else to do, he spends his time getting shredded. He also totally buys into the rhetoric being used to justify his treatment, reinventing himself as a kind of hulking monk obsessed with personal progress at the expense of everything else. So, when he escapes from the Pit, it’s this dominant persona that takes over.

David Ramsey in The Hunting Party | Image via NBC

Bex and co. initially suspect that exposure to the big wide world will trigger Arlo’s urges, rendering the therapy meaningless, but The Hunting Party Episode 6 takes the opposite direction, which I appreciate. Arlo commits to the bit completely, kidnapping a string of victims not with the intention of killing them but of shaving their heads, dressing them in robes, and recreating a version of The Pit in the bowels of a disused plant. He has bought so completely into the idea of his own salvation that he wants to replicate the Pit’s anti-materialism teachings with himself in the role of therapist. It’s a very novel take on the usual formula. I think it works better than any of the previous episodes have.

Of course, Bex and the gang are able to apprehend Arlo and save his captives, but that isn’t really the point. It doesn’t go unnoticed that The Pit has done more harm than good here, and not for the first time. This is, partially, what compels Bex to look further into the mysterious Silo 12, details of which she knows Oliver has been keeping from her. She demands he come clean, and, to an extent, he does.

Oliver doesn’t know much about Silo 12 beyond a strong suspicion that it was being used to conduct even more “experimental” treatments of the prisoners who performed positively in the Pit. He also knows that the two facilities are connected, and reveals that the call he got on the day of the breakout was to inform him that Silo 12 had been stormed by armed insurgents. So, whatever happened at the Pit began in Silo 12. Bex points out, rightly, that they need to get inside and have a nosy around.

And as if that wasn’t enough, The Hunting Party Episode 6 also includes a little twist with Shane. It was revealed earlier that one of the Pit’s former employees is his father and is in full-time care on account of worsening Alzheimer’s disease, which Shane is keeping secret from the others. We see him interact with his dad a bit in this episode, trying to video call him but being met only with confusion and panic, and then, at the end, trying to dissuade his nurse from moving him to a more dedicated care facility in Colorado.

But when Shane leaves, a woman asks the doctor who Shane is. This woman is the daughter of Shane’s “father”, and according to her, he doesn’t have any sons. It looks like Shane is impersonating this guy’s son, using his deteriorating mind as a convenient way to do so, in order to get answers about something. Something, presumably, that happened at The Pit.