Summary
The Hunting Party continues to tick along in Season 2. “Zack Lang” provides an interesting enough case of the week and a big-ish development in the overarching plot.
It’s always daddy issues, isn’t it? Since The Hunting Party deals with the psychology of killers, it’s kind of unavoidable that parental problems will frequently come to the fore, but the titular Zack Lang, who’s the focus of Season 2, Episode 3, almost feels like he has been assembled from a nutcase bingo card. A weird obsession with his father? Harming a cat? We’ve almost got a full house here, folks.
But not so fast. Despite the overly familiar backstory, Lang is an interesting case. He’s a modern-day Robin Hood, or so it seems, stealing from and murdering the rich, and that MO earned him a cult following and a degree of infamy. But The Hunting Party does what it does best here by contrasting the original incarnation of Zack Lang with the post-Pit redo, showing how the questionable therapies he underwent during his incarceration changed him. The premiere did this quite well, and there were more personal shades of it in the previous episode, but it has always been a recurring theme. It’s what helps The Hunting Party stand out as a procedural.
Lang, in the early days, just hated the rich. He was belittled by them and enacted his revenge in murderous robberies, but even then, it wasn’t that simple. Bex’s profiling skills reveal that Lang’s folk hero status fed his narcissism. It wasn’t so much about being of the people, but receiving their adoration, even under false pretences. He had the front-facing demeanour of an anti-establishment rebel hero, but the interiority of a proper lunatic.
The true pathology comes out in the present-day, post-Pit version of Lang. His new MO is to murder the poor, dressed up as wealthy people in expensive suits and watches. His rage is palpable, a complete destruction of the victims and their possessions, which reflects his “rage room” therapy during his incarceration, allowing him to wreck a simulacrum of his childhood bedroom with a baseball bat.
As ever, the genesis of Lang’s issues stretches all the way back to his childhood, to a formative event in that bedroom. As it turns out in The Hunting Party Season 2, Episode 3, Lang had attempted to impress his wealth-obsessed father by killing a cat and dressing it up in expensive jewelry, but it had the opposite effect. His father rejected him, which is the key thing he never got over. After the Pit, he’s now loaded thanks to a Bitcoin stash, so he considers himself on the other side of the fence, targeting the poor and dressing them up like effigies of his father.
The more complex pathology of Lang is what makes this episode interesting, since the case takes up the vast majority of the episode. It also reveals a teeny bit of characterisation for the team, especially Hassani, who is particularly put off by the idea of Lang as a folk hero, at one point reiterating – as though it needs to be said, but these days perhaps it does – that the right to peaceful protest and free expression doesn’t extend to murder.
The case-heavy structure doesn’t leave a great deal of time for fleshing out the overarching plot, though Bex does discover something fairly significant about Colonel Lazarus – her real identity, and a snippet of her apparently violent past. When she was a track athlete – who could run a sub-5-minute mile, impressively – she murdered a couple of people. How does that gel with her fast-tracked military career and current identity? More to come on this, I suspect.
My only bugbear with this whole thing is what was Lazarus really expecting in taking over this team so suddenly, and with so much mystery? It’s obvious that everything about her past and real identity has been erased, which is only going to exacerbate the suspicions of a team who are already famously suspicious. It just strikes me as a kind of dumb thing for a Big Bad to do, especially one trying to keep the true nature of the Pit quiet.
But whatever. Season 2 of The Hunting Party continues to tick away nicely, though I’m not sure Lang was necessarily as compelling or creepy as the first two killers. Despite that, though, the team dynamic continues to develop nicely, and progress is being made in the macro plot, even if it doesn’t make a great deal of sense. I’ll take that for now.
