[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Hunting Party Season 1 Episode 2 “Clayton Jessup.”]
On The Hunting Party, Bex (Melissa Roxburgh) may just be starting out catching the serial killers who escaped the Pit — a prison full of inmates who were supposedly sentenced to death — but she got started very early with her first one at only age 15. And that serial killer returns in the second episode of the NBC drama.
Eli Johnson (Mark Moses) was arrested for the murders of 12 girls, and now that she knows about the existence of the Pit, Bex worries that he was one of them. Her former mentor and the prison’s warden, Oliver (Nick Wechsler), assures her he wasn’t (the world knows he’s alive, he reminds her) and promises to look into his location. But how much can she trust Oliver when it comes to that? Their relationship is, after all, strained because back when they were partners, he burned a man alive to get him to give up the location of a young girl he’d taken (and whom Bex adopted).
As we learn, when Bex opens up to one of her new teammates, Pit guard Shane (Josh McKenzie), Eli was her best friend’s father and she caught him when she slept over one night. She ran when Eli caught her, and when the time the cops got to the house, he killed his daughter in the standoff.
Near the end of the episode, Oliver has Eli transferred to the team’s base, and Bex comes face-to-face with him. He wonders if she’d still be an agent if they knew the truth: Bex had taken his daughter into his garage that night and she ran and left her friend behind.
David Astorga / NBC
Roxburgh enjoyed filming that Bex-Eli scene. “Mark Moses is really good at what he does, so going into the scene, I didn’t try to plan too much,” she tells TV Insider. “I just wanted to see what he did. He’s the reason Bex does what she does on top of the fact that her dad was a sheriff. He was the first serial killer that she encountered and he killed her best friend. Every time she goes into a case, every time she’s hunting a killer, it’s at the back of her mind that it’s almost like a way to redeem the past. It’s a way to fix what she couldn’t fix when she was 15. Mark Moses is so intense, and I think for Bex, she’s an adult now and she’s gone through life and she’s seen other serial killers, but he reverts her back to a 15-year-old. As much as she’s trying to be tough, there’s this child inside of her that is scared still.”
She reveals that there were plans to possibly bring him back, “but then as shows go, things got busy.” She does hope to see him again in a second season, should they get one.
That conversation with Eli also adds another layer to the already complicated dynamic for Bex and Oliver. The serial killer reveals that Oliver knew the aforementioned truth. Yes, he’s been covering for her all this time after interviewing Eli for Bex’s security clearance when she was at Quantico; lying to the police would have gotten her disqualified from the bureau, and as Oliver explains to her, he knew the kind of agent she’d make some day.
Taking that into account along with their history and what Oliver had done to that man, Bex is “incredibly torn” about him, says Roxburgh. “She had real feelings for him at one point, and they were partners for a long time. She looked up to him. He taught her a lot of what she knows now. I think she wrote him off when he murdered someone. But now that they’re back in each other’s lives working together, and she finds out that he hasn’t only been bad, he stood up for her and he’s currently standing up for her, I think it creates this push-pull of, can she trust him? Can she let him back in? We see a lot of that in Season 1.”
Executive producer JJ Bailey echoes that. “She worked with him very closely before the events [shown] in the [series premiere]. He was a little bit like a mentor figure in the Behavioral Analysis Unit in the FBI, and as they got closer and closer, I think she really gained a lot of respect for him. And then seeing what happened, obviously this terrible choice that he made, and it obviously had huge ripple effects for her career, for his career, I think there’s a side that understands it,” he says.
“There’s that great quote — you can only stare into the darkness so long before the darkness stares back or touches you back. I think that’s sort of what happened to Oliver. And I think Bex can recognize that while not approving of it obviously, and him now back in her life, I think she recognizes who he is on a deeper level,” he continues. “I think [there’s] that sort of push and pull of wanting to trust him, but knowing what he’s capable of and having seen it sort of firsthand and also realizing it’s been several years since they’ve seen each other and who knows what kind of journey he’s been on since then, recognizing that that can change a person. She wants to trust him. She wants that old relationship that she had with him to be a real thing and to maybe find their way back to that, but she can’t deny what she’s seeing, and I think it makes that internal struggle for her very apparent.”
Bex may not be sure about Oliver, but she sure seems to feel like she can trust Shane since she talks to him about Eli. “I don’t know” why she does, Roxburgh admits. “I chalk it up to she’s a great profiler. She’s good at reading people. She knows when someone’s inherently good or inherently bad. And I think Shane, played by Josh McKenzie, does a really good job of coming across very calm, cool, collected, very sweet, very earnest. We find out that Shane has a lot of secrets down the road, but upfront, I think that he is someone that she can lean on and trust. It seems like he doesn’t have as much of a hat in the race as everyone else. And I think because of that, she knows that he’s a safe place.”
What’s your take on Oliver so far? Do you trust Shane? Let us know in the comments section below.
The Hunting Party, Mondays, 10/9c, NBC