Murder! Affairs! Megachurches! The Hunting Wives has an awful lot going on, and a lot of it is deliberately ridiculous and sensational. Across eight episodes, it weaves a binge-worthy web of debauchery in which all kinds of madness occurs, all of which is broken down in probably too much detail in the comprehensive recap below.
I’m not sure any of this constitutes a trigger warning, but given the goings-on, maybe it does. Approach with caution if you’re sensitive to hunting accidents, alcohol abuse, drink-driving, age-inappropriate extramarital sex, heavy-handed immigration debates, hyper-excessive God-bothering, suicide, and other fun things.
Episode 1, “Strange and Unfamiliar Places”
As an East Texas primer, “Strange and Unfamiliar Places” makes the expected introductions at an unexpectedly rapid pace. You can scarcely move for plot and character details worth keeping an eye on, almost all of which pass by in such a flurry that it isn’t entirely clear whether they’re clues in a burgeoning mystery or just reminders that everyone in this show is nuts.
Here’s the gist. Sophie and her husband, Graham, have recently moved to Texas from Boston. Graham’s new boss, Jed Banks, is preparing to run for governor, and Sophie is quickly accepted into the social circle of his wife, Margo, an enigmatic socialite surely hiding some secrets and sexual proclivities best saved for subsequent episodes. There’s a pretty heavy implication that Margo is sleeping with her friend Jill’s son, Brad, who is in a relationship with a god-fearing girl named Abby, and also that she has designs on Sophie that extend a little bit beyond wanting to make a new friend.
Most of the premiere, then, finds Sophie being taken under Margo’s wing; going shooting, jiving, and drunk-driving almost against her will until she suddenly finds herself enjoying the freedom. We learn that Sophie had a car accident a while prior, caused by her having had a few too many drinks, and Graham has kept her on a tight leash ever since, and Margo has a black sheep brother who owes money to some unsavoury types. Since Margo is the only member of the family with money, well… you do the math.
But this isn’t a girl-power story of a woman slipping the shackles of her overprotective husband. Episode 1 of The Hunting Wives is bookended by flash-forwards to three weeks later, where a blonde woman – could be Sophie, could be Abby, could be someone else – is being hunted through the woods by what seems very much like a woman in swanky boots. The show’s title isn’t an accident, folks, and neither is the shooting.
Episode 2, “Knockin’ Boots”
Things are picking up fast in Episode 2 of The Hunting Wives. We’re now only two weeks removed from the murder in the cold open, and the list of potential suspects, victims, and motives is growing by the moment. Of particular note is Jed’s push for governor promising to put a much bigger spotlight on him and his wife’s activities, which prompts Margo to try and shut down her ongoing flings – she has two, one with Callie and the other with Brad – while Jed tries to strike one up with Sophie.
Jed and Margo don’t have an “open marriage”, since open marriages are for liberals, but they do have a longstanding arrangement that they both sleep with other women. Margo isn’t supposed to sleep with other men to keep things traditional, so Jed doesn’t know about Brad. Sophie does, though – she catches them together at the end of the episode.
In the meantime, more hints are dropped about Sophie’s backstory. Callie is still digging into it, and towards the end of the episode learns that whatever happened in her past was “juicy”. Thanks to some forms from Child Protective Services in her belongings, we know it’s more serious than Sophie let on to Margo. During a sermon at the megachurch of Jill’s big-time pastor husband, Clint, Sophie is moved to tears by the notion of being forgiven for one’s sins.
Not that she plans on being especially pious any time soon. She masturbates over Margo’s Instagram, watches Margo and Brad get busy for a suspiciously long time, and enjoys another flirty exchange with Jamie, although it’s pretty one-sided. I think we all know where this is going, though.
Speaking of backgrounds, Margo’s is questionable. We meet her dodgy brother Kyle in “Knockin’ Boots”, who she’s consistently paying off – $20K a year! – to downplay any connection to her. She blames him for the one-eyed dude who has been following her, peeing in the lake house toilet, and calling her Mandy, which is her original humble beginnings name. She later accuses Brad of being the Lake House Urinator, but while he shows a flash of unexpected aggression, he was busy despoiling Abby when that took place.
Episode 3, “Sunrise Tells the Story”
Well, we already know who the dead girl from the cold open of the first two episodes is – it’s Abby. What we don’t know, however, is why she was killed. Episode 3 of The Hunting Wives provides some potential theories, though, especially since she got so frustrated with Brad’s shenanigans that she decided to threaten Jill.
But Abby’s fate could also be connected to the disappearance of Kaycee Krummell, who was briefly mentioned in the premiere during Jed’s speech. In the cold open of “Sunrise Tells the Story”, we see the local sheriffs investigating an old hunting cabin in search of her, and one of them, Salazar, being shot in the head by the perpetrator. While the wound seems fatal, she shows up again at the end of the episode, investigating Abby’s body. It has been chewed up by boars, but she was also shot. There’s a killer on the loose.
The rest of this episode is very much a kind of sexual awakening for Sophie. Through a hunting trip, the purchase of a firearm – two, actually, a rifle for shooting boar and a pistol for shooting people, if the need arises – and an ill-advised game of Never Have I Ever, she ends up alone with Margo at the lake house. This leads to several drinks, a few lines of crushed Xanax, and some brief liaisons with Brad’s friend Jamie and Margo herself. She also returns home the next day, feeling pretty ghoulish, to discover her new handgun is missing.
It was Callie who proposed the drinking game in an effort to expose Sophie’s dark past. As it turns out, she killed a pedestrian during the drunken car accident, and CPS got involved because Jack’s car seat was in the vehicle. This backfires on Callie considerably, and all the other wives turn on her. She’s directly responsible for Sophie and Margo’s hook-up, which is exactly the opposite of what she intended.
The plot is thickening into a murder mystery right before our eyes.
Episode 4, “Cheat Day”
Everyone’s sad about Abby’s death, albeit some more than others, but the pervading sense of grief isn’t really the point of The Hunting Wives Episode 4. Instead, the whole thing’s about the gradual build-up to Sophie inevitably being arrested for the crime, with her new handgun supposedly having been used to do it.
You can see this coming a mile away. It was obvious as soon as Sophie’s gun went missing. She spends the entirety of “Cheat Day” trying to find it, only to be repeatedly distracted, primarily with Margo. While still pretending that she can’t remember anything from the night Abby was killed, we know she’s still getting flashes of her brief hook-up with Margo, and she commits to that and then some here when the two go to bed properly for the first time. Their pillow talk leaves a little to be desired, with Sophie explaining about her emergency hysterectomy leading to the beginning of her drinking habit, but it’s really all a ploy by Margo to keep her quiet about Brad and Jamie being at her lake house that night.
Margo exerts her influence elsewhere, convincing Brad to stay quiet – Jill helps him come up with an alibi – and Callie to plant the idea in Jonny’s head that the murder was no doubt perpetrated by an undesirable who slipped through the porous southern border. Clint asks Pastor Pete to “step aside for the greater good”, since he was apparently too close to Abby, and Jill sends Starr an edible arrangement and gives her the good news about Holy Horizon putting up a sizeable reward for information that leads to the arrest of Abby’s killer. Everyone’s cleaning house.
The only person who seems to see through the charade is Salazar. She still thinks what happened to Abby might be connected to the disappearance of Kaycee Krummell at the hands of the kidnapper who shot her, and apparently smelled of vodka and cinnamon gum, but she’ll have a tough time proving it. Jonny seems utterly disinterested in pursuing Brad, the most viable lead, and attention quickly turns to Sophie when Flynn gets a call from a sheriff in neighboring Winnsboro who claims Abby’s gun was used to hold up a Penny Pantry and was also used to kill Abby.
With Sophie being arrested in front of the entire town at Abby’s candlelit vigil, where Jed formally announces his intention to run for governor, the question now is how many of Maple Brook’s secrets she will spill to protect herself.
Brittany Snow and Malin Akerman in The Hunting Wives | Image via Netflix
Episode 5, “Not Her First Rodeo”
Following her arrest in the previous episode, Sophie is now public enemy number one in Maple Brook. The other wives have blocked her on Instagram, her alibi has fallen to pieces, and by the end of Episode 5, she has been kicked out of her own house. It’s one woman against an insulated East Texas community, and potential allies are extremely thin on the ground.
“Not Her First Rodeo” is essentially a depiction of how tightly the small-town community is wrapped around Margo’s little finger. With help from Jed’s new campaign manager, Jia-yi, the Bankses shut up shop, completely cutting Sophie off. Even though Margo was Sophie’s alibi, she deliberately only tells half of the story to Jonny, inventing a family emergency that she supposedly had to attend to on the night Abby died, leaving Sophie alone for several hours. Since she can’t reveal Brad and Jamie’s involvement, and neither can Sophie, there’s little Sophie can do without giving away enough information to totally ruin her marriage and life.
To be fair, that might happen anyway. Graham, who is slightly less than no use at all, is incensed by news of Sophie bringing a gun into the house – imagine if he knew about her sleeping with Margo?! – and later, when Flynn and Salazar interview Sophie at home, he throws her out. After being publicly ejected from Abby’s funeral and tossed out of her own home, Sophie is forced to shelter in a cheap motel.
Who might save her? Jaime seems well-intentioned enough, and he goes so far as to fight Brad over his mistreatment of Abby when she was alive and his disinterest in anything other than his alibi since her death. But Jill bribes him with a Holy Horizon scholarship to a nice Christian university, so he’s unlikely to commit. Neither Flynn nor Salazar necessarily fancies Sophie for the murder, but they can only go on what they have. The only other option is a mysterious late-night call from Sienna Coulson-Banks, Jed’s ex-wife, who points Sophie in the direction of Margo’s surprisingly well-endowed – you’ll know it when you see it – brother, Kyle.
Kyle seems unlikely to be much use, but desperate times call for desperate measures.
Episode 6, “Deep in the Heart of Texas”
Episode 6 of The Hunting Wives offers up two new prime suspects in Abby’s murder, and the good news for Sophie is that neither of them is her. Unfortunately, her name is still mud as far as everyone in Maple Brook is concerned, so she’s forced to do some investigation of her own, which rather implausibly brings her back into allegiance with Margo.
Margo’s relationship with Kyle is a matter of some concern here. The opening flashback to 1999 shows them as kids conning a creepy dude out of his truck to help their mother pay the rent, but it seems like their mother had much deeper problems than unpaid bills. But this sets a standard for a deeper sibling connection than it first seemed to be. After inadvertently becoming an accomplice in an armed robbery with Kyle, Sophie is able to confirm that Margo’s alibi about responding to a family emergency was true. She went to sit by Kyle’s bedside on the night that Abby died after he almost took his own life with dodgy pills, which is killed by a local doctor named Blevins.
This means that Margo didn’t kill Abby. This, and the revelation that Margo is being blackmailed by someone who leaves a bunch of photographs of her in bed with Brad, along with a note reading “I see you,” softens Sophie on the matter slightly. When Margo turns up at her motel and plays the apologetic victim, Sophie agrees to keep her past and her affair with Brad quiet as long as she helps to find out who murdered Abby.
So, who are the suspects? The first is Jill. After the police dig up Abby’s phone records and discover that her last incoming call was from Brad’s mother, she becomes a person of interest. This gets to Clint, through whom it gets to Brad, who reports it to Margo. Margo eventually tells Sophie, which jives with information she gleaned from Pastor Pete that Abby had an abortion. If Jill, the head of the church’s Project Life initiative, discovered that, it might be a motive for murder.
The second suspect is Pastor Pete himself, who was Abby’s last outgoing call. We still don’t know what happened to him back in Louisiana, but we do know that Clint had cause to remove him from Holy Horizons. We also know that he had a fixation on Abby, and that in the privacy of his own home, he likes to drink. He’s also “dating” Abby’s friend Nina, but his intentions, revealed at the end of the episode, aren’t particularly pious. He drugs her drink and bundles her into his car, where she spots Abby’s sweater on the backseat.
Does Maple Brook have a serial killer at large?
Episode 7, “Shooting Star”
The penultimate episode of The Hunting Wives contains more major developments than all of the previous episodes put together. And while we now know who kidnapped Kaycee Krummell, we don’t know who killed Abby, and the prime suspect for that keeps shifting and rotating every episode.
If nothing else, Jill certainly had something to hide. It’s made clear in an 18-year-earlier flashback to Brad’s birth that there was a bit of an Oedipal motif going on here, and that may or may not have continued into the present day. For some reason, she changed all of the passwords to her devices and wiped the GPS history from her car, which is revealed when Margo sends Brad to investigate why she was so suspicious about her images when it came to signing the NDAs. But we’ll get back to Jill at the end of the episode.
In the meantime, Salazar solves Kaycee Krummell’s kidnapping after receiving a call from a Louisiana sheriff about Pastor Pete. We aren’t made privy to the contents of the call, but given he’s trying to skip town with Kaycee and Nina in a trailer, we can probably guess. Salazar recognises that he’s drunk and has cinnamon gum in his glovebox, which is enough for her to put the pieces together. She gives chase when he tries to escape, and Flynn cuts him off from the other direction. Cornered, Pete takes his own life.
However, since Pete was in the drunk tank on the night Abby died after being caught jerking off over her while inebriated, the day has not quite been saved. Sophie is pretty sure about her theory that Jill killed Abby after she found out about the abortion, and she’s willing to take that information to the police. However, the police track her down first. Jonny has some new evidence – a trail camera that quite clearly shows Sophie arguing with Abby in the woods, despite her prior claims that she had never met her. As a result, Sophie is formally arrested.
But Margo is still hung up on how suspicious Jill is acting, and raises this at Coyote Joe’s. She and Callie decide to confront Jill, but when they get there, she’s acting even weirder than usual. As it turns out, Starr is dead in the kitchen. Earlier, she had arrived at the house to confront Jill after Sophie had let on about the abortion and Starr had basically confirmed it by discovering sexy lingerie in Abby’s things and pushing Jamie to admit that she and Brad had been intimate. Jill insists she shot her in self-defence, but she’s quick to pull a gun on Margo and Callie. Margo tries to talk her down, but Callie draws on Jill and shoots her dead (nice foreshadowing with her at the range earlier.)
Episode 8, “Sophie’s Choice
I hate to do this to you, but the finale is so jam-packed with developments that it required a completely separate article to break down. For the full skinny on who killed Abby, why, and a few more scandalous revelations, you should check that out. So as not to disappoint you, though, here are the highlights:
- Brad got Margot pregnant, not Abby. She had an abortion, which was carried out by the doctor, Blevins, who gave her an alibi for the night of the murder. Blevins is Margo and Kyle’s secret father.
- Margo killed Abby. Kyle was supposed to dispose of the murder weapon, but sold it to a friend, which is how it ended up being used in an armed robbery.
- Sophie confesses her affair to Graham, and Margo confesses to Jed. They both get thrown out and privately conspire against the other. Sophie intends to tell Salazar everything she knows, while Margo rekindles her relationship with Callie to get some control over the sheriff’s department.
- Kyle tries to take matters into his own hands by threatening Sophie. She runs him over, fatally, but because she has been drinking, she dumps his body in a lake instead of reporting it.
Do note, there’s a little bit more to basically all of this, so I strongly advise you to read the linked article in full for the proper context.
