‘The Hunting Party’ Ending Explained – Now That’s How You Do A Finale

Now that’s how you do a finale. The Hunting Party caps off a run of great form with a brilliant ending that weaves its case of the week into the overarching plot more explicitly than ever, providing a few answers, raising even more questions, and leaving the fates of two key characters up in the air. Episode 10 is really good and a great table-setting for Season 2, which is nice to see after a very rocky start.

And in other positive developments, I’ve finally learned the severe blonde lady’s name! I’m glad we finally got to that point, and it only took us ten episodes. A professional critic right here, ladies and gentlemen.

Anyway, the lady’s name is Colonel Eve Lazarus, which is hilarious because it makes her sound like a comic book character. But she’s no laughing matter, really. Picking up from where we left things in the penultimate episode, she reveals to Bex and Oliver a little bit more about what was happening Silo 12. It was basically a testing site for an empathy drug developed by James Whitmore — I think it’s called GWB45, but the screeners don’t have subtitles, so don’t take that as gospel — that was designed to either increase empathy in people that don’t have it (like serial killers) or reduce it in people who have a surplus (like soldiers with PTSD). You get the idea.

It’s easy to imagine what kind of applications a drug like this could have, so when the research reached a certain point and yielded actionable results, the military attempted to take over. Whitmore didn’t like this and sent a private tactical team to secure his research and subjects, which he considered to be his property. That raid is what caused the carnage Bex and the others found in Silo 12. And some of the test subjects are still unaccounted for.

While we’re continuing on from the end of the previous episode, we might as well bring up Shane. He’s excited about the possibility of discovering who his mother was, but there’s a problem — Dr. Dulles is in a coma and Sarah has signed a DNR, so he might never get the opportunity to play him the VHS recordings to see if they jog his memory. Instead, Shane takes a sampling of the audio to Morales in the hopes that she can identify his mother’s voice.

But in the meantime, there are things to do in The Hunting Party Episode 10. The killer of the week is Jenna Wells, a pharmacist who killed at least 24 people, all by poisoning, earning her the nickname “The Killer Chemist”. But Jenna’s unique for a couple of reasons. One is that she’s a rare killer with literally zero empathy, and also with no recognisable trauma that formed her into who she was. She was simply born that way, driven to kill, motivated by petty jealousy, and never remorseful.

Melissa Roxburgh in The Hunting Party | Image via NBC

The other thing that’s interesting about Jenna is that she was one of the Silo 12 subjects who was given the highest possible dose of GWB45. It had some unintended side effects, one of which being the inability to differentiate between herself and her victims. This is what makes her latest spate of kidnappings and killings make sense. She isn’t just posing as her victims as part of her pathology — she literally believes herself to be them to a certain extent.

There’s more time pressure than usual in the finale since Jenna is being pursued by two other men posing as cops — these turn out to be Whitmore’s goons who have been dispatched to retrieve his “property”. As it happens, he needn’t have bothered. Jenna uses her latest victim, a caterer, to infiltrate a Whitmore Sciences event and poison everyone present. While she believes she’s someone else and that Jenna Wells is dead, she also has a deep-seated need for revenge against Whitmore for what he did to her.

Bex and the others arrive in the nick of time to save Whitmore, but he throws the rescue back in their faces by refusing to let Jenna go, leading to a standoff with his men. Suddenly, though, Whitmore collapses — Jenna has already fatally poisoned him by slapping a patch on the back of his neck, and a shootout ensues that leaves Hassani badly wounded. To add insult to injury, Attorney General Mallory arrives shortly after to disband the team for lacking discretion. It’s very obvious she’s covering up her own complicity, but that’ll be a story for Season 2, one suspects.

At the end of The Hunting Party, Jenna, who fled when Whimore went down, impersonates Bex and breaks into the command centre, taking Oliver hostage. Bex rushes over, and so does Shane, but he’s waylaid by a call from Sarah. Her father is awake, but won’t be for long, so if Shane wants answers about his mother, he needs to be there. He decides to help Bex instead, taking down Jenna and saving Oliver… or so he thinks.

Away from the command centre, Sarah shows her father the tape of Shane, and Morales finally finds a match for the recording. They both reveal the same thing. Shane’s mother is Colonel Lazarus. Based on a tattoo we see on the bottom of her foot that looks like a bar code and something Dr. Dulles says about her “graduating”, it seems like she was initially a test subject.

As if that wasn’t enough of a shocker, Oliver also collapses. Jenna managed to slip him with the same patch that killed Whitmore, and his fate remains unknown as the finale cuts to credits.