Summary
The Hunting Party sets a new Season 2 high-water mark in “Byron May”, boasting a creepy killer, an effective mystery, and all kinds of Pit weirdness.
Now this is more like it! The Hunting Party slipped into Season 2’s familiar holding pattern last week, with a decent enough case that just didn’t feel weird and original enough. Episode 10, while not totally original either, definitely strikes a much more effective note of weirdness, with not just an effectively creepy killer but also an extremely bizarre Pit therapy and a compelling present-day mystery for good measure. On balance, this is probably one of the better episodes the show has produced across both seasons, with a couple of truly effective images and sequences, even if it only moves the main plot along a smidge.
We might as well start with that. After the cliffhanger reveal that Lazarus knew who Shane was all along, I was worried that the show was going to beat around the bush with that information, forcing Bex and Hassani to keep the truth from him. Luckily, the exact opposite happens. They tell Shane immediately, and, refreshingly, he believes them. I’m so glad we didn’t have to go through the whole rigmarole of cheap drama here. On the contrary, by the end of the episode, Shane has doubled down on the idea of finding proof that Lazarus carried out the attack on Cyrus’s convoy.
Side note: It’s also revealed that Shane’s initial application at the Pit was rejected on account of him failing his psych eval. Bex tries to frame this as a good thing, like his potential employers knew they wouldn’t be able to control him, but I’m not so sure. The idea definitely resonates with Shane, and a later move showing off his itchy trigger finger potentially proves the Pit’s point.
Anyway, Lazarus is all over Byron May’s case, and for good reason. A lonely tech specialist desperate to make a friend, he would use his job at an electronics repair store to gain information about his new potential pals, but when they inevitably found his overtures creepy, he’d flip out and batter them to death with a convenient household object. The Pit was able to track him down and incarcerate him, but since they couldn’t exactly tell the local authorities that, the case of the “Eastside Ripper” remained open until an innocent man, Victor Rosa, was arrested and convicted for Byron’s crimes. Lazarus knows that if Byron’s true identity gets out, there’ll be immense public scrutiny around the case.
This is a refreshingly new angle, but the meat-and-potatoes psychopathy stuff is also pretty good. Byron is effectively creepy, and his treatment while he was being held in Silo 12 was weirder still. Kept in a sensory deprivation chamber designed to simulate his mother’s womb and trigger early childhood memories, it was unearthed that his issues stemmed from a traumatic birth, since his umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck (I was born like this, by the way, and thus far I haven’t killed anyone, but let’s not rule anything out.) Byron just wanted to make a friend, to be accepted for who he was after a lifetime of not being able to form relationships, but whenever he was met with rejection, he turned mortally violent.
The present-day side of The Hunting Party Season 2, Episode 10 is great fun, since Byron, in the absence of his previous job and access to his victims’ phones, has developed a hobby called phrogging. This is a real thing, where people sneak into someone’s home and live there undetected. Byron is studying his victims 24/7 from inside their houses to figure out more about them in the hopes he can leverage that information to befriend them, but since the interactions will always be inauthentic, he’ll invariably have to continue killing. It’s an endless, deeply creepy cycle, and the womb made of loft insulation that he was sleeping in is something that, frankly, I could have lived the rest of my life not having seen.
Eventually, it turns out that Byron is targeting super-fans of Victor Rosa, whom they believe to be the real Eastside Ripper. He’s looking for absolution — or at least companionship — second-hand, having acquired all of Rosa’s personal correspondence by posing as a crime writer pretending to be working towards his exoneration. This leads him to Victor’s son, Eric, who stopped writing to his father years prior when he wouldn’t confess to his supposed crimes.
When the Scooby gang gets the jump on Byron, he takes Eric hostage, and Shane just coldly executes him at the first opportunity, not exactly dissuading the notions of him being a nutcase. But there’s method to his madness. Despite Lazarus’s instructions, the team is determined not only to catch Byron but to get Victor exonerated, which means allowing Byron to be found by local authorities so that it can be proved he was the Eastside Ripper all along.
Side note #2: The whole climactic sequence is very good and effectively tense, with the exception of a moment when Byron pulls off a needless superhero landing through the roof. Who thought that was a good idea?
Anyway, this episode totally works. The interplay between the killer and the Pit is particularly good, since it’s working on two different levels this time. Byron is really effectively creepy, and there’s some solid tension-building towards the end. There’s even a nice emotional payoff when we learn that Victor is going to be released, and Eric even goes to visit him in prison. One assumes there’ll be hell to pay for the team going off-script here, which should bring Lazarus into the main plot more directly, so I’m definitely looking forward to seeing how that plays out, especially now that Shane is in the know. All in all, this is The Hunting Party operating at the peak of its powers.
