Summary
The Hunting Party continues a run of good form in Episode 8, effectively tweaking the formula again while staying true to the core plot and themes. Plus, bonus points for some effectively grisly imagery.
The Hunting Party is getting rather good, isn’t it? I love watching the trajectory of a show in real-time; the so-so episodes when it’s figuring out what works (and what doesn’t), and then the better ones when it finds its feet and focus. I’ve been reiterating for weeks what works here — a compelling case of the week that relates in some meaningful way to the high-concept premise of a secret underground prison performing experimental, possibly illegal treatments on its inmates. Episode 8 has all of these things, but it also tweaks the formula in interesting ways to give the hour a more novel feeling and keep audiences on their toes.
For instance, it starts back-to-front, in a sense. Usually, the cold open is reserved for the killer’s introduction and then we jump straight into it, with a few minutes spare at the end to develop the overarching plots involving Silo 12 and Shane’s backstory. “Denise Glenn” instead bookends Episode 8 with the subplot development, so it picks up right where the previous episode left off.
Shane explains to Dr. Dulles’s daughter, Sarah (Siobhan Williams), that before she died, his mother told him that he wasn’t her biological child. He was adopted as part of a program that involved Dr. Dulles as his long-time “therapist” — he met with him weekly for years. To Shane, Dr. Dulles is the only link to his biological family, and since he’s suffering from Alzheimer’s, he’s soon going to forget that connection, leaving Shane to forever ponder who he really is.
Side note: He’s definitely going to be the child of a serial killer, isn’t he?
Similarly, Oliver and Hassani still aren’t on the same page regarding what they discovered in Silo 12. Oliver claims ignorance of everything, from who might have been there when it was raided to who potentially did the raiding. Hassani isn’t buying it because of the CCTV footage from his office that shows him downloading terabytes of data from the mainframe, but Oliver claims that was just part of his job as warden in the event of an emergency. He elects not to mention that he subsequently handed that data off to the severe blond Army lady whose name I still haven’t caught and who reappears again at the end of the episode. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
In the meantime, case of the week! The so-called “Muse Murderer”, Denise Glenn, is a former art professor and sculptor who killed six people as offerings to the nine Greek muses, Clio, Euterpe, Thalia, Melpomene, Terpsichore, Erato, Polymnia, Urania, and Calliope. Each killing targeted someone of immense talent and expertise and was staged for dramatic, on-brand effect. We get to see two of them during this episode — a cellist killed on a park bench (an offering to Euterpe, the Muse of music and lyric poetry), and a fortune teller staged with a glowing crystal ball (for Urania, the Muse of astronomy.)
These are effectively nasty images, which helps the vibes, but they’re not the reason why the case is interesting. The kicker here is that Denise was pulled from the Pit’s rubble hours after the breakout. She’s alive, but in custody, so the killer must be a copycat. So, bucking the usual formula, Bex has to stay behind with Oliver to interrogate Denise and figure out how she managed to sway another inmate into completing her magnum opus, while Hassani and Shane remotely follow the leads they dig up.
As with some of the other recent outings, The Hunting Party Episode 8 lays the blame for all this firmly at the feet of the Pit’s employees. During her incarceration, Denise was allowed an hour a week to sculpt clay figurines in a sterile therapy room. The whole time, she was observed through two-way glass (similar to the setup of Silo 12, it’s probably worth noting.) You’d think that the voyeurs would be medical staff and therapists and the like, but inmates were also cycled in to watch her sculpt. This was dubbed “fixation displacement therapy”, the idea to transfer the obsessions of inmates onto Denise so that they could be controlled. Well, it half worked.
Nick Wechsler and Melissa Roxburgh in The Hunting Party | Image via NBC
As with all of the Pit’s experimental therapies, nobody thought much about what might happen if these people were to escape. Without any effort, Denise had a devoted protege who worshipped her and was willing to continue her work. When the inmate, Craig Martin (Zeke Goodman), found her in the rubble, she sent him to retrieve her sketchbook from a hidden location under a university and follow its precise instructions to kill the cellist, the fortune teller, and eventually the mimic, Denise’s former star pupil, Everett Forgarty (Al McFoster).
Bex and Oliver have to deduce all this by interrogating Denise, and these scenes are fun because she’s enjoyably demented but also smart enough to profile the profilers with alarming accuracy. She drags up the unspoken connection between these two, poking at their damaged trust but underlying affection. It throws them off but doesn’t stop Bex from displaying a couple of moments of genius, first figuring out Craig’s identity by pretending he was killed in the explosion and gauging Denise’s reaction, and then deducing that there’s more to the plan than simply having Craig kill the final, most important target.
There’s some underlying messaging about men taking credit for women’s work here, which Bex can relate to, and this ends up being the giveaway. Denise wouldn’t be satisfied with Craig carving his name in the history books on the back of her work, so his plan is to remind the world of who’s pulling his strings and then blow up her former lecture hall, immortalizing them both. Bex figures this out with just enough time remaining on the rucksack full of C4 Craig dragged in for Hassani and Shane to disarm the bomb and save the day.
The Hunting Party Episode 8 works in all of these areas; the back-and-forth with Denise and Bex, the bonding in the field between Hassani and Shane, and all the tweaks to the typical formula, with the real mastermind not being the one on the run and Bex being siloed for most of the episode. All good stuff. And it sweetens the deal by returning to those ongoing subplots at the end and delivering a little more information in both.
Hassani, for instance, has tracked the IV bag being used in Silo 12 to a company with a connection to AG Mallory. And Sarah, inspired by Shane’s honesty, has ransacked her father’s office and unearthed a collection of VHS tapes; presumably recordings of Shane’s childhood meetings with Dr. Dulles.
But the final scene is the most alarming. In it, Denise is taken away and murdered by the blond Army official I mentioned earlier, the one Oliver handed off the mainframe data to. Denise clearly recognizes her, which means they have been in contact before, and there’s at least one uniformed officer totally aware of what’s happening in the car, all of which implies that the U.S. Army, I guess in collusion with the Attorney General, are flagrantly covering all of this up.
