Summary
The Hunting Party Season 2 comes to a relatively coherent close, but the ending hints at much more in the future for Bex and her team.
The Hunting Party Season 2 comes to a close in Episode 13 by shifting the status quo pretty radically, honestly, in a way that I’m curious about, given the sudden lack of an overarching Big Bad. Most of the season’s main storylines are resolved here, or at least exposed, which isn’t necessarily the same thing, but it doesn’t feel like an ending so much as a new beginning, with the show pivoting into slightly different territory.
There’s a fair amount to go over here, from a creative new killer to questionable decision-making, close brushes with death, and cameos from previous villains. Lazarus’s plan is ultimately exposed, a mystery that has been lingering since Season 1 is solved, and Bex gets a promotion. Let’s break it all down.
The Toxic Avenger
The finale’s serial killer, Xander Wax, is a fun one (insofar as serial killers can be fun, but you know what I mean). Xander’s pathology isn’t that interesting – the loss of his parents in a random car crash has led him to be obsessed with randomness as an unavoidable certainty of life – but the way it manifests in his MO definitely is.
Xander’s whole deal is using toxins from exotic animals to kill his victims. Importantly, his victims aren’t specifically selected. He leaves the poison in random places and simply waits until it takes someone’s life. The thrill for him is in the waiting, the chance, the power implicit in the idea of killing someone totally arbitrarily, completely at random. This is the kind of “weapon” that, as we learned last week, Lazarus is hoping to fill her personal army with.
Exit Strategy
When it transpires that Xander has been targeting investigative journalists, it becomes clear that his “talents” – if you want to call them that – are being put to more nefarious use. There’s a connection between his victims, who were investigating the link between the Pit and Phillip Beaumont, whose book, Deviations from the Normal, was in Lazarus’s apartment and was being read by one of the victims. Beaumont runs a think tank called the Institute for Human Consciousness, which has its hands in multiple government projects, including, potentially, the Pit.
It’s easy enough to put the pieces together. Beaumont being behind the Pit was about to be exposed, and Lazarus deployed her pet serial killer to prevent that from happening. Once caught, Xander reveals that Lazarus has been looking for an exit strategy ever since the explosion destroyed the Pit in Season 1, trying to cut a deal with a foreign government for himself and several prized “graduates”, whom she has been keeping imprisoned in a separate facility.
Who Blew Up the Pit?
Bex and the gang plan to hand Xander over to Mallory, arranging to meet her without realising they’re being lured into a trap by Lazarus, who kills Mallory and Xander and throws Bex and Hassani in cells alongside some old faces, including Amanda Weiss and Dr. Malak from way back in Season 1.
Lazarus keeps Shane separate, still nursing delusions of them building a loving mother-and-son relationship. She also confesses to him that it was she who blew up the Pit, since she couldn’t face the idea of the project being shut down. She has fully bought into the idea that her own career proves that the therapies in the Pit work. She was the first “graduate” and believes that she paved the way for more.
She’s also adamant about not getting put back “in a box”, which is a little weird considering she’s so keen on the outcomes of her being in that box. I’m not sure she has necessarily thought this all the way through.
Lazarus Is Taken Down, and Peck Goes Free
While all this is going on in The Hunting Party Season 2, Episode 13, Morales and Ben are running interference from her apartment, where Peck is being held captive. In exchange for his freedom, Morales asks Peck to give them server access to the detention centre, allowing Morales to remotely open all the doors, causing chaos inside.
Bex, Shane, and Hassani are able to fight their way through the various inmates and security personnel. The distraction gives Lazarus time to run, but Shane and Bex follow. Bex gets clipped in the shoulder by a bullet, but Shane is able to get the drop on his mother. Despite her urging him to kill her – she’s really adamant about not going back to prison – Shane doesn’t bite, putting to bed the theory that was floated earlier in the season that Lazarus’s psychopathy might be hereditary.
Lazarus uses Bex’s squirming as a brief distraction to reach for a gun, but Bex, even in her wounded state, is able to take Lazarus down. Morales is true to her word and gives Peck an hour-long head start.
Setting Up Season 3
As mentioned at the top, the ending of The Hunting Party Season 2 also sets up multiple fresh angles for a third season. Here’s what we’re working with in convenient bullet-point form:
- Hassani’s dead wife was seemingly connected to the Pit, or at least to Phillip Beaumont, in some way.
- Beaumont blew the whistle on himself in an effort to get the Pit shut down. He had been trying to do so for years after seeing how inhumane the experiments were, but Lazarus had too much control.
- Bex is promoted to the new head of the task force, and her new responsibilities, working under Beaumont, are to bring in the remaining “graduates” who are roaming free. Then, the entire project can finally be shut down and put in the past.
- The list of escapees is extremely long since the Pit wasn’t just treating serial killers captured from the outside world – it was also making its own.
Expect these and other threads to be tugged on if – or indeed when – The Hunting Party returns.
