Richard Harris
Episode 1 of The Hunting Party begins with a body being carted through the hallways to jovial music, as you do. They arrive at room D12 which, as we soon find out, is just one of many. There are tons of cells all holding dangerous criminals and this whole area happens to be in a hidden, remote area underground. Specifically, it’s in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Two of the workers leave after a brutal shift, unaware that everything is about to change. An explosion inside the prison rocks the place, turning the place into rubble. The shockwave hits the two workers leaving but the status of everyone is, as yet, unknown.
Over in Portsmouth, Virginia, we meet Rebecca Henderson, who everybody calls Bex. She’s working at a casino and certainly knows her stuff. Checking the cameras, she immediately figures out that two people are playing the system, and that makes her the perfect candidate for what’s about to go down.
Bex is whisked away from her life by the FBI, and arrives at the J.M. Webb Air Force Base. There are numerous military personnel outside, but her point of contact here is the Attorney General. She brings bad news that someone called Richard Harris has escaped from custody. He killed 7 women and Bex was the one who brought him in. Now, he was supposed to be on Death Row and killed, so obviously there’s something wrong here because, as it turns out, he’s also the man who was brought in at the start of the series.
It’s unknown whether there were any survivors from this blast but given Bex’s excellent deduction skills, along with her background surrounding Harris, she’s tasked with joining a team dedicated to bringing in escaped killers. They can’t get the authorities involved because technically the prison (dubbed The Pit) doesn’t actually exist. They don’t know how many inmates have escaped either but they do know Harris is one of them.
Harris manages to get all the way down to Denver, Colorado. Word of this reaches the team over at The Pit, who watch in real-time as Harris strangles another woman in broad daylight.
The group use the jet to fly over to Denver, but they’re not sure where Harris could be going next. Bex is joined by Jacob Hassani and former prison guard, Shane Florence, who both believe Harris is heading for the woman’s residence. Bex knows better though and heads to the diner, speaking to the locals. Specifically, the waitress who knew the kidnapped girl.
This girl worked part-time at the animal hospital, as she’s studying to be a vet. This, as Bex soon realizes, is where Harris is keeping her, but despite radioing in for the others, she decides to go it alone without alerting anybody else.
Predictably, Harris manages to subdue her, luring Bex in and then getting hit with some pepper spray right to the eyes. Ouch! The other guys manage to catch up just in time but when they do, Harris is gone. Together, they realize that Harris is not one to leave a task unfinished, and Bex deduces that this stems from a woman called Nicole Westin, someone who Harris never got around to killing.
On the plane, it’s exposition time as we learn more abut Bex. She always wanted to work for the FBI ever since she was 15, and managed to crack a case back then by chance, figuring out her best friend’s dad was a serial killer. Ever since, she’s always had a knack for this line of work. As for Shane, he worked in the Pit after being in the military. During his time in the Pit, he brings up that the killers had experiments done to them but he doesn’t elaborate further.
The gang arrive to see Nicole, and Bex gives an impassioned speech about how she’s going to protect her. Hassani though wants to use her for bait to lure Harris in so they can capture him again. Turns out the experiments they’re doing at the Pit are so they can catch serial killers before they actually kill. Some of the inmates have got better but for others? Well, it’s had the adverse effect.
Before we can elaborate further on this though, the gang wait inside the house (doing a terrible job of hiding I may add) while Harris stalks the residence and tries to find a way in. He eventually does get in, holding Nicole up at knife-point, but he’s surrounded and erratic. Hassani shoots the guy at point-blank range and kills him.
In the aftermath of this, the clean-up crew arrive to sort everything out, while Bex gets the unenviable task of debriefing and calming Nicole down. Given she doesn’t even know what she’s doing in this role, Nicole’s questions certainly throw her off-guard.
However, it soon becomes clear what’s going on here when Shane and Hassani find another girl stuffed in the trunk of Harris’ car. Turns out his earlier mantra about “girls being gifts” were literal, not metaphorical, as they were being gifted for none other than Nicole. Nicole is the real serial killer here, in a little twist. She helped Harris kill the girls and she pretended to be a victim in order to save herself.
Nicole was the one who trained Harris, and here, through it all, she looks set to hurt Bex, until Bex blinks first and shoots her at point-blank range. With Nicole down, the leaking kettle brings back bad memories of the past.
Throughout the episode we’ve seen that Bex has been part of a difficult string of cases. One of which includes her old partner Oliver Odell. He has a rather harsh method for questioning potential suspects, with one in particular she witnessed, seeing the poor guy lit on fire while tied to a chair. Bex was forced to watch from outside. However, this was the point of no return for her, and that was the last time they worked together.
As for Bex, she decided to adopt Sam, the daughter from the house who had nobody until now. Bex describes some of this to Hassani, including how she sees Sam as a daughter. Furthermore, Hassani has a daughter of his own, along with 3 sons too. This, as it turns out, is Bex’s route back into the FBI, but she’ll need to stomach a lot worse if she wants to be part of this taskforce.
Bex is thrown back into the past when she finds out that her old partner is actually the warden at the Pit! He called Bex in because she’s the best agent he’s ever worked with, and needs her help to catch all the escaped inmates. Furthermore, the blast at the Pit? Well, he’s convinced this was no accident but actually a jailbreak, orchestrated by someone very high up. But who?
The Episode Review
So The Hunting Party gets NBC’s new thriller off to a pretty mediocre start. As a sucker for anything prison-related, the show has potential to be a decent episodic romp, especially if we dive deeper into the past for each of our main ensemble. However, it’s also quite rough around the edges and completely full of unnatural exposition dumps too.
Using this private jet as a location for exposition feels really cheap and lazy, especially as we get three separate dumps of information here. We also have the obligatory flashbacks to the past, which reveal that Odell is not quite so holier-than-thou like Bex is.
There’s definitely friction between Odell and Bex, which I’m guessing will be explored in more detail throughout the season. It also wouldn’t surprise me if this show goes the love triangle route, with Odell and Bex potentially having an old romantic flame together, which is reignited as Bex gets closer to Shane. This is all speculation right now but NBC’s drama does have the same sort of hallmarks to lean into this.
The twist involving Nicole does rings of the same sort of twists we saw with Prodigal Son, which Fox obviously cancelled after a few seasons.
Beyond that, there’s going to be a lot of questions about how everything is going to stay hidden and under the radar, especially as law enforcement catch wind of everything that’s happened and the public start asking questions.
This is one of those that could go either way and right now, there’s not enough to really determine which side of the quality meter this one will go. Either way, there’s definitely enough intrigue to tune in to the next episode in three weeks time.
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