Summary
The Hunting Party Season 2 makes decent progress in the overarching plot in “Lou Kaplan”, while also delivering a very “current” killer.
Finally, a serial killer I can get behind! After all, who among us hasn’t considered pushing an influencer into traffic? The Hunting Party Season 2 hasn’t made much of an effort to be “current”, but you simply can’t have a procedural these days without an influencer case, and Episode 6, “Lou Kaplan”, is that. It also introduces one of the few killers who hasn’t really been meaningfully worsened by the Pit, although there’s a fair amount of movement in the overarching story, so it still counts.
But anyway, the Selfie Slayer. Lou Kaplan – played, hilariously, by Jefferson White, aka Jimmy from Yellowstone – kind of has a point. Sure, you definitely shouldn’t kill people who annoy you, but there’s a pretty compelling case to be made that social media is a net negative for humanity, and that people who attempt to make a career on their platform of choice are arguably the most annoying people who have ever lived. The flashback cold open showing him taking out someone who was holding up a line in a coffee shop to take photos of the latte art was very much a kind of “yeah, I get it” moment.
But there’s a point to Lou, beyond his being a maniac. He was instrumental in the creation of a social media platform called Snapmax and was driven to distraction by how his altruistic intentions were co-opted to promote fakery and make as much money as possible. More so than social media, Lou was annoyed by vacuity, by the negative – and very real – implications of people aspiring to lives that are carefully cultivated illusions. He’s all about exposing the hypocrisy – a baking influencer who doesn’t like baking; a fitness influencer on steroids – that is at the very heart of social media.
Lou’s technical expertise allows him to operate in a way that folds other prevalent social issues into the case. He’s catfishing his victims using sophisticated programs that build AI avatars indistinguishable from humans. His “therapy” in the Pit has made him more dangerous, but he was very much the finished article before he got there, driven to kill by how warped his vision for a meaningful online community became. That transition predates his incarceration. His old boss’s money-grabbing use of an algorithm to promote drama and division was the antithesis of what he originally wanted.
Lou’s technical expertise also upset Morales, who falls for one of his tripwires, taking the control centre’s server offline just when they’re most needed to track him. This isn’t much to do with the case, though, and is instead designed to further the brewing romance between Morales and Peck. Office romances are generally ill-advised, and it doesn’t help that I can’t really get a gauge on Peck, but just because he’s Lazarus’s lackey doesn’t mean he’s necessarily corrupt. Still, though. It’d be a shame to finally have Morales defrost a little only for her to ultimately end up being betrayed.
That’s a point about Lazarus. She finally turns back up in The Hunting Party Season 2, Episode 6, blaming the team for the death of Noah Cyrus, which occurred at the end of the previous episode. Now, it’s pretty obvious that it was her who organised that – and it wouldn’t be the first time – but her accusations prompt Shane to investigate what happened. And that investigation leads him to suspect Hassani, who supposedly gave the route of the convoy away. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that Lazarus engineered this chain of events to sow discord among the team and get closer to Shane. Initially, it didn’t seem like she wanted much to do with the latter, but she does turn up at his door at the end of the episode wanting to talk, so she obviously has some kind of agenda.
Bex is onto her, of course, but she still hasn’t plucked up the courage to actually tell Shane how they’re connected, though she came incredibly close this week. The main problem I can foresee is that her hesitation to do so is going to mean that Lazarus gets to him first, which could cause all kinds of additional problems. Something to look forward to, I suppose.
