‘The Hunting Party’ Bosses Reveal Someone Will Die in Season 2 Finale

Just when you thought the serial killers in this thrilling drama couldn’t get any more disturbing, The Hunting Party steps it up in the harrowing penultimate episode, airing April 30, and the finale on May 7.

Coming off the revelation of Peck’s (Luke Forbes) involvement in Noah Cyrus‘ (Kelsey Grammer) transport being stopped (and the cult leader’s death), ex-FBI profiler Rebecca “Bex” Henderson (Melissa Roxburgh), along with her team — the CIA’s Jacob Hassani (Patrick Sabongui), prison guard Shane Florence (Josh McKenzie), and intel officer Jennifer Morales (Sara Garcia) — track down Nancy Albright (guest star Jamie Chung), an addict looking for a new way to get high. Then, John Corbett is the killer guest in the season-ender, playing serial poisoner Xander Wax, who contaminates the simple things that people touch every day, like elevator buttons, doorknobs and even sugar packets. Terrifying.

Below, executive producers JJ Bailey and Jake Coburn preview the final two episodes of Season 2. (The series has yet to be renewed for Season 3.)

Nancy Albright is chasing a new type of high. What can you say about that?

JJ Bailey: It’s based on a real thing, but we take it to the ultimate extreme. How do we explain this, Jake?

Jake Coburn: Pretty much everyone over a certain age at Universal Television was like, I had to Google this. [Laughs] It is a twisted and shocking new form of drug use. Something people have not seen before on TV. … Jamie Chung is so much fun.

Bailey: She’s so fun. So alive.

Coburn: She has electricity running through the whole episode, and she’s just amazing.

Bailey: It’s a different kind of killer for us, though. I think to Jake’s point, this energy she brought, I think, one, she’s playing an addict in recovery, but I think she’s also got this sort of natural just energy to her and we haven’t really seen a killer alive in that way, which honestly made the role even more twisted and fun. So, yeah, it’s very exciting for us.

Ralph Bavaro/NBC

When you said addict in recovery, I started thinking the Pit must be the worst place to go through withdrawal.

Bailey: Well, we’ll see some weird stuff they did to her down there.

What can you say about how the search for her is going to challenge the team and what we’re going to see from their investigation?

Bailey: Hassani gives voice to something that the Pit did to Nancy when she was down there, and he’s like, is this actually a good thing that the Pit was doing? They’re working on something very positive. And then obviously, it gets completely twisted through the mind of a serial killer once she’s out of the Pit and now she’s doing this horrible thing. So they have to reckon with that piece of the Pit of, is there ever an eventual good outcome for what was done down there or is it always going to be like this where it gets twisted and crazed? But then also I think our team’s wrestling with somebody doing something pretty horrible. I think they all have a moment where they voice their frustration with how the Pit has influenced this killer into what she’s doing now. So I think that sort of struggle with what could have been if the Pit was successful before all this happened versus what they’re seeing out in the world now is an interesting push-pull.

Coburn: I would agree. Not all of our cases have interesting biomedical ethical questions to them. Sometimes it’s just crazy people doing crazy torture-y stuff, but we had a lot of really interesting discussions on this one. It was a chance to look at some of the ethical and emotional questions surrounding drug addiction, recovery, sponsorship, all these different things. And we do it in our own twisted Hunting Party way, but I think we’re both really happy with the episode.

The logline for the penultimate also teases that back at the command center, the team is also forced to come to terms with new revelations about once trusted individuals. What can you preview about that and what that’s going to mean for all the dynamics between the main characters?

Bailey: Peck obviously knows a lot more than he’s let on. He’s involved in more than he’s told our team. Morales and Peck have sort of started a little romantic thing, and when these revelations come out, she’s going to be forced to reconcile with that. But I think ultimately what it does, as we go penultimate to our finale, in my view at least, there’s a couple shots that we got in Episode 12 and 13 where it makes it very clear that while there’s a betrayal going on, the rest of the characters get very galvanized. “We are on the same page, this is a betrayal, but we’re here to move forward.”

There’s a really cool dynamic that emerges with the whole team being involved in something as opposed to, oftentimes we find ourselves in this sort of situation where we siphon off two characters and we sort of silo their stories or they know something about this person. And in these final moments of the season, we see our whole team together dealing with this, which is really fun because you got six characters in there struggling with the same thing, which, for me at least, was really satisfying to see them all in one place dealing with the serialized stuff as opposed to, oftentimes it’s just Bex, Shane, and Hassani doing the serialized stuff, and Morales and the others are back in the command center, but this was putting everybody in one room to talk about it. It’s just fun.

What else can you tease about how the penultimate episode is going to be teeing up the finale?

Coburn: There are some killers coming back. You’ll get to see Amanda Weiss, Liz Gillies. You’ll get to see Dr. Malak, Kevin Corrigan. Those are two really fun killers that we’re excited to have as part of our finale. You’re just going to get the sense that everything, s**t’s about to go down.

Bailey: Yeah, I was going to say Jake worked really hard to find a way to bring these people back. And I will say Kevin and Liz were both awesome and excited to return to this world and play these characters again. But Jake really made this happen. And I’m so happy he did because I feel like we had a couple standout episodes. I wish we could have had more of our killers back, but these were two that we just enjoyed working with and I think fans of the show really enjoyed. And to put them back in the world of our show, I think, it’s going to be really fun for the audience.

So are we going to the black site in the finale?

Bailey: I don’t know, maybe. We’re going somewhere.

Ralph Bavaro/NBC

Also looking at the finale, you have John Corbett guest starring as serial poisoner Xander Wax. What can you preview about his unpredictable methods?

Coburn: When you learn about his methods, they just paralyze you with fear because he’s a master at putting these very rare, very toxic chemicals and poisons on things that you touch every day, like elevator buttons and doorknobs and sugar packets. And it’s really uncomfortable.

Bailey: We took a lead from — there was a case in the ’80s, it was the Tylenol killer case where at any point you open a bottle of Tylenol now, there’s 15 layers of packaging and security. It’s because they used to not have that and this guy poisoned a bunch of bottles of Tylenol and then just put them out in the shelves, didn’t know when someone was going to purchase that bottle of Tylenol. And eventually people were dying from this and they didn’t know what bottles were poisoned or where. Guy was never caught. But we took that idea and we wanted to see this character who enjoyed setting the trap and not knowing who he was going to catch or when, and that sadistic nature of just the random chance and what led you to that moment to pick that thing that he put this poison on. And I think John did a great job of taking that, changing it from his character pre-Pit to his character post-Pit. He feels like two sort of different characters, but he adds this little bit of swagger to it that I think is pretty fun.

Coburn: The opening kill of the Episode 213. I guarantee you, no one has ever done this on TV before. It’s very, very funny and very, very twisted.

So, perfect for The Hunting Party. We saw how the team ended up in danger because of last finale’s killer. We saw what happened to Oliver (Nick Wechsler). Who from the team is in danger this finale?

Bailey: Pretty much everybody. I will say, I think we up the stakes quite a bit in that regard for this. And we get to have an extended fight sequence in a way that we don’t typically do on our show that I think is going to be really exciting and fresh for people to see. But yeah, I think we take the idea of one of our characters being in danger at the end and we’re like, well, what’s more than one? Let’s go bigger. And we put a lot of our characters in danger at the end.

Who’s the fight sequence between?

Coburn: Everybody.

Bailey: Yeah, it’s a big one.

Will everyone survive the finale?

Coburn: No.

Will we know in the finale who dies?

Both: Yes.

Xander’s description also teases that he’s caught the particular interest of Colonel Lazarus (Kari Matchett) and will push our team to discover the inner workings of her mysterious plans. What can you say about that?

Bailey: We’ve sort of long teased out that Lazarus is this graduate, whatever that means. I think we tease out exactly what that program entailed and what it was aimed at. We’ll learn that Lazarus has really taken over that program and is attempting to pick up the pieces post explosion at the Pit and run with her own version of it. And I think pretty early in the season, we find out, or at least we’re theorizing, that she took over inmate transport from Hassani. She did this false flag attack on the convoy and all this. We start to figure out why she’s making those moves. And in the final episode, we see why and where she’s doing all this stuff. Ultimately the goal, and I think we’re successful in this, is that we answer a lot of those questions, but leave you with new exciting questions that are going to open the world up a little bit more for a potential Season 3.

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What else can you preview, though, about the team — specifically Shane and Bex, when it comes to Lazarus and the finale?

Coburn: Shane and Bex’s relationship and their connection is going to be very challenged by what’s going on and Shane’s journey for the truth.

Bailey: I think it’s clear she’s the Big Bad of the season, and you can imagine when that all comes to a head, the type of things that Shane and Bex are going to have to deal with on the other side of that.

The finale logline says things back at the command center come to a head, pushing the team further than they’ve ever been before. Is that what you were talking about earlier with everyone together?

Bailey: Yeah, I think everyone together, everyone dealing with the same problem. And then also, like we said, we put a lot of our characters in danger towards the end of the episode and how they have to work together to get out of this and putting them in the lion’s den, so to speak.

So you said we’ll know who dies, but last season did end with Oliver dying and his fate unknown. So what can you tease about how this season ends? What can you say about the cliffhanger?

Bailey: The cliffhanger out of this one is more sending the team in a new direction as opposed to Season 1 was, “Are we losing this person? Are we not? And what’s going to happen out of that?” And … hopefully the episode and season feels like it sort of resolves, and then we open things back up at the very end, sending our team in a new direction.

Coburn: There won’t be a question about whether or not someone is going to survive. You’re going to know everybody’s fate in a more clear way than at the end of Season 1, but the dynamic of the show and the world of the show is going to shift a little.

It’s more like a “What’s next?” type of question.

Bailey: Yeah.

Is there anything else you can tease about these last two episodes of the season?

Bailey: I think for me, the thing that’s exciting is finally getting to talk about some of these serialized mysteries in a much more open way and getting our characters face-to-face with the Big Bad so that we can get answers to some of these things, but then seeing how it’s going to platform a whole other mystery and also, like we said, send our characters off in a new direction, which is fun.

Coburn: I think what’s really fun for me with [Episodes] 12 and 13 is that we have two villains, we have Jamie Chung and we have Corbett, and they’re both TV stars playing so far against any type that you have seen them before. John Corbett is terrifying as this poisoner, and Jamie Chung is terrifying as this killer. So it’s really fun to see the heightened extreme world of our show and to see these actors you love and who are so talented, but they’re playing roles like you’ve never seen before.

You guys are so good with that — this season, starting with Eric McCormack, and then Josh Dallas was so chilling.

Bailey: He was so fun and he was so game for anything. I’m a massive fan of his. I mean, he was so kind and willing to just dive into this weird world and obviously was super excited to work with Melissa again. But yeah, I think one of the things about our show that’s really fun is because we play our killer sort of card up, who the bad guy is from the start, it gives the killer a little more screen time and allows the opportunity for these actors who maybe haven’t been given this sort of space to play in to come really dive in and go deep with something that’s against type, which we love seeing. And so far they’ve enjoyed it.

The Hunting Party, Thursdays, 10/9c, NBC