Summary
The Hunting Party Season 2 grapples with the morality of the Pit even more than usual in “Nancy Albright”, while also hinting at the full scope of Lazarus’s plan.
One thing The Hunting Party has always done well – and continues to do well in Season 2 – is having its cake and eating it. It consistently presents a laundry list of creepy killers while also acknowledging the deep immorality of The Pit as a concept. It never attempts to exonerate its bad guys, who were evil long before their incarceration, but it also suggests that you can go too far for the right reasons, and that even the worst of the worst are still human beings. Episode 12 grapples with this idea as well as, if not better than, any of the others.
The titular Nancy Albright is an addict, which is important. All serial killers are addicts in one way or another, obviously, but Nancy is also the more common kind of substance abuser. The idea behind her “treatment” was that addressing the more obvious compulsions might also tackle the more deep-seated ones. In other words, cure her fondness for drugs, and perhaps also cure her fondness for murder.
This creates the most compelling moral dilemma of the episode, since the Pit did, on some level, cure Nancy’s addiction with an experimental cocktail that deadened her ability to get high. It doesn’t take much imagination to think about how this might have some practical applications. Nobody would chase a high they can’t experience. But there are some pretty obvious caveats to this, namely that nobody bothered to cure the compulsions that already existed in Nancy, and that she was experimented on against her will as part of a top-secret government mad science project. Kind of a dealbreaker.
But it’s chewy enough to be compelling, isn’t it? Sometimes the Pit has seemed cartoonishly over-the-top and evil, to the extent that you couldn’t always figure out what anyone was doing there beyond satisfying their own morbid curiosity. Nancy’s story at the very least raises the idea that there were supposed to be some meaningful long-term benefits to what was going on there, even if their hiring practices could have done with a rethink. And what happened to Nancy as part of the experiments also allows for the impressively grim case of the week, where she’s rampaging in the present-day, targeting addicts in recovery, and transfusing their blood into her own body to circumvent the knots that the Pit tied in her circuitry.
A lot of the villain performances in The Hunting Party Season 2 have been good, but Episode 12 leans on Jamie Chung, who plays Nancy, more than usual. She has a lot to do here, having to be equally attractive, seductive, charismatic, and reassuring. She’s equally convincing in the flashbacks that show her as a garden-variety seductress as she is in the present-day sequences, which lean into her sinister charm, presenting as an understanding mentor figure. The duality is more pronounced than usual.
The gradual unfurling of Nancy’s scheme to circumvent her new programming makes the case more compelling because you can’t quite see where it’s going, since it’s a response to the Pit’s experimentation. There’s something deeply cruel about Nancy’s targeting of recovering addicts, but also something oddly sad about the creativity and resourcefulness addicts can display to feed their addictions. The Hunting Party is a network procedural, so it isn’t best equipped to really delve into the complexity of these ideas and subjects, but I appreciate that it bothers to raise them in the first place, which is more than most shows can claim.
The implication that Nancy’s case has for the sadism of the Pit’s staffers also has unavoidable knock-on effects for the overarching story about Lazarus and Shane. Knowing his mother was almost certainly privy to these experiments doesn’t jive well with his private hopes that things might have been different between them, although Hassani and Bex reassuring him about his predicament is one of the better scenes of the episode.
This is worsened by the discovery in the previous episode that Peck carried out the raid on Noah Cyrus’s transport – at Lazarus’s behest. The change in Peck’s demeanour now that he has been rumbled is also interesting to see, and I’m glad that the team confronted him immediately instead of sitting on the information for too long. Peck ends up seeming much more sinister than he initially appeared to be, but he’s also in a predicament where he’s realising that he knows too much for the powers-that-be to ever allow him to live. So, he talks, giving us at least a hint of the scope of Lazarus’s plan.
This plan basically consists of transporting the Pit’s former inmates to a new, even more secret facility, based on the same sadistic principles, with the intention of creating an army of weaponized serial killers. I think the logistics need some work – if these two seasons have proved anything, it’s that all of the Pit’s treatments have made its subjects even more dangerous and unpredictable – but it certainly tracks with what we’ve seen from Lazarus thus far.
