[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Hunting Party Season 1 Episode 4 “Doctor Ezekiel Malak.”]
The serial killer the team pursues in The Hunting Party Episode 4 does to his victims what Melissa Roxburgh considers, so far, to be the darkest moment of the show.
Bex (Roxburgh), Jacob (Patrick Sabongui), and Shane (Josh McKenzie) track down Dr. Malak, the latest escapee from the Pit (the top-secret prison housing and doing experiments on the worst serial killers the world thought had been sentenced to death). As they discover, he’s been killing his victims only to bring them back to ask them about the moment of clarity they experienced at the time of death (which he says he did). He captures Bex and does the same to her before she’s able to free herself and the others come to her aid. But what exactly did Bex see? Was she being truthful when she said she saw Oliver Odell (Nick Wechsler), her former partner, and Sam, her daughter whom she adopted after saving her from a killer?
“Everyone sees something,” Roxburgh tells TV Insider. “What she saw, we’re not sure. Was it just Sam? Was it Oliver and Sam? Was it her dad? Was it Eli Johnson [Mark Moses]? Who knows? My guess as Melissa is that she saw Oliver and she was being honest.” She adds that it will come up again, in the finale.
This comes as Bex is trying so hard to keep things strictly professional with Oliver, who left the FBI after he burned a man alive to find Sam. He brings her a cupcake for her birthday. We know that they used to mean a lot to each other, but she says that they’ve moved on. Is there a future for the two of them?
David Astorga / NBC
“Anything’s possible,” says Roxburgh. “You forgive people for a variety of things, but I think it will eventually become a love triangle of, does she go back to the past and someone that she felt very deeply for despite what he did, or does she move forward and lean on someone that she can trust a little bit more and doesn’t have the tainted past that they do?” She previously teased a potential triangle with Oliver and Shane.
Speaking of Shane, we find out why he’s been keeping that photo of the doctors at the Pit from the others: One of them is his father, in a senior living memory care facility. “Shane’s personal search is very connected to his understanding of himself and family and all of the mysteries that surround him,” teases executive producer Jake Coburn.
Elsewhere in the episode, Jacob continues to think that Oliver is guilty of knowing about the explosion that took out the Pit and led to the escapes in the moments before; there’s video of him getting a phone call, taking classified information off a server, and leaving. After he receives another call from that mysterious burner, Jacob asks Bex to plug a device into his phone so they can get the GPS data off it. She’s reluctant, but she does ultimately do it when Oliver checks on her at the hospital after her experience with Malak.
For Bex, it’s about needing to know and wanting to prove Jacob wrong. “It happens in an episode where she dies, and so I think that there’s a lot of thinking that she’s doing on her own and introspection about the past and how she actually feels,” explains Roxburgh. “And so I think it’s one part, she wants to prove Jacob wrong. She actually does love Oliver in whatever capacity it’s at now. And then there’s another part of her that’s probably maybe trying to prove to herself, no, he is a bad guy and this is why I can’t trust him, and if I get this information off of the phone, then I’m justified in walking away.”
Bex and Jacob then check out the storage facility to which Oliver drove after receiving that call. Inside, Bex finds a box with stuff about and from Sam, including a photo of her at graduation and a birthday card for Oliver with “wish you were here.” That is a complete shock to Bex, who had no idea the two were in communication at all.
“It’s weird,” says Roxburgh, “because when she adopted Sam, it was the same time that he killed and burned the guy alive. And so for him to impose himself into her daughter’s life, it just feels strange. They kind of explain it, but me as Melissa, I still feel like it’s weird. I wouldn’t trust him.”
Coburn and fellow executive producer JJ Bailey tease that Episode 5 will really dive into the aftermath of that.
“She wrestles with that a lot because obviously suddenly Odell overlaps into her personal life in a way he hadn’t before, and she realizes her daughter was keeping a secret too, not just Odell,” notes Bailey. “She sort of reflects on who Odell is and why would he be keeping this a secret. The Sam storyline and her connection with Odell just really helps us shine another light onto a different side of Odell and Bex and Odell’s relationship, which is fun and messy and complicated.”
Adds Coburn of the scene at the end of Episode 5 in which they talk about it, “There’s some parts of the equation that we don’t realize yet, and I think it’s a pretty emotional scene between the two of them. I was working with our composer, Dan Romer, just to maximize that effect. He’s so great.”
Also in Oliver’s storage unit are blueprints of the Pit and coordinates to five other locations. “We’re going to find out that the Pit is one piece in a much larger puzzle, and we can tease that we’re going to get to see some other things,” says Bailey. Coburn teases, “We’re going to focus a lot on one of the other silos.”
While Jacob may know more than Bex about the Pit and what’s been going on, Sabongui says those alternate sites are a surprise to his character. “It’s par for the course for somebody in Hassani’s line of work that I am privy to a bunch of secrets, but I know there’s official classifications above mine and there’s official information that I do not have,” he says. “Hassani hadn’t predicted [those other sites]. But I don’t think it’s hard for him to accept that there’s a bunch of stuff that he doesn’t know about.”
From Roxburgh’s perspective, Bex knows that this doesn’t look good when it comes to how involved Oliver may or may not be. Factor in her also seeing that box of stuff about her daughter, “I don’t think it’s putting a great taste in her mouth. So when they come across the blueprints on top of that, [in] the next episode, there is some definite tension.”
What do you think of the latest twists on the NBC drama? Let us know in the comments section below.
The Hunting Party, Mondays, 10/9c, NBC
This story originally appeared on TV Insider
