The Hunting Party Season 1 Recap: Things To Know Before Season 2

NBC’s crime drama, “The Hunting Party,” has quite an interesting premise, as it explores issues like preemptive criminal intervention strategy and governmental conspiracies exploiting criminals as expendable resources through the narrative setup of a prison break. Despite having the chance to dive deeper into the moral and ethical intricacies such a storyline can offer, the series keeps itself content with following a case-of-the-week format while exploring the emotional complexities its leads grapple with. With the second season of the series about to premiere, let us take a look at the events and characters viewers need to remember to get in sync with the story so far.

Spoilers Ahead

Bex Gets Recruited in the Hunting Party

In Cheyenne, Wyoming, a deep silo-like structure known as the Pit acts as an off-the-record supermax federal prison, holding the country’s deadliest death row inmates and serial killers. Formerly used as a nuclear missile-containing bunker, the existence of the Pit is kept secret even from the who’s who of the administration. After a sudden, fierce explosion wrecks the prison, a number of serial killers are able to escape. The narrative focus shifts to Rebecca Henderson, aka Bex, a former FBI behavioral analyst who is now working security at a casino and using her skills to detect frauds. Bex has quite an intriguing past—growing up with a sheriff father, she had a knack for investigating from an early age. When Bex was fifteen years old, she was able to crack the case of a serial killer who targeted local teenage girls. Unfortunately, her close friend, Naomi, was the final victim of the perp, who turned out to be her own father, Eli Johnson. Bex carries the guilt of failing Naomi, as she abandoned her when Eli became aware of the investigation the duo were conducting together and came after them. Bex’s professional life as an FBI agent hit a roadblock when she parted ways with her partner/mentor, Oliver Odell. Desperate to pry out intel regarding a victim from a killer, Odell had immolated him to death. Even though Odell’s extreme interrogation allowed Bex to rescue the victim, an orphan named Sam whom she adopted as her own daughter, Bex refused to work with Odell ever again. 

As one of the escaped prisoners from the Pit, Richard Harris, a serial killer with an affinity for using ammonium sulfide, was nabbed by Bex on her first case as an FBI agent, she is recruited as part of the task force that’s been put together to hunt down the escaped killers. White House Advisor Jacob Hassani helps Bex to get into the groove of things—how, unbeknownst to the rest of the world, supposedly dead serial killers like Harris are held captive inside the Pit. Unless they are recaptured with haste, the killers will wreak havoc, and given the clandestine nature of the entire affair, they can’t rely on local law enforcement for assistance. Ex-US Marine/Pit prison guard Shane Florence remains determined to join Bex and Hassani to search for the killers, and the trio sets out to nab Harris. After intercepting Harris’ attempt to torment his first victim since his release, Bex rightly deduces that the killer is on his way to take out his last targeted victim, Nicole Westin, whom he couldn’t kill before getting caught. Bex and Hassani go through an argument after Hassani reveals he wants to use Nicole as bait, but his strategy works, as Harris steps right into the trap. Hassani shoots Harris to death after the killer takes Nicole hostage. However, later on, Bex figures out that Harris considered Nicole his muse, and he was taking those lives under her command. As a desperate Nicole tries to attack her, Bex is able to incapacitate her and take her to the Pit. Much to Bex’s surprise and dismay, Odell turns out to be warden of the Pit, and he shares his suspicion about the Pit explosion being an inside job. 

Killer Galore and Prison Conspiracy 

Hassani’s eccentric demeanor and attempts to cover up the secrets of the Pit intrigue Bex, and Shane also mentions to her about the inmates being experimented on inside the Pit. Bex confronts Hassani and discovers that, learning from the behavioral patterns of the inmates, the administration of the secretive prison formed a method to nab possible perpetrators even before they commit a crime. More on that later, as we move to the next perp, Clayton Jessup. 

Afflicted with Reactive Attachment Disorder, which led him to crave a perfect family life, Jessup killed his entire family on his 16th birthday by poisoning them with carbon monoxide. Since then, Jessup has taken down other families as well, whom he saw as lining up with his idea of perfection, before getting caught by the authorities and spending his adulthood in the Pit. After the collapse of the prison, Jessup has already abducted a victim, an elderly lady named Irene McFadden, but Bex is surprised to observe that his MO has completely changed. Eventually, the investigators are able to deduce that Jessup used to watch an educational video on a regular basis, and he is assembling the actors who featured in the video, displaying an ideal family setup. As Jessup manages to abduct all three of the actors, Bex and her team meet his therapist, Dr. Lansing, whose spine Jessup broke following a sudden outburst of anger. Eventually, Bex is able to realize that Lancing has a soft spot for Jessup and believes that he can be reformed. Upon being fired from the Pit after being crippled, Lancing is actually manipulating Jessup to recreate his maladaptive fantasy. Shane gets caught off guard and knocked out by Jessup, who was hiding at Lancing’s place, and Bex too gets trapped inside the basement along with Shane—where the actor trio are being held captive as well. Bex is able to free herself and save the others, and thanks to Jacob’s timely return, Jessup is thrown back into the Pit before the situation gets any worse. Bex faces her worst fears all over again when Eli Johnson is revealed to be a Pit inmate, and he taunts Bex about abandoning Naomi all those years ago. As it turns out, Odell had known about this as well but deliberately kept this from the authorities to protect Bex’s career in the FBI.

The third perpetrator, Brenda Lowe, is a privileged woman with a high IQ who killed over a dozen and a half people before getting dragged into the Pit. Brenda used her family inheritance to work for gray wolf conservation, and it seems she targets men who believe their right to hunt supersedes others’ right to live. However, Brenda’s bloodlust can’t be justified, as it has its own selfish, depraved roots and is not really motivated by any higher ideal of ecoterrorism. To make things worse, as Brenda starts taking down new victims, it is revealed that, inside the Pit, she was assigned to a behavioral adjustment training regime that depended on creating a fabricated world through lies. While remaining imprisoned, Brenda didn’t know that her land had been sold off to her lawyer, who kept falsely assuring her as part of the training—on the false hope that she would recover. At present, feeling betrayed, Brenda is more dangerous than ever—and as she spirals out of control, she nearly takes down a group of kids. After getting distracted by multiple red herrings and misdirections, Bex finally confronts Brenda and manages to get her guard down by calling out her real intentions. A distraught Brenda is recaptured thanks to Bex’s expertise. In the meantime, a tussle continues between Odell and Hassani, as both of them appear distrustful of each other and believe the other party is responsible for the data breach and prison breakout. Both of them want Bex to believe their version of the story, and Odell’s actions before the Pit destruction further paint him as a possible conspirator. 

The fourth case involves Dr. Ezekiel Malak, a classic narcissistic, delusional, evil doctor stereotype who believes himself to be a misunderstood genius. Burdened by paternal rejection and a deep-rooted sense of denial, Malak is also afflicted by a god complex, which prompted him to poison his patients to death, as he took it upon himself to decide who deserved a second chance at life and who didn’t. After getting tortured in the Pit to live through near-death experiences over and over again by a certain Dr. Dulles, Malak is now subjecting his victims to a similar fate, and Bex finds herself caught up in such a situation. After surviving a near-death situation, Bex realizes Malak believes he saw his father after his experiences gave him a new clarity, and allowing Malak to run his mouth, she manages to free herself and subdue him. Malak attempts to take his own life by injecting himself with the same cardiac drug that he uses on his victims, but Bex saves him in time. Surprisingly enough, as Bex decides to check on Dr. Dulles after having Malak sent to the Pit, it turns out Dulles is really Malak’s father. 

In the fifth case, Roy Barber, a deranged psychopath and gifted artist, comes into focus. Roy’s childhood trauma of witnessing his father killing his mother before taking his own life is reflected in the most horrendous way as he targets couples as his victims. Too confident of his ability to hide his secrets, Roy even assisted the cops as a sketch artist. After Roy restarts his killing spree, Bex and co. figure out his true MO—which was to ‘save’ women from dysfunctional, abusive relationships by killing their partners and staging the crime as a double homicide to allow them a second chance. Thanks to the police files to which he had easy access, Roy chose his targets and brought the abusers to justice. But at present, Roy is taking down female victims as well—women who found a new partner and whom Roy believes didn’t learn from their past experience. The investigators manage to nab Roy just before he subjects his latest victim, Linda, to his crude lessons, and manage to find all the co-conspirators who kept their partners’ deaths a secret and covered up for Roy. 

The sixth episode features an OCD-afflicted serial killer, Arlo Brandt, and during his time in Pit, he too was subjected to behavioral adjustment training like the other captives, which worsened his condition further. Forced to become nearly an ascetic during his imprisonment, after escaping, Brandt is trying to humble his rich victims by preaching the gospel he himself learned the hard way. The team of investigators manages to nab Brand after catching him red-handed with his latest victims and puts him back where he belongs. In the meantime, Bex and Hassani continue to investigate Odell’s actions but face pushback from higher authorities—especially Attorney General Mallory. The equation between the team members changes upon the discovery of Shane’s parentage, after he turns out to be Dr. Dulles’ son. However, this is another misdirect, as Sarah, Dulles’ biological daughter, goes through her father’s recorded video tapes on Shane and reveals to him that he might be the son of one of the captive prisoners in the Pit. 

In the seventh episode, serial killer Mark Marsden, who has a tendency of killing his partners, goes after a former worker in the Pit, Carol. As Bex and her team once again investigate the cause of the changed MO of a killer, they learn, like clockwork, that the Pit’s experimental, odd rehabilitative measures are responsible for this mishap. Mark was compelled to believe Carol was his wife to force his killer instincts out of his system. Funnily enough, Carol has fallen for Mark to cope with her own feeling of loss, and this unlikely couple needs to be apprehended in time before Mark gets on with his killer routine. As Carol starts seeing Mark for who he truly is, the team catches up, and in a standoff situation, Bex shoots Mark to death to save Carol in time. 

The eighth chapter focuses on a talented yet troubled art history professor, Dennis Glenn, who killed bona fide, high-achieving artists in different fields to offer them up as sacrifices to the Greek muses. However, with Glenn still in captivity, a copycat killer is out and about, finishing Glenn’s elaborate murder scheme, which she herself couldn’t finish. Bex is able to pry out the identity of Denise’s admirer, who might be the perp in question, a certain Craig Martin, who was a fellow prisoner in the Pit. Martin plans a bombing at Denise’s university, but Shane and Hassani manage to locate and defuse the bomb in time. Martin is nabbed by the authorities, but Denise mysteriously gets killed off by a shadow group of prison operatives. Bex, Hassani, and Odell work together to untangle the larger conspiracy at play, and they learn about silo 12, where secretive experimentation took place on the prisoners, which was possibly decommissioned following a riot and massacre. Mallory and a number of influential figures, including hotshots from the military, are seemingly covering up illegal experiments performed on prisoners, and James Whitmore, CEO of big pharma company Whitmore Science, had a major role to play. 

The ninth episode features a psychopathic killer whom Bex nabbed during her time as an FBI operative, a certain Tom Beecher who kidnaps teenage girls and derives sadistic pleasure from watching one of his victims die in front of the other. After escaping the Pit, Beecher abducts a girl named Lily, and as the team gets on his trail, they learn Beecher was experimented upon by Dulles, which gave him short-term memory loss. As the team manages to capture Beecher, they aren’t able to locate Lily, but end up rescuing a second victim instead. Bex and co. decide to recreate the abduction scenario to have Beecher lead them to Lily—with Jennifer Morales, one of the task force members, acting as decoy. Due to some silly mistakes in the recreation, the plan fails, and upon discovering the ruse, Beecher takes his own life, as he prefers that over being sent to Pit. Shane’s ingenuity in deducing Beecher’s notes from “Moonlight Sonata” as a clue to locate Lily finally saves the day. 

The Truth Behind Pit: Who Is Lazarus?

In the season finale, a flashback sequence takes viewers back to a decade ago, when James Whitmore developed an experimental drug known as GWB45, which manipulated empathetic responses in users. Given that deranged psychopathic serial killers lacked empathy, which is the root cause behind their murderous actions, the doctors and investors associated with the Pit wanted to rehabilitate the criminals. However, the military wrested control over the Pit, as they wanted the drugs to be used in soldiers to obliterate PTSD and turn them into perfect killing machines. Whitmore, unwilling to give up his research, set up his own strike team to extract test subjects from silo 12, and a clash with the military at the location resulted in a breach, which caused the massive explosion, resulting in the Pit breakout. The explosion allowed an easy cover-up for Whitmore’s actions and that of all the ulterior motives involved in the project.  This whole story is revealed to Bex and her team by one of Odell’s superiors, Colonel Eve Lazarus. Shane, desperate to learn the identity of his birth mother, asks Morales to use voice identification software to match with denizens of Pit. 

For the final case of the first season, the true extent of Whitmore’s hideous experimentation comes to light, as Jenna Wells, a chemist serial killer who has taken down over two dozen victims, is revealed to have overdosed on the empathy-manipulating drug—which has turned her into an empathetic psychopath. After targeting multiple victims and trying to step into their shoes, Jenna sets her sights on James Whitmore. Infiltrating one of Whitmore’s parties, Jenna spikes the drinks of the guests. The team manages to get to Whitmore’s place in time before Jenna kills her, but a standoff arises as Whitmore appears unwilling to hand Jenna over to the authorities. As it turns out, Jenna already poisoned James, as he faces karma and meets his end. A fight breaks out between Whitmore’s private security and Bex’s team, which leads to Hassani sustaining severe injuries. Jenna escapes and later poisons Odell before being taken down by Shane for good. Mallory disbanded the team in light of recent events, and a shocker drops as using the voice identification software, Morales is able to learn that Lazarus, who was intricately connected with the whole operation, is Shane’s biological mother. Formerly an imprisoned criminal, Lazarus apparently is the only one to pass a ‘graduation’ process to become Dulles’ greatest success, and she derived pleasure from seeing the horrors of the Pit turning the system upside down. Odell’s fate appears murky; it remains in question whether the team will continue their mission and how Shane will fare upon the learning of his paternal ties—all these questions will be answered in the upcoming second season. 

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