Diksha Sundriyal
NBC’s ‘The Hunting Party’ concludes its first season with an episode that packs several revelations as well as a shocking turn of events for Bex Henderson and her team. Picking up from the last scene of the previous episode, it begins with Oliver bringing Bex face to face with his contact, Col. Eve Lazarus. Before telling her the truth, Lazarus warns her about getting too close to James Whitmore and his company, Whitmore Sciences, but when Bex counters that the man killed his scientist who had worked at the Pit, Lazarus drops all pretenses and gets to the core of the situation. She reveals that Whitmore’s research at the Pit focused on treating serial killers by fixing their empathy problem. Most of the subjects did not have enough empathy to make them human. But if they could be fixed, they could be rehabilitated.
For this, Whitmore created a drug called GWB-45, which could increase empathy but also be used to decrease the same. The increase would help treat the serial killers, but the decrease is what the military focused on. They saw the drug as an opportunity to numb their soldiers from the horror of war and spare them the traumas and the PTSD. They wanted to send empathy-less soldiers on the field, and Whitmore’s drug could do that for them. So, they decided to take over his research, but Whitmore did not take it lightly. He had seen great success with his drug and wanted his test subjects to continue his research. This is why he sent a tactical team inside Silo 12, had everyone killed, got some of his test subjects out, and had the explosion initiated at the Pit, which was supposed to bring down the whole structure. Or at least, that’s what Lazarus tells them.
Jenna Wells Shows the Side Effects of Whitmore’s Drugs
Bex and Oliver share these findings with Hassani, though they don’t tell him about Lazarus. He decides to look further into the matter, but before that, they receive a notification about another escaped prisoner of the Pit. It is Jenna Wells, a chemist who made a name for herself by poisoning people and becoming one of the most prolific killers out there. She is also unique because she was born with zero empathy, which is what made her such a successful killer. Now, however, her pattern seems to have changed drastically.
If you have to test a drug that increases empathy, the perfect subject for it is someone who has zero empathy. This is why Jenna Wells was a favorite for James Whitmore, and when she goes missing, he sends his own search party for her. It seems that the drug has elevated her empathy to such levels that she doesn’t just feel connected to people’s emotions; she starts believing she is them. She feels the need to take over their lives, so she kills them. She does it to two women before Bex and her team figure out what she is up to. Her latest victim is a caterer who has been hired to work at a party hosted by Whitmore. Jenna crashes it, poisoning all of the guests. She also kills Whitmore, using a poison patch that she sticks on the back of his neck, but before that, his bodyguards and Bex’s team engage in a gunfight, which ends with Hassani getting shot.
Hassani’s critical condition makes his colleagues concerned. Meanwhile, Bex discovers that his wife died a couple of years back, something that he had kept a secret from her all this while. While their colleague is in surgery, Bex and her team are visited by Mallory, who tells them to pack up their operation as she is bringing in a different team to handle stuff. She doesn’t like the fact that Jenna killed a party of people while Bex and the team could do nothing to stop her. She already had doubts about them, but now she is convinced that they are not capable of handling the task at hand. Meanwhile, Jenna Wells finds her next fixation, which is Bex Henderson.
Who is Shane’s Mother?
Apart from the mystery of the Pit and the explosion that catalyzes the events of the show, one of the major mysteries has been the origins of Shane Florence. Since the beginning of the season, he has been on his own side quest, keeping it a secret from the rest of the team while finding an unlikely support in Tara. She is the daughter of Dr. Dulles, who is also connected to the Pit and was Shane’s childhood therapist. In one of his recordings, Tara discovers that Shane’s mother knew about his therapy sessions with Dulles, but her face is not in the video.
The only way Shane can find out more about his mother is by directly asking Dulles, who is now on his deathbed. He had tried to be close to him by posing as his son, but he had to stop after being found out. When he asks Tara to help him talk to her father, she reveals that the old man has been in a coma for a while, and she has signed a DNR, which means that he will die soon enough. She tells him to find another way to find his mother, and so he turns to the only place and people he can trust with it.
He asks his colleague and friend, Jennifer Morales, to test the audio of the woman’s voice and run it through their database to get a match. He asks her to be discreet and doesn’t tell her anything about the audio, but he does tell her that it is very important for him. Morales runs the search in the background while working on Jenna Wells’ case. When Mallory shuts down their operation, and everyone is forced to pack up and leave, she keeps the search going on her own device, which she takes home. Eventually, it pings and reveals that the voice matches Col. Eve Lazarus.
Was Lazarus in the Pit? Was She a Serial Killer?
At the same time, Tara calls Shane and asks him to come to the hospital because her father is conscious. It is a very small window, which means he will have to be there immediately because she doesn’t know when or if this window will arrive again. When Shane doesn’t show up (because he chooses to be there for his friends and colleagues, Bex and Oliver), she shows the video to her father, and he tells her that the woman in the video is not in the Pit anymore because she graduated. At the same time, we get a visual of the soles of Lazarus’ feet, and we find the same stamp as that of other prisoners in the Pit. This shocking revelation puts a lot of things into place.
For starters, we now know that whatever experiments James Whitmore was conducting in the Pit were working. Eve Lazarus was one of the prisoners inside the Pit and not only went through the experiments but also survived them. It seems to have worked on her enough to rehabilitate her to such an extent that she is now a Colonel and overseeing the very thing that she was once a subject of. This is why perhaps she was so adamant about saving the project and keeping it a secret. However, with her real connection to the Pit revealed, more questions are raised about her and Shane.
First and foremost, why was she in the Pit? What did she do to be sent there? The other question is what it took to rehabilitate her and whether the therapy really worked or she found a loophole around it. Another question is about her and Shane. Who is his father, what happened to him, and does he know that Shane exists? What role did he play in the Pit? Was he a prisoner there, or a guard, or a doctor? The finale sets up all these mysteries for the next season, in addition to how and when Shane will finally meet Lazarus with the knowledge that she is his mother.
Will Oliver Survive Jenna Wells’ Poison Patch?
Catching serial killers is a difficult and dangerous job. To catch people who kill because they like it or can’t help it means putting oneself in danger, and the finale of ‘The Hunting Party’ makes the extent of this danger evident by putting two members of the team at risk of death. First, Hassani is shot and brought to the hospital just in time to be saved. Then, Oliver finds himself at the mercy of Jenna Wells, who shows up at the headquarters dressed as Bex. After Jenna fixates on Bex, she breaks into the fed’s hotel room and takes her badge and gun. She also reads her texts and digs into her life enough to find out that she has a daughter. She also gets a sense of Bex’s relationship with Oliver and believes that he is the one who caused her all the pain she has experienced till now, so, believing herself to be Bex, she decides to cut off the root cause of their pain and targets Oliver.
Bex arrives on the scene just in time but is unable to shoot Jenna, even though Oliver tells her to go through with it. She tries to talk the killer out of it but doesn’t realize that the deed has been done. Before Jenna can shoot Oliver, Shane shows up and shoots her from the back. She is neutralized, but before that, she leaves a patch on the back of Oliver’s neck. It is the same poison patch she used to kill her other recent victims, including James Whitmore. The patch works quickly, and moments after Jenna is shot down, Oliver starts to bleed from the nose and collapses. Shane rushes to get help while a tearful Bex holds Oliver in her arms, praying for him to survive while also telling him that she never stopped thinking about him. The episode ends before we see Oliver surrender to death or for any help to arrive and give us hope for his survival.
The truth about his fate is left to be revealed in the next season, but there is enough to show that he might survive after all. The first and foremost thing protecting him is plot armor. Oliver is the main character and has too much history with Bex, which has not yet been explored. He also has a strong connection to the Pit and Lazarus, which has also been kept in the shadows so far. By killing him, the show could be shutting off all these possibilities, and it would be a great waste. Another thing that works in Oliver’s favor is that Lazarus has been keeping an eye on him and has seen the whole thing with Jenna go down on her computer screen. At the beginning of the episode, Oliver tells Bex that Lazarus saved him, which suggests that they have a strong relationship. It seems unlikely that she would do nothing while watching him die. This strongly suggests that help could already be on the way, and Oliver will live to see another day.
