Summary
The Hunting Party Season 2 delivers another solid case in “Amanda Weiss”, while also doing a little bit more to further the overarching plot.
The Hunting Party has been a little male-dominant in Season 2, so Episode 4 already wins some novelty points by revolving around a female spree killer. Thankfully, “Amanda Weiss” has a bit more going for it than that. It’s another good example of how “treatment” in The Pit invariably changes serial killers for the worse, and it shuffles the main plot along a bit more by making Bex aware of Shane’s connection to Lazarus, even if he doesn’t yet know that she’s onto him. For an early-season episode, that’ll certainly do.
Amanda Weiss, dubbed “The Masseuse” by the media, was a spree killer whose physical and psychological abuse at the hands of her mother made her a psychopath. However, her relationship with her drug addict sister, Lucy, kept her somewhat tethered until Lucy overdosed on fentanyl, and Amanda lost the plot. She began to murder her massage clients by looming over them and snapping their necks, which I have it on good authority isn’t as easy to do as movies and TV shows — including this one — consistently imply.
By the usual standards, this is fairly tame. Amanda has the unusual distinction of being a serial killer that isn’t just different on account of her therapy in the Pitt, but only becomes interesting in a show like this on account of it. Initially, it isn’t entirely clear what that therapy consisted of. It definitely involved a specialist by the name of Celia Erikson, who was brought in to try and relate to Amanda on an emotional level, which she not only seemingly failed to do, but failed to do pretty spectacularly. After determining that Amanda had to become emotionally attached to her, which would be impossible given her psychopathy, she quit mid-session in a bit of a tantrum.
But this isn’t even the half of it. Once Bex finally gets a hold of Celia, she confesses to having adopted a pretty radical approach with Amanda, which played on her relationship with her sister, Lucy. She picked an inmate named Alice who was reminiscent of her and put her in the cell next to Amanda, where they began to communicate through the walls via a knocking system. They developed a strong bond, with the only caveat being that Alice didn’t really exist — it was Celia all along, using details from her own personal life and therapy career to provide believability and texture.
Naturally, this has completely backfired. The Hunting Party Season 2, Episode 4 finds Amanda trying to track “Alice” down and, failing that, kidnapping a woman named Tiffany, discovered through Narcotics Anonymous meetings, who could stand in as a feasible substitute. Amanda takes Tiffany to a cabin in the mountains, as discussed in her long conversations with “Alice”, where Amanda poses as another victim to try and develop a sisterly, dependent bond with Tiffany.
This is an interesting setup, and it tees up the interesting development of Bex having to pretend to be the real Alice in order to ingratiate herself with Amanda and try to rescue Tiffany from the cabin. There’s some pretty genuine tension in all this, even though it always seems to be Bex putting herself in the line of fire while Shane and Hasani bring up the rear. If I had to nitpick, which I suppose I do, then I’d suggest that the team dynamic works better when we see everyone working as a team, but you can’t have everything.
Bex is successful, obviously, and Amanda heads back to prison on the false promise that the real Alice is there waiting for her, though that isn’t a white lie that anyone’s going to lose any sleep over. Side note: I can’t remember if the show has clarified this or not, but where do these re-captured killers go, given that The Pit is out of commission and the world at large thinks they’re dead? Answers on a postcard.
“Amanda Weiss” is bookended by a couple of notes on the overarching Lazarus plot. For one thing, Bex tells Morales what she discovered in the previous episode, about Lazarus having once been a prisoner in the Pit, and Morales shares Shane’s request to have her identify a voice that she discovered belonged to Lazarus. Bex casually asks Shane about the latter, and he plays coy, but at the very end of the episode, he decides to come clean, obviously not knowing that Bex has additional information. With that, she’s able to put the pieces together that Lazarus is Shane’s mother, and for good measure, we also see Lazarus smothering Dr. Dulles with a pillow while promising to look after the boy. So, I guess she knows who Shane is?
