Summary
The Hunting Party continues to play with form and expectations in Episode 9, keeping the procedural stuff fresh while also teasing out the overarching plot.
It’s genuinely impressive how The Hunting Party keeps adapting its formula each week. Episode 9 continues a run of great form by finding another novel take on the procedural format while also making ground in the macro plot and Shane’s personal backstory. We’ve had enough good episodes in a row now – including the previous one, which mostly confined Bex to an interview room – that I’m starting to look forward to each new gimmick the show will come up with, and “Tom Beecher” is no different, with the titular criminal being caught about ten minutes into the episode. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
You can feel a degree of confidence building as well. This particular case is layered in multiple ways; Beecher has a history with Bex, a connection to Silo 12 and Shane’s personal history, and a unique quirk that completely redefines the hunt for his latest victim. And it all works, while also roping in Morales for a much more meaningful role (which is well overdue).
But anyway, Beecher. The idea behind this guy is that he’s a brutal sadist who targets young women in pairs. He takes one and keeps her alive until he finds another, and then tortures and kills the first girl in front of the second. All the while, he torments the families of the victims, calling them so they can listen in on what’s happening, and he can delight in their helplessness and trauma.
Not a nice guy, then. And now on the loose.
But because Bex knows his MO, she’s able to prepare for him to call the family of his latest victim and trace it to a motel, where Beecher is apprehended without incident. But the victim in the bathtub isn’t the one whose family was called. This is the second girl, whom he was planning to take to the first. Beecher’s original victim remains missing, her pleading call to her parents a recording he was playing down the phone via a Walkman – a crucial change in his MO.
And here we arrive at the main hook of The Hunting Party Episode 9. During his time in the Pit, Beecher has had experimental brain surgery at the behest of Dr. Dulles and has lost the ability to form new memories. Whenever he sleeps, he loses all knowledge of everything that happened to him since he last slept. This means that he can’t remember where his original victim is. So, how can Bex and the gang find her?
This is even bleaker than usual since Beecher’s “treatment” wasn’t even part of the Pit’s more above-board therapy techniques. He was a pet project of Dr. Dulles, who was using the Pit to conduct very secretive and illegal experiments on the prisoners. Since he was suffering from Alzheimer’s, the theory is that he was using them as lab rats to try and find a solution to his own degenerative disease. Unlawful experimentation branching off from an already unlawful secret prison is a whole new level of off-the-books.
Melissa Roxburgh and Josh McKenzie in The Hunting Party | Image via NBC
It also, naturally, provides a major obstacle in finding Beecher’s victim. Eventually, Bex realizes that he and Dr. Dulles must have formulated a kind of code or muscle-memory-based solution for retracing his own steps, so Morales is sent undercover as Beecher’s bathtub victim, the motel room is reset to exactly how it was found, with all the creepy Post-It reminders on the walls, and Beecher is knocked out and dumped back there, to wake up with no memory of his interrogation. The hope is that he’ll lead the others straight to the missing girl.
But he doesn’t. After finding graphite on the steering wheel and intuiting it must have been used to dust for prints, he smells a rat and confronts Morales. She’s able to get out of his way while the others swoop in for an arrest, but Beecher slices his own throat, hoping the trail will go cold. Luckily, enough clues have been collected to allow Morales to crack the code, which involves connecting the voice recording of the victim’s pleas to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. She’s found, safe and sound.
As ever, The Hunting Party Episode 9 also sneaks in some progress in the season-long subplots involving the original breakout and Shane’s parentage. In the case of the former, Oliver finally gets sick of playing middleman to the severe-looking blonde lady and introduces her to Bex. Now, I’m still a little unclear about how much complicity Oliver has in all of this, especially stuff like having Denise Glenn killed at the end of the previous episode. Is he a largely unwitting conspirator, or a full-fledged partner?
As for Shane, we kind of called it. While he’s busy tracking down Beecher, Sarah goes through all of the VHS tapes left by her father, recordings of the interview sessions he had with Shane when he was posing as a child psychologist. Sarah summons Shane back to the house at the end of the episode to deliver a crucial reveal. In one of the tapes, it becomes obvious that the interview is being watched through two-way glass by a woman who is undoubtedly Shane’s mother – and who looks, at least to me, like a prisoner.
