Summary
The Hunting Party continues to move in the right direction in Episode 7, further condemning the Pit’s experimental therapies and developing the Silo 12 subplot.
If nothing else, The Hunting Party is heading in the right direction. Episode 7 seems to have settled on what works best about the show, much like the previous episode did. There’s another killer, Mark Marsden, whose psychopathic tendencies have been made worse by the Pit, there’s more intrigue about what was really going on in Silo 12, and it seems like Shane is right on the cusp of revealing what he has really been up to in impersonating the son of a mentally ill man.
I find myself a little bit more engaged with this show each week, which is obviously a good thing, especially after some episodes threatened to descend into conventionality. You don’t build a show around such a high-concept premise and then refuse to really interrogate that premise, so I’m glad to see it happening on a more regular basis now, as with Mark Marsden.
Mark’s gimmick is that he murdered his wives, usually immediately after marrying them, an outgrowth of a longstanding fear of abandonment stemming back to his first high-school girlfriend dumping him when he was 15 (she was also, not entirely coincidentally, found murdered.) Mark’s crimes earned him the fitting nickname of The Widower.
After escaping from the Pit, Mark is on the lookout for a new bride. Bex and the team are surprised to discover that he has found one in distressingly close proximity, which is a clue in itself. Why would Mark target a woman, Carol Miller, who used to work a boring admin position at the prison?
If you guessed because of “experimental therapy”, you’d be correct. We’ve seen this multiple times by now; with Brenda Lowe in Episode 3, and with Arlo Brandt in the previous episode. Mark’s specific treatment involved getting married again and again, the theory being that the wedding itself, the exchange of vows (always the same, really rubbish vows for him), was the specific trigger of his abandonment issues. So, if he can just get used to getting married, he might stop using it as an excuse to kill his bride. For this purpose, Carol was brought in as an actor to play his wife and offered some easy cash for the role.
This is obviously messed up on multiple levels. But it’s particularly heinous that a low-paid employee was offered up as part of the experiment with a dangerous serial killer, and it’s this specific element that completely backfires. After poring over the recordings of the “wedding”, Bex notices something alarming – that the affection is going both ways. Through the repeated nuptials, Carol had legitimately fallen in love with Mark.
Brooke Smith and Jesse Bradford in The Hunting Party | Image via NBC
The especially tragic note here is that Carol was grieving the loss of her husband and felt totally alone. She was looking for connection wherever she could find it, be that on serial killer forums or opposite Mark. She allowed herself to believe that he was truly reformed, that their marriage would be long and earnest and happy, and that he wouldn’t kill her or anyone else. She was wrong.
The Hunting Party Episode 7 spends a lot of time with Mark and Carol, and she cuts an especially sympathetic figure. Rather than Bex and the team tracking the killer down in the usual manner, Carol helps them, first inadvertently – by logging into Reaper’s Digest out of habit – and then intentionally, when Bex broadcasts the news about Mark having stabbed the employees of the bridal shop they’d just visited to procure Carol a dress. As it’s gradually confirmed that Mark isn’t as reformed as he’s claiming to be, Carol realizes how much danger she’s in, which is made doubly troubling for her because it also means the collapse of her new, idealized worldview.
After Bex solves this problem with a few bullets (interesting that she made a point of killing Mark rather than trying to arrest him?), the matter of Silo 12 remains unaddressed. With the latest killer dealt with, Bex, Hassani, and Oliver finally have the time to check the place out.
What they find isn’t evidence of a break-in, but of a massacre. There are bullet holes and bloodstains all over the place. There’s also a chair with restraints behind two-way glass, hooked up to the drug that Richard Harris was given when his execution was faked. Whatever experiments were being conducted on people in Silo 12, it was for the benefit of an audience.
The Hunting Party Episode 7 ends with Shane, who spends most of the episode being conspicuously tailed by the daughter of the man whose son he has been impersonating. Eventually, he buys her a drink, letting her know the jig is up, but when she asks him why he did what he did, it seems like he’s going to tell her. Which is, of course, where we cut to credits. Maybe next week.
