[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Hunting Party Season 1 Episode 3 “Lowe.”]
There’s a new player in the mystery of the Pit, the top-secret prison that was home to serial killers the world thought had been executed (and on whom experiments were being conducted) until an explosion that may or may not have been deliberate to orchestrate their escape. The end of The Hunting Party‘s latest episode makes the prison warden, Oliver Odell (Nick Wechsler), look as guilty as Jacob Hassani (Patrick Sabongui) thinks he is.
Bex Henderson (Melissa Roxburgh), an FBI profiler and Oliver’s former partner, is working alongside Jacob (who’s CIA) and Pit guard Shane Florence (Josh McKenzie) to track down the escaped killers. She’s also trying to get answers about what was happening down in the Pit and what led to the escape; Oliver told her he thinks someone wanted the killers back out in the world. However, Jacob is so sure that Oliver knew about the explosion before it happened and shows Bex security footage of the warden receiving a call from a burner phone minutes before the blast, disabling the server’s firewall, transferring thousands of classified files to a flash drive, and heading for the exit. But Bex argues that she knows Oliver and there’s no way he’s involved. Jacob points out that no one knows what he was up to in the two years between leaving the FBI (after he burned a man alive to save a young girl, whom Bex then adopted) and started at the Pit.
“Bex knows that Oliver’s got some sneaky corners, so I think she leaves room for the fact that he might be doing some shady stuff, but she really does want to believe that there’s a good guy there,” Roxburgh tells TV Insider. “There was a version of Oliver that she knew that was good and that’s why she fell in love with him, but then he murdered someone, and so she’s constantly in that in-between of, I want to believe he’s a good guy, but is he really?”
David Astorga/NBC
Sabongui does acknowledge there may be “a fair bit of projection on Hassani’s part. I mean, Odell is so obviously guilty, but I think I really do appreciate Bex’s faith in humanity. But when you’re an operative the way Hassani is, deception is built into it. It’s part of the training. And so it’s easy for me to project that onto Odell and go, well, he’s obviously engaged in deception because this is what we do. There should be no surprise there. So I just don’t trust the guy.”
What they don’t know is that Oliver brings the aforementioned flash drive to a mysterious woman (Kari Matchett) at the end of the episode. He tells her people are asking questions, and she says she’ll worry about that and be in touch.
“She plays a major role in the series sort of behind the scenes,” teases executive producer JJ Bailey. “She comes up several times. She sort of starts off as a little bit like the deep throat character who has information that she’s sharing in the shadows, and we’ll come to find that she’s much more involved in maybe sort of pulling some strings here and there, maybe steering our team in certain directions that she wants them to go, maybe sharing a little bit of the truth, maybe lying. She has major implications for the season as we get to the end.”
Adds executive producer Jake Coburn, “She’s in many ways the face of the military. One of the cool things about the Pit is it’s never really clear who is in charge and who’s running it. It’s on a military base, but the CIA was very involved, and then there were doctors kind of calling the shots, but there were corporations sort of leading it. We had a joke that we would say between each other about how the person ultimately in charge of the Pit is the president of the United States, but unfortunately, the president doesn’t know about the Pit. That’s the way the Pit functions. It’s one of those kind of shadowy things.”
But we can’t help but wonder about Oliver since he was the one to tell the attorney general to bring Bex in in the first place. If he is guilty, he has to know that she would be able to suss it out, right? Bailey confirms they’re leaning into that.
“If you’re trying to hide something and you bring somebody in who knows you super well, somebody who you say is the best of the best, are you inviting them to look a little too close or could that possibly mean that you’re not as guilty or dirty as maybe you look and you’re hoping that they’ll be able to help you prove that?” he wonders. It’s something that Bex has to consider: “Either he brought me in because he knows I’m going to find the truth and he wants me to find the truth because he’s not guilty, or he brought me in because he knows me and maybe he thinks he can manipulate me because we have this past relationship.”
Coburn calls Oliver Bex’s “Achilles’ heel” in some ways. “She’s this incredibly gifted profiler who can see through everything, and yet she consistently has trouble reading him and assessing what to make of him and why he did certain things,” he explains. “Is he a bad guy who also has a good side, or is he a good guy who did some bad things? I think he’s, at his core, a good guy who made a lot of bad choices and who’s lost his way in a lot of ways. That’s the way she sort of sees him, too: Is there a good person and a good life in there that I can still engage with or help strengthen?”
What’s your take on Oliver? Let us know in the comments section below.
The Hunting Party, Mondays, 10/9c, NBC
