Summary
The Hunting Party falls into its typical Season 2 pattern in “Colette Akins”, which feels a touch cliched despite a game guest performance.
As a network procedural, you can’t fault The Hunting Party for having a pattern. Season 2 has relied on it to varying extents, delivering a slew of interesting killers and creepy MOs alongside a steadily percolating overarching plot about Shane and Colonel Lazarus. Episode 9 is as adherent to this formula as any other, and it isn’t bad as a result, but the relative lack of interest around the titular Colette Akins, despite a game guest appearance from Piper Perabo (Butterfly), and the slow progress of the macro plot, conspires to make the whole thing feel a bit disappointingly standard.
The previous episode was a bit like this, to be fair, but a serial killer turning his victims into shoes was enjoyably novel, especially in how the killer had evolved — or regressed, depending on your perspective — on the back of his treatment in The Pit. That was enough to carry things, and Shane also took the big step of having dinner with his mother, whose motives he very quickly started to believe might be genuinely benevolent.
That’s where things pick up, with Shane defending Lazarus, mostly because he has bought into the idea that she has only just found out about him and is, like him, fumbling her way through a newly discovered relationship. You can understand why Shane would buy this, even if you’d expect a bit more scepticism from a guy who catches serial killers for a living, but the ending of the episode throws the logic for a loop when Hassani is informed that Lazarus fast-tracked Shane’s application to the Pit and has known about their relationship for much longer than she’s letting on.
We’ll presumably get more of this in the next episode. For now, I don’t love that Hassani — and by extension, Bex, even though she doesn’t know yet — once again have information about Shane and Lazarus that they’re not going to share immediately. That kind of drama can’t help but feel a bit forced to me, but we’ll have to see how it’s handled before we make any substantial judgments.
In the meantime, the main problem with “Colette Akins” is, well… Colette Akins. Having grown up in her family’s funeral home, she idolized her father, but hated her abusive older sister, Liza, who resented her for the death of their mother, who died while giving birth to Colette. After the death of their father, Colette heard his disembodied voice compel her to kill Liza, and then ten more victims, all of whom she buried in coffins with other, unrelated people.
“Because the voices told me to” — that old Son of Sam classic — isn’t the most compelling motivation for a serial killer. The idea of auditory psychosis is fairly interesting, and the working theory is that it might have been caused by Colette’s prolonged exposure to embalming chemicals like formaldehyde. But how it relates to the Pit’s inhumane treatments isn’t especially interesting. Good old Doctor Fairfax performed an experimental surgery on Colette that removed her father’s voice from her head, but in order to find out where her victims were buried, they had to pump her “father’s” voice back into her cell. It’s appropriately sinister, but again, not especially novel.
As a result of all this, present-day Colette is looking for new victims to replace her father, whose voice she’s suddenly adrift without. She ends up kidnapping a bunch of people with decent singing voices so they can replicate the lullabies that her dad used to sing to her, even though when we get a snippet of her being sung a lullaby in the Pit, it sounds horrible. Bex is eventually able to trick her by mimicking her sister Liza’s voice, which doesn’t sit especially well with Bex, but the moral dimension isn’t delved into at all, which feels like a shame.
It’s all fine, don’t get me wrong. An average episode of this show is, generally speaking, better than most procedurals, and that’s the case here. But that extra note of creative weirdness is, sadly, absent this week. Maybe next time.
