Summary
The Hunting Party Season 2 really puts Shane through the wringer in “Sidney Fairfax”, but his arc coming full circle is great news for the show.
I suspect that jetting around the world hunting crazy serial killers is pretty high-stress, as far as jobs go, but even by the usual standards, Shane has a terrible time of things in The Hunting Party Season 2, Episode 7. As teased by the ending of the previous episode, he gets a major bombshell about his parentage dropped at his feet, he feels betrayed by his teammates for their having kept that bombshell from him, and then he gets kidnapped and prodded by a murderous neuroscientist obsessed with proving whether psychopathy is a product of nature or nurture.
That’s a bad day by anyone’s standards, though it’s pretty good news for fans of this show, since all of this feels quite major in the context of the overarching storytelling. The titular Sidney Fairfax is a bit like the final boss of the “The Pit makes bad people even worse” theme, and it’s about time that everything came out about Shane. The revelations here massively recontextualise the ongoing story, including putting a bit of a question mark on whether Lazarus is really the villain we’ve been assuming she is (although, come on, she almost certainly is).
Anyway, Sidney Fairfax wasn’t sentenced to time in the Pit, but was invited to be a guest lecturer there, since he was so brilliant that his expertise were considered useful to the inmates, even if it meant hand-waving away the fact he was also a crazy serial killer. A guest-starring David Rasche does a wonderful job here of making Sidney so unassumingly normal-seeming that the fact he kills people and removes chunks of their brains comes as quite the shock.
There’s a lot of shock-inducing imagery in this episode, to be fair; lots of long needles in heads and that sort of thing. It helps to add a creepy contour that pairs nicely with the idea of Sidney and Dr. Dulles as mad scientists working with the blessing of the U.S. government. The whole thing really gets at the underlying conspiratorial vibe. And the Dulles connection obviously connects Sidney to Shane; he’s following up with several of Dulles’s former subjects, and is especially interested in Shane as the child born in the Pit to a serial killer mother.
The Hunting Party Season 2, Episode 7 really piles it on Shane. Lazarus tells him she’s his mother, then he gets word that Dr. Dulles has died, then he has to reveal that he and Dulles’s daughter have been liaising for ages and Shane is now in possession of all the classified files that might now pertain to catching Sidney, and then when he tries to open up, Bex and Hassani have to reveal that they already knew about the Lazarus thing. It’s a brutal string of events even before Sidney gets his hands on him.
Luckily, the core cast have formed such a strong unit by this point that any disagreements don’t last long, and they quickly reconcile to save the day. But it means turning to Lazarus for help, and, for the first time, floating the possibility that maybe she’s not as bad as they thought. Her entire connection to the Pit is that she’s the only character who has featured in two seasons whose treatment was ostensibly a success. For all intents and purposes, she’s no longer a psycho, even though we’ve seen her do some pretty cold-blooded stuff already. But do we really believe she’s reformed?
The argument in her favour would be that she helped the others find and save Shane. But I’m not sure that counts. Shane is her son, so she’d have a special connection to him anyway, and she could quite easily have helped just to throw Bex and Hassani off the scent. If she’s not a Big Bad, The Hunting Party doesn’t really have one, which seems bizarre to me. I’d be much more inclined to assume that she’s playing a long game and that Shane has some more stressful workdays to come. But we’ll have to wait and see.
