‘The Hunting Party’ Season 2, Episode 11 Recap – Puppets Are Creepy

I’m firmly of the opinion that there has never been a puppet that wasn’t horrific, and I confess to being a tiny bit sceptical of anyone who doesn’t feel the same. I feel slightly vindicated in this stance by The Hunting Party, which delivers another creepy killer to add to Season 2’s impressive menagerie, one whose enthusiasm for dolls is basically his entire backstory. But that’s not all! Episode 11 also provides one of the more significant twists in the overarching plot that we’ve had in several weeks. Perhaps Lazarus isn’t the Big Bad after all? But maybe we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves.

We’ll discuss that later. In the meantime, though, meet Dylan Miles, an aspiring comedian with an unhealthy connection to his puppet, Barney. He’s “aspiring” because he’s not very good, and because he’s not very good, he gets heckled relentlessly. Dylan handles criticism rather poorly, which is to say that he follows his hecklers home and beats them to death while communicating through Barney, who he stages in various odd positions to terrify his victim prior to their demise.

Oh! And he also makes his victims up to look like puppets themselves. He’s a proper psycho, even by this show’s standards. And that’s just the way we like it.

Dylan’s issues stretch back to his childhood. He was nonverbal until he was 10, and communicated through his puppets as proxies. He wanted to be seen and appreciated for his act, but never got the adoration he felt he deserved, so he started to murder his detractors, staging their corpses publicly so that they would be seen in their final moments of indignity. Lovely chap.

Disappointingly, Dylan’s treatment at the Pit was only mildly creepy. A version of empty chair therapy, he was locked in a room with various puppets who weren’t Dylan, and he’d angrily smash them all to bits until he eventually relented and started opening up. He gave the puppets, named Debbie and Peter, backstories and personalities, and through them, he would share more about his own pathology. It’s weird, granted, but not quite as eyebrow-raising as some of the other Pit therapies we’ve seen. But no matter.

In the present day, Dylan is trying to remake Debbie and Peter, who were obviously destroyed in the explosion. Very creepily, the puppets, which were provided by an industry legend named Nicholas Fletcher, were all modelled on real people, so Dylan goes after the originals so he can remake his therapists. He’s also just shooting his victims now, or at least these ones, because these kills are just perfunctory, necessary to rebuild his support circle.

Dylan does have an ultimate target, though — a comedian named Jeff who made his fortune on an act that mocked Dylan himself after he was incarcerated. Jeff gets a much more insidious treatment, including a puppet that Dylan names “Dead Jeff” and uses in a stage routine where he asks the crowd — who finally laugh at his jokes — whether he should beat the real Jeff, who’s tied up behind the stage, to death.

In the midst of this, The Hunting Party Season 2, Episode 11 gives the supporting cast a bit more to do. Peck takes Morales and Ben to the home of the Peter puppet, who’s dead when they arrive, and Peck ends up taking a bullet for Morales. She stays with him until he can get to the hospital, allowing Ben to occupy Morale’s usual tech-support role. I enjoyed this small shake-up of the usual formula, but it’s also purposeful when it comes to moving the main plot along.

On that subject, the Scooby gang is still trying to collect evidence implicating Lazarus in nefarious wrongdoing, especially the attack on Noah Cyrus’s convoy. Shane is fully on-side now after finding out that Lazarus knew who he was long before she revealed it, so he suggests using his unique access to Lazarus to keep her busy while Hassani and Bex search her apartment. He texts her asking for a dinner date, and she agrees.

At the end of the episode, while Lazarus is out with Shane, Hassani and Bex take a look around. They don’t find anything, though, which means that Lazarus is either too smart to leave incriminating evidence lying around, which is likely, or she’s actually innocent, as she claims. The search is juxtaposed with Morales taking Peck, who’s doped up on painkillers, home. While she’s putting him to bed, she notices a tell-tale bruise on his chest which seems to have been caused by the kickback of a rifle, despite him claiming that he doesn’t shoot. While he’s unconscious, she takes a peek at his laptop and discovers footage of Peck leading the assault team on the convoy.

So, is Peck the real Big Bad? Presumably, he was operating on Lazarus’s orders, no? Either way, this is the most significant development in this area for several weeks, so I’ll take it. Let’s see how it all shakes out.