‘The Hunting Party’ Season 2, Episode 1 Recap – Down the Rabbit Hole

And we’re back, folks. The team is reunited in the Season 2 premiere of The Hunting Party, which is good news for fans of what was ultimately one of NBC’s better recent procedurals. Episode 1 wastes no time in re-establishing the same premise in a slightly amended form based on what happened in the first season finale. To recap: Oliver’s dead and Bex is Big Sad about it, Shane has no idea that Lazarus is his mother, Morales decided to lie to him about the tapes, and the team was hastily disbanded.

Oliver’s death is dealt with rather unceremoniously, truth be told, with Bex just staring at his headstone and having a beer for him later in the episode. It’s the same with getting the team back together and the killer-hunting operation up and running again. Bex just blackmails the Attorney General, threatening to go public with what was really going on in The Pit, and that about does it. And besides, there is a pretty good reason for keeping the team active – escapees are still on the loose.

Which brings us neatly to the premiere’s namesake, Ron Simms. For the most part, this guy is built on a very good, kind of scary idea. We get a nice flashback to his spree pre-incarceration to give us a sense of his MO, which is to follow women home, hide under their beds, and then reach up through a hole he has cut in the mattress to inject them with a paralytic. Then he’d spend days pretending to be their boyfriend as they sat there unable to move or speak until their organs eventually shut down and they died of sepsis. What a charmer!

The best idea of this episode is to use this original version of the killer as our introduction, but then highlight how the present-day Ron Simms has changed based on his unconventional therapy in The Pit. Apparently, his anxiety and sense of isolation were so extreme that he had to be given a bunny to look after and feel attached to. And, on some level, this worked, at least insofar as making him a bit more capable of interaction. Thus, the latest version of Ron Simms fancies himself a bit of a Lothario and has upgraded from hiding under beds. Instead, he picks women up at speed dating and then inevitably has to murder them when his “being open” includes telling them he’s a serial killer formerly of considerable renown.

If this is the best idea of The Hunting Party Season 2, Episode 1, the worst is by far the rabbit focus. I’m totally okay with the idea of a creepy serial killer becoming obsessed with a pet, and I could get on board with the idea that he keeps a whole bunch of the animals in his barn. But he also keeps his therapist in there, dressed in a gigantic comedy bunny suit, and it’s such a profoundly silly idea that it really undermines the big moments late in the episode when Ron kidnaps Bex, and she has to pretend to have the hots for him to buy some time.

Side note: I could be wrong, but I don’t feel like this is the first time that “Bex is so hot the serial killers can’t kill her” has been used as a plot device in this show. Feel free to correct me.

Ron is apprehended, of course, and Bex comes quite close to strangling him to death, which I think is a detail we’re probably supposed to be paying attention to. Sure, it might just be that he was very close to killing her, and she was annoyed about that, but given Bex’s desperation to have the team reassembled and her grief over Oliver’s death, it’s easy to imagine that we’re going to focus her arc on becoming dangerously reckless in her pursuit of these criminals. One can only imagine how she’ll feel once the depth of the corruption comes to light, since Lazarus marches in at the very end of the episode to take charge of the team. And, as she says, there are going to be some changes to how things work as a result.

Will Bex be able to play ball? I certainly hope not.