The Hunting Party Season 2 Episode 3 Recap: Who Is Caitlyn Taylor?

The latest episode of NBC’s “The Hunting Party” is very Wall Street coded, though not thematically, but in a superficial, premise-setting kind of way—drawing reference from movies like “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “American Psycho.” The case of the episode, revolving around a Pit escapee who targets the one percenters, is quite bizarre and random in the way it establishes the crisis. The Lazarus plotline is moving at a slow pace but still making headway with each passing episode, with the latest one revealing the shady colonel’s real identity.

Spoilers Ahead

The third episode opens in a luxurious mansion in Long Island, New York, in 2014 and focuses on Zack Lang, a maintenance/car cleaning employee. Zack is seen duplicating car keys to hide himself within the trunk in order to infiltrate the mansion two weeks later and brutally kill the owner couple using a shotgun. Starting his killing spree back in 2010, Zack killed and robbed 12 people, all of whom belonged to the upper echelon of the economic class—until he was finally arrested and sent to the Pit, where he stayed for over a decade. Zack, son of a penny stock broker father and nurse mother, belonged to a lower middle-class family and was evicted from his house when he was sixteen years old after his parents caught him doing drugs at his house. Zack’s parents lost much during the financial crisis in 2007, and Zack, who looked up to his father, lamented how he miserably passed away while suffering from cancer. It should be mentioned that given all his victims were one percenters, Zack was hailed by media as a Robin Hood-type figure, and from the recorded footage of his interrogations, it becomes apparent that he enjoyed the popularity and fame, even while receiving them for all the wrong reasons. After escaping the Pit, Zack has restarted his killing spree all over again and has taken a new victim—Eric White. As Bex, Shane, and Hassani visit Manhattan and begin investigating, some significant changes in Zack’s MO can be noticed. An unemployed Eric belonged to a lower financial status and could not have afforded to purchase the two expensive watches that are lodged into his eyes. 

Morales and Ben come across video footage of Zack being subjected to questionable therapy during his time in Pit, where Zack is kept in a rage room of sorts, which is modeled after his childhood home. Bex shares her assumption that Zack might have experienced a traumatic event in the same room; the rage room therapy allowed him to have his cathartic release. Now that the outlet is no longer available, Zack has resorted to his old ways and is using his wealth to find victims. Given the fact that green paint has been found within Eric White’s fingernails, the same color that Zack’s childhood home is seen painted in, the team suspects that Zack is taking his victims to his family home to reenact the therapy sessions in the crudest possible way. 

However, upon reaching the Lang household, the investigating trio find it to be empty. Bex tries to trace the origin of Zack’s childhood trauma and works on her hunch of animal cruelty being involved with Zack’s eviction from his home after seeing a pet door with the name ‘King’ written on it. Morales finds a confessional video of Zack where he reveals how he killed his pet cat, King, and presents it to make him more ‘likeable’ by decorating the carcass. Absolutely disgusted by Zack’s psychotic behavior, his father disowned him. His father’s disappointment prompted Zack to target the ones his father aspired to become all those years ago. At present his motivation has changed, as Zack now targets the people his father really was, a poor man who tried to appear as someone privileged. Zack’s confession video also reveals that his father didn’t sell his luxurious watch even at the worst financial crisis, which is why, to mock his memories, Zack uses it to ‘brand’ his victims. 

In the meantime, Zack takes another victim, a certain James Small who joined his shady private finance firm, and upon looking it up, the team finds out about a potential victim of unemployed young men trying to become yuppies of Wall Street while riding on false promises given by Zack. A sadistic Zack has introduced himself to them as King. Upon interrogating them, Bex and co. learn the identity of Zack’s next possible victim -a guy named Damon, who is lately in his good books. Morales tracks down Damon’s location using his cell number and finds out it’s Zack’s mansion in Long Island, where he has taken him. Bex, Shane, and Hassani reach there, and Bex confronts Zack just in time before he almost manages to kill Damon. Trying to use his estranged relationship with his father, Bex tries to distract Zack long enough to ensure Damon’s safety and engages in a grueling fight to overpower him in the end. 

Coming to the Lazarus plotline, Bex suspected a possibility that Lazarus’ past can be traced using past athletic records, as she proved herself to be more than exceptional in track and field during her time in the army. However, Hassani believed that whoever erased Lazarus’s past surely could have taken care of any such records as well. Bex seeks help from Morales, who tells her about back files—digital copies of documents that remain intact in private servers, even after deletion of the uploaded documents. Morales is able to hand over related back files to Bex, and in the final moments of the episode, Bex finds the true identity of Colonel Lazarus to be Caitlyn Taylor. As it turns out, once a promising athlete, Caitlyn killed three teenagers and got arrested and has gone off the grid since then. Unbeknownst to Bex, Caitlyn was subjected to Dr. Dulles’ secretive ‘Graduation’ procedure, which shaped her psychopathic tendencies into a controlled form, removing empathy to build her as a remorseless killing machine. In the upcoming episodes, more details about Lazarus’ past will surface, and hopefully, the revelation about Shane’s connection to her will be highlighted as well.