Over its two seasons, The Hunting Party has slowly unfurled a mystery about its most shadowy character: Who is Colonel Eve Lazarus? And what does she really want with the twisted killers who were confined to the secret prison known as The Pit?
In Season 2, Episode 12, “Nancy Albright,” we finally learned exactly what Lazarus is up to. Jonathan Peck (Luke Forbes), brought in to replace Oliver Odell after his death, spilled the info to Bex (Melissa Roxburgh), Shane (Josh McKenzie), and Agent Jacob Hassani (Patrick Sabongui) after they’d learned he was the one who killed Pit escapee Noah Cyrus (Kelsey Grammer) in a convoy siege earlier this season.
Read on for a recap of what Bex and the team found out in the April 30 episode about the real plan for The Pit’s most “promising” escapees — including two killers Bex and her team captured.
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The Hunting Party‘s Colonel Lazarus was a Pit inmate — and Shane’s mother
By the end of Season 1, we’d learned a few surprising things about the character played by Kari Matchett. Born Caitlin Taylor, she herself was a teenage killer imprisoned by Dr. Henry Dulles (Matt Frewer) in The Pit until she “graduated” and began her military career at West Point and returned to The Pit to help oversee it. Graduation aside, she killed Dr. Dulles to keep him quiet about “the boy” who, we now know, is her biological son: Shane.
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After Shane learns that he was born in The Pit and Lazarus is the birth mother he never knew, he seems torn between getting to know her better and leveraging his position to find out why Lazarus was on such a mission to become the warden of The Pit.
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The truth came out at the end of “Nancy Albright,” after the titular killer (Jamie Chung) was caught by the team.
Colonel Lazarus wants to turn The Pit’s killers into weapons: “She’s building an army”
Shane tells a captive Peck that whatever good intentions Lazarus may have had, “she’s now just acting in her own self interest.” He goes on to tell Peck that Lazarus was “an experiment. She was an inmate from The Pit released to the military for god knows what reason.”
While Shane presumed this would be news to Peck, that might not be the case. “Whatever you think you know, believe me, it’s only the half of it,” Peck tells the team. “You think because you’ve done a little snooping, you know something? You have no idea what you’re into.”
Peck confirmed that he was part of the team Colonel Lazarus ordered to take down Noah Cyrus’s convoy “so that she could assume control.” Then he drops a bomb: “She’s collecting certain inmates in another location […] She has a lab, one that no one knows about. She’s continuing the work that was done in The Pit.”
He adds that Lazarus is using paramilitary as guards in this new project. “What project? What is she continuing?” Bex asks.
Peck tells them that Lazarus is continuing the graduate program. It turns out it was all part of a bigger plan to weaponize The Pit’s killers and turn them into “controllable assets for field deployment.”
While Lazarus was the first graduate, “now, she’s building an army,” Peck continues. As we see Lazarus move through this undisclosed location, it’s clear at least two killers are in captivity there: Doctor Ezekiel Malak (Kevin Corrigan) and Amanda Weiss (Liz Gillies).
Stream “Nancy Albright” on Peacock starting May 1, and don’t miss The Hunting Party‘s Season 2 finale with guest star John Corbett on May 7 at 10/9 on NBC, streaming next-day on Peacock!
