[Warning: The following post contains MAJOR spoilers for The Hunting Party Season 1 Episode 7 “Mark Marsden.”]
What exactly was happening in Silo 12?!
The latest episode of The Hunting Party saw Bex (Melissa Roxburgh), Oliver (Nick Wechsler), and Hassani (Patrick Sabongui) investigate the silo that was breached before the blast at the Pit. There, they find the aftermath of a massacre (bodies were removed), with blood stains all over a board room of sorts — with a window into a room where the inmates appear to have been taken to be experimented on for others to witness. Meanwhile, Shane (Josh McKenzie) has been pretending to be the son of a Pit scientist, Dr. Dulles (Matt Frewer), to visit him at a senior living facility, only for his real daughter to enter the picture.
Below, showrunner Jake Coburn unpacks the Silo 12 mystery and teases how the season ends.
Oliver says that he got a call of a breach at Silo 12 before the blast. Is he telling the truth about that?
Jake Coburn: Yes.
Then at the end of this episode, Bex, Oliver, and Hassani go to Silo 12 and see the aftermath of a massacre. First of all though, Bex brings up a good point earlier in the episode about the access code not being changed. So should we be wondering why it hasn’t been and the one that Oliver got works? Could someone want them to find that? Could it be some sort of test for Oliver?
You do have good story instincts. I can’t answer the question, but I do think the questions you’re asking are good questions. … The short answer is the fact that they were able to view this as something that will be visited in future seasons.
Let’s talk about that scene at Silo 12 because there were clear signs of a massacre, bodies were collected. There’s this room where it looks like people could watch the experiments on the inmates. What did you want to do with ending the episode with showing those parts of Silo 12?
Well, we wanted to show that basically the scene of the crime, where things initially happened and what initially went wrong, and the fact that there’s this creepy boardroom where people would watch experiments on humans. It is a little dark and a little twisted.
David Astorga / NBC
Why at this point in the season?
I think because we’re moving towards giving the answers and explaining what happened. So [Episodes] 7, 8, 9, 10 are going to answer a lot of questions and hopefully in a satisfying way.
What can you say exactly about Silo 12 and what was going on there before the blast?
I can’t say much, but I will say that what was happening was not particularly ethical and it was probably needed to be kept in the shadows.
It feels like each silo had something different happening, but are there any silos where the same thing was happening? Is there another Silo 12, for example, I guess you could say, essentially running elsewhere or does that have to be made and built?
Again, you have good questions and good story instincts. I cannot answer that other than to say that it’s something we are looking forward to exploring because we’re trying to build a world that has a lot of possibilities. But I don’t want to leak any of them and I also don’t want to close off any of them.
What can you say about that drug? Because Bex finds the bag and she’s like, this is a drug that Richard Harris was getting. Is she going to get answers this season about that drug because now she has that bag?
The bag, the company, that’s all going to play a big role and especially in 10.
Hassani asks Bex if she really believes that Oliver is telling her everything he knows and she just says he’s not lying about Silo 12. So how much does Bex trust Oliver at this point in the season?
That’s a good question. I think how much does she trust? Oliver in general is sort of a central question to her. She believes there is a good person there in Oliver Odell, but at the same time she knows there’s also a darkness, and I think she’s sort of listening to her gut that what he’s telling her here is true and it feels true to her and she believes it and she’s willing to follow it. And so I think she knows he can be deceptive, but it doesn’t feel like he’s being deceptive right now. And she’s a profiler, so she’s using a lot of nonverbal signals to sort of make her decision as to whether or not to trust him, because I think she mostly does trust him, but she knows that he’s not 100 percent trustworthy.
Because it feels like she trusts him more now than she did at the beginning of the season, obviously.
I think so.
But at the same time though, she’s also learning more things that can take that trust away and make her question if she should be trusting him. So it’s like where’s the scale of that?
Yeah, no, exactly. And I think that’s something that’s going to be answered in the next few episodes. A lot of that’s going to come to a head. The question of, how does she feel about him? How does she feel about their past? Can she trust him? All of those things we are moving towards answering. And the same thing with Shane and his mysterious journey of what exactly is he doing and why, I think there’s some fun answers.
What would it take for Hassani to trust Oliver?
Not gonna happen. … I think he does trust him to an extent, but I don’t think Hassani is somebody that absolutely trusts a lot of people.
Does he absolutely trust Bex?
I think he 99.9% trusts Bex. But in his mind, he thinks Becks has a blind spot for all. So there’s part of him that may think, I trust her, but I also know that she can be subject to manipulation or to errors in judgment or an outside influence. So he’s a CIA guy. He’s not built to 100 percent trust anybody probably outside of his family.
Of the team and who they work with, does he trust Bex the most?
I mean, I don’t know whether I would say he trusts Bex more than Shane or Shane more than Bex, but those are the two people I think he really does trust quite a bit.
Shane is not Dulles’ son. Dulles’ daughter confronts him. What can you say about what the relationship actually is between Shane and Dulles and what Shane’s been doing?
You’re going to get some answers, and I think when you get the answers, you’re going to understand that Shane’s deception, while it’s a deception, is not like a malicious one. He’s not acting in a nefarious way. He’s trying to get answers. And I think you see at the end of [Episode] 7, Sarah Dulles asks him, why are you pretending to be my brother? And he gives that answer, and I think you can see in him that he’s not scared. He’s ready to talk about it with her. And as we’re going to get more information, you’re going to see that he does have a lot of conviction about finding out what he needs to find out.
Melissa told me that Episode 9 is the scariest episode of the series, involving a killer who enjoys watching people suffer and that someone from the team ends up in danger. What can you preview?
I can preview that that’s all true. Episode 7 I think is lighter, right? You know what I mean? We have a variety of tones in the first season and for an Episode 4 with Malak, it’s kind of darker, scarier. I would say [Episode] 9 is the scariest, and I think it was probably one of the hardest to make. And it was kind of the dark night before the finale. I cannot tell you who will be in danger.
What can you tease about the finale and how it sets up a second season?
I would just say we go big. We’re not saving anything. We’re trying to really deliver the best possible story we can with the most interesting and exciting twists possible. I’m excited for people to see it because I’m hoping that they will be surprised and satisfied and wanting more because we are going to learn a bunch of things in the finale that I think you would be very surprised by.
How would you describe the cliffhanger of the finale?
Heart-pounding,
Anyone’s life hanging in the balance?
I’ll just say heart-pounding.
The Hunting Party, Mondays, 10/9c, NBC
