Summary
The Hunting Party Season 2 returns with a bang in Episode 5, which is elevated by a great Kelsey Grammer villain turn and a slightly different vibe.
The Hunting Party Season 2 is back after a little hiatus, and it’s back guest-starring Kelsey Grammer, which has to count for something. After all, who else would play the charismatic leader of a doomsday cult who believes himself to be an end-times deity? This focus on Grammer’s cult leader gives Episode 5 a slightly different vibe than usual, which doesn’t go unnoticed, since the titular Noah Cyrus isn’t the typical kind of serial killer that the Pit usually bothers with. But that more straightforward approach leads to some pretty good suspense and a tense climax, so it’s worth the shake-up.
Besides, Noah’s story is pretty on-brand when it comes to displaying how the supposed “treatments” undergone by prisoners at the Pit exclusively do more harm than good. But we’ll get to that. The episode starts by introducing Noah in his pomp, and so shall we. Before his incarceration, he was the leader of the Thirteenth Hour, and led his followers in a mass suicide when it became clear he had run out of road, legally speaking. The Thirteenth Hour’s whole thing was blaming the government for everything, so of course, Noah became a target of the authorities.
One of Noah’s followers, whose name is either Poppy or Puppy, since NBC screeners don’t have subtitles, survived that initial culling. Noah himself also survived, despite having been shot during the raid and officially declared dead. In reality, he was taken to an all-white room, which is a breach of several human rights conventions, and kept there until he became even crazier.
Noah also executed at least a dozen people in outbursts of violence whenever his authority was questioned, a habit he continues in the present day when he reveals himself to a still-believing Poppy — I’m going to go with Poppy here, since Puppy is a little weird — and immediately shoots her husband in the back of his head. To be fair, Poppy is pretty swayed by the idea of Noah having come back from the dead, as well she might be. The timing of this isn’t an accident either, since Noah has big plans for the ten-year anniversary of his initial arrest.
Those plans include a reborn Thirteenth Hour cult, which includes a man named Jack and his brother, Norm, and is also how Bex and the crew begin to track Noah down. Even as a child, Noah was gifted, a master manipulator, but the speed at which he’s inspiring complete devotion in his new followers is nonetheless worrying. By following a few more clues, Bex and the Scooby gang discover that he’s using the same all-white sensory deprivation room that he himself was subjected to while in the Pit.
And that wasn’t the only treatment he received. He was also the beneficiary of a unique form of positive reinforcement therapy in which everything he said was treated as fact, so now he believes that he genuinely is a reborn prophet heralding the end of mankind. Did anyone who worked at the Pit have any qualifications at all?
The big tension in The Hunting Party Season 2, Episode 5 comes from a missing bomb and the reveal that Noah has a mole inside the command centre. It becomes Morales’s job to root out who that might be, but Peck also has his suspicions, leading to some paranoid complications. It’s also revealed that the bomb is in the command centre; Noah’s live public return, hosted by Poppy/Puppy, is just a distraction.
This makes for a pretty cool finale in which it’s revealed that Norm is the mole — he works in the command centre and takes Morales hostage, clutching the detonator. This requires some clever improvisation, with Morales telling Norm that Noah killed his brother, Jack, and Bex tricking Noah into confessing to it so Norm can hear. It buys Morales enough time to disarm Norm, which also impresses Peck. Are we seeing the germ of a romance here?
It’d be a nice serialised thread to follow, since we’re running short of those. The main one at the moment is the small matter of Shane being Lazarus’s son. Bex has now shared that news with not only Morales but Hassani, though the latter doesn’t agree with Bex’s plan to tell Shane the truth. He thinks it’s something he’d be better off not knowing, and he might be right. At the end of the episode, Shane tells Bex that he has kind of gotten over the lack of clarity around his birth parents and settled on the idea of defining his own identity, so she decides not to tell him, though I’m sure the information will be revealed in time.
In the very final scenes, we see Cyrus being shot to death by masked men while in transit, so it’s clear that Lazarus is still killing off the recaptured escapees.
