Eliza Coupe slays it as the Killer Chemist in The Hunting Party season 1 finale. It’s time to look back at the events of the episode and the cliffhanger that makes it clear a second season is necessary.
Caution: This post contains SPOILERS for The Hunting Party season 1 finale.
Jenna Wells is the psychopath that Bex and the team are after, and we quickly learn that she has absolutely no empathy at all. She killed because she was jealous of the life that a person would have, and she was easily able to kill them by slipping in a pill into their medication bottle that would do them harm.
Now she’s out of the pit, but she’s not exactly immediately killed again. However, there is an alert on her when it’s clear that she poses a threat. Maybe she would have gotten away with it had it not been for one traffic stop.
What happened in Silo 12 in The Hunting Party?
After picking up with Bex meeting Lazarus for the first time, we finally get some answers about what happened in The Pit. It turned out that it wasn’t Lazarus’s people who moved in and destroyed everything. It was Whitmore’s people.
Whitmore was using The Pit as a way to create empathy. This would help psychopaths, but it would also helps soldiers. If they didn’t feel anything going into war, they wouldn’t suffer from PTSD afterward. There is a sort of kindness in the experiments when you look at it from a military point of view, but that doesn’t mean it was right.
Well, Whitmore shut the whole thing down when he learned that the military was taking the experiment off him. If he couldn’t have it, then nobody could, and it led to the takeover of Silo 12 — killing everyone who got in the way — and the explosion in The Pit.
I’m inclined to believe Lazarus. She had no reason to tell Bex anything, and it makes more sense than Odell being part of some prison break. It also makes sense why she wouldn’t want any of this getting out, because Whitmore is clearly still a threat.
MORE: Melissa Roxburgh talks The Hunting Party season 1 finale
Tracking down Inmate Zero in The Hunting Party season 1 finale
Bex doesn’t have much time to think about all of this. She and the team get another case, and it turns out that this is Inmate Zero. Jenna Wells was a dangerous woman when she was first out, working as a chemist, which meant she was able to mess with everyone else’s medication. Now she’s out and having to figure out another way to kill.
Only, it’s not a murder that puts her on the radar of the task force. It’s a traffic stop, which leads to the team learning that Jenna Wells has assumed the identity of another person — a person she looks a lot like.
The case gets trickier, though. Jenna became the person that she had kidnapped, but eventually, she killed that woman and moved onto someone else. Bex needed Lazarus to help figure out what was going on here. After all, Jenna never had any empathy at all before. Now she’s full of empathy, but it’s had a side effect. She literally thinks she is the person she wants to copy. Texting people as if she is the person isn’t a way to make someone believe that her victim is still alive, but it’s a way to live as the person she’s kidnapped.
Jenna has a bigger plan in mind, though. Her newest victim, Anna, works at a catering company that happens to be catering for an event hosted by Whitmore. Oh yes, Jenna is after revenge for everything that Whitmore did, and she spikes drinks with blood pressure medication to make them collapse, so that she can get Whitmore.
Of course, Whitmore isn’t going down without a fight, but he doesn’t actually want to fight off Jenna. He views Jenna as his property. She is a medical experiment that he wants to continue. Maybe someone should give this man a dose of empathy considering how psychopathic he is. When Bex and her team move in, Whitmore orders his guys to kill them while he gets Jenna out.
It doesn’t go to plan. Jenna kills Whitmore, realizing that he just views her as property. That’s not something you want to say to a cold-blooded killer. As the shootout takes place, Hassani is hit and a couple of Whitmore’s guys are killed. Bex is able to talk the last man down from an all-out war.
AG Mallory shuts the entire operation down
Fortunately, Hassani makes it out of surgery alive, but there is a huge secret revealed. It turns out that his wife died a few years back, and it’s why he has come back Stateside. He needs to be there for his children. It’s funny how this group started to become friendly but they have no idea about each other’s secrets.
Shane isn’t all that surprised that there are a few secrets within the group. He has his own, and nobody pries him for those secrets. It’s not the time or place for any of them, and it’s actually an extremely mature way of looking at things.
There’s job bad news for the team, though. AG Mallory is not happy with the way the latest operation has gone. This was supposed to be a secret task force. Honestly, I’m not sure why she thought that an inmate wouldn’t cause a scene like the one Jenna caused. How is that the team’s fault? It’s not, which suggests she has got orders from someone else. It’s curious that this is after Whitmore’s death, so was Whitmore the one ordering her to do things, or does she think it’s all over without the scientist?
Can Lazarus change all of this? After all, there’s no way that the team won’t keep working on things. Morales is sure to be on board with hacking into systems and continue taking down the bad guys. If there is going to be The Hunting Party season 2, we’re probably going to see the team working with Lazarus running the show, and this could mean a few more details about The Pit.
Can Odell be saved in The Hunting Party season 2?
The situation with Jenna isn’t over, though. While in the showdown with Whitmore and his men, Jenna got a good look at Bex. I’m surprised nobody commented about how Bex would make an excellent next target for Jenna, but I guess they were all focused on Anna and their attempt to save her.
So, it wasn’t surprising to see Jenna attempt to take over Bex’s life. She just didn’t quite figure out who she was going up again, or figure out how smart Bex was to know where Jenna would go. Of course, she went to see Odell, and while Jenna may think that she’s Bex, she was still a cold-hearted killer.
While Bex is able to take Jenna down and have a tender moment with Odell, it all seems to come at a cost. Odell collapses as he suffers a nosebleed, and Bex finds the band-aid that the previous two victims had. Jenna managed to place a band-aid laced with Cyanide on Odell’s neck, and now we have to wonder if there is any hope of saving him in The Hunting Party season 2? Just how fast does the cyanide act, because that’s something we never got to the bottom of with the previous two victims.
The series couldn’t just end us with that one cliffhanger, though. We finally learned who Shane’s mom is. Shane had asked Morales to run voice recognition, and eventually, it came back with an answer. Shane’s mom is unsurprisingly Lazarus!
That’s where The Hunting Party season 1 leaves us, and it’s clear that there is far more to this story. Even without the cliffhanger involving Odell, there are a lot of questions about Lazarus, her position in the military, and her working within The Pit. How can the team continue when AG Mallory has shut them down? Well, that part’s easy with Lazarus, but can Bex and the team really trust her?
The Hunting Party is available to stream on Peacock.
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