‘The Hunting Party’ Bosses and Melissa Roxburgh Explain Oliver’s Death

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Hunting Party Season 2 premiere “Ron Simms.”]

The Hunting Party Season 2 premiere on Thursday, January 8, has two loose threads to address: Oliver Odell’s (Nick Wechsler) fate and getting the team — Rebecca “Bex” Henderson (Melissa Roxburgh), Jacob Hassani (Patrick Sabongui), Shane Florence (Josh McKenzie), and Jennifer Morales (Sara Garcia) — back up and running after Mallory (Zabryna Guevara) disbanded it. It does just that rather quickly.

First of all, Oliver does die. And Bex forces Mallory’s hand by threatening to go public about The Pit, the top-secret prison from which serial killers who were supposed to be dead escaped to kick off the series. The team’s successful in stopping their first target after officially being back at it, Ron Simms (Eric McCormack, with his son Finnigan McCormack as the character in flashbacks). But soon after, they find out that Mallory is relieved of her command and, instead, Lazarus (Kari Matchett), who is also Shane’s mother (though he doesn’t know it) and has “graduated” from The Pit program, is now in charge.

Below, in separate interviews, Melissa Roxburgh and executive producers JJ Bailey and Jake Coburn break down Oliver’s death, Lazarus now in charge, and what’s to come.

Oliver’s dead. Was that something you knew about when you filmed the Season 1 finale?

Melissa Roxburgh: No. No. So they wrote that, and that we actually didn’t get to read that until the last minute, which sucked. But then it’s left on a cliffhanger, so I’m like, OK, maybe there’s hope that he’s not dead. Because I think the Bex-Odell storyline, I feel like it needed something; it needed closure. So I was really hoping. But you know what? It’s a great plot twist, I think, that coming into Season 2 and finding out that the cliffhanger, it went off the edge, audiences will be more inclined to tune in because I think that they weren’t expecting that.

David Astorga/NBC

Why kill off Oliver, and when was that decision made?

JJ Bailey: Honestly, it’s kind of a loaded question. We wrestled with it for so long. I think ultimately there’s several schools of thought, but one thing that we sort of faced was creatively, it was hard to involve him in the field and to find stories that felt like it really serviced what we wanted to do with the character and with Bex. And honestly, I think there was a part of us that felt like we had such great chemistry out in the field with the three of them, that it felt on one hand, creatively very limiting for the Oliver story. And then when we realized we were going to shut down the team in Season 1 and have to restart things and have Bex fight for it, it felt like his death was going to be the right thing to motivate Bex to come back both feet in and really drive her forward.

Jake Coburn: I would say that I think the character, he was so intricately tied to her past, and at a certain point, we processed a lot of that story and emotion. And it felt like going forward, we were more looking in terms of the characters that were going to be part of her future story more and felt like we’d squeezed all the juice from the relationship that we could.

What are we going to see Bex’s grief this season? Because she just admitted in the finale that she thinks about Oliver and Sam, so she’s mourning that, too.

Roxburgh: I know. Bex is a funny one. I feel like, because of everything she’s been through, she’s really good at putting the walls up and forging forward with her job. And so I think we will see her crack. It depends what she turns that into, though. I think there’s a version of her that lets it unravel her, and then there’s a version of her that makes it strengthen her towards catching these guys and bringing them to justice.

Coburn: I think there are two ways to look at it. There’s an element of grief, but I think we also feel like there’s a real strong element of determination that we have jokingly called it “woman on fire,” that there’s an element of her that just goes into badass Rambo mode because she’s going to honor her promise to him. And so our show is such an action-oriented, leaning forward, keep moving show that while there is sadness, we’re not going to dwell in grief as much as we are going to motivate hard-charging badass Bex.

Bailey: Yeah, I’m often reminded — One of my friends has this quote that I love, and there’s the five stages of grief, right? His quote is that there’s actually a sixth, and it’s legacy. And it’s what do you do with after you’ve come to peace with this? How do you live forward in the legacy of what you’ve lost? And I think that’s a little bit of what Bex is doing. During the period of time off camera, I think she’s dealt with her grief in such a way as where she can live on in Odell’s legacy now by pushing forward and being motivated and being that sort of woman on fire for the season.

Ralph Bavaro/NBC

Bex says what she has to to force Mallory’s hand to get the team back up. And then Lazarus walks in at the end. Does Bex regret what she did at all or anything about the way she went about it after that? Is she questioning, did I make the right call there?

Roxburgh: I don’t think she’s questioning, did I make the right call? Because I think the reason that she did that was because the team got screwed over. The team got fired, for lack of a better term, and she still fully believes in the job and what they’re doing. And so the fact that they were sidelined due to bureaucracy and politics and all that, which is its own separate storyline because it’s not just normal politics, we’re dealing with top secret storylines here. So I don’t think she regrets it. I think that she is realizing how high up some of this goes and how out of her hands some of it is. But the problem with her is that that just makes her want to fight it all more. So, nothing really stops her.

Yeah, but Lazarus is such a wildcard.

Roxburgh: Lazarus is such a wildcard. And the really fun thing for Season 2 is that we get to see that storyline more and more and more. And I think that they’ve kind of teased some of how that interacts with the team specifically in Season 1. And so going into Season 2, we see it all come to a head.

How is Lazus going to be running things compared to what we saw in Season 1?

Bailey: Good question. I mean, she’s certainly more hands-on than Mallory was as far as a presence in the command center. Something you’ll see over the course of the season is she’s gaming for more and more, and we’ll see ultimately that she’s doing this for a very specific purpose.

Coburn: And it’s the difference between somebody who was — she came out of The Pit, and so her perspective on everything is much more clouded and subjective than Mallory’s. Mallory’s a real outsider, a government official, whereas Lazarus is an alumni.

Bailey: And allows for her to have more intimate knowledge of some of the cases and some of the things that were going on as our team is trying to unfold a mystery. Whereas Mallory’s read some files, but Lazarus has been boots on the ground inside The Pit, seeing what was being done. So it offers a different perspective.

But Shane doesn’t know that’s his mom. What are those interactions like as he’s still in the dark?

Bailey: Hopefully loaded, hopefully loaded. That’s what we’re going for is that dramatic irony that I think audiences love. I know I love it when I watch a show like that. Well, I know and I’m sort of like, “What are you guys going to realize this? Is this the moment?” Or you hear something, a character says a line and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, if you only knew.” We’re hoping that that’s how people feel watching those scenes.

And what’s Bex and Lazarus’ dynamic like this season? Because we got a tiny bit of it last season, but now, this is every day.

Coburn: It’s a strained relationship. And I think the fact is, as you’ll come to see, they both have a very strong emotional connection — very different emotional connection, but very strong connections to Shane, and there’s a tension that’s going to come because of that.

Will Mallory be back at all?

Bailey: Yeah.

Coburn: Things get messy.

Bailey: Yeah, that’s a good way to put it.

As we learned in this episode, Mallory brought Morales in to be her eyes and ears. Now that Mallory’s gone, though, what does that mean for Morales, and how is she going to be handling continuing to keep that secret from the team? Because she is growing closer and closer to them.

Bailey: Yeah. I think something we love about the character of Morales is — I think we described her in Season 1 as a spark of light in this sort of dark world. I think she is an honest person. I think she works hard, but she’s sort of put in a bad situation by the AG. And so I don’t think she’s sitting here thinking, “Oh, I get to keep secrets from the team and I get to report it.” I think she feels like she’s backed into a corner and we’ll watch her get out of that corner.

Is that the same thing when it comes to she’s keeping the hit on the voice recognition from Shane?

Bailey: Yeah. She’s sort of inadvertently got these secrets she doesn’t want to have.

Could we see Ron again? Because both Eric and Finnigan? So good and so chilling.

Coburn: Yeah. Finnigan got his SAG card doing this role, so it’s pretty scary to think that this is how talented he is out of the gate, and just the fact that he’s all over the promos. It’s awesome. And so he just popped so much, and I think it was so special to be able to have — We didn’t go into it with that plan, but in the evolution of the role with Eric to be like, “Well, is this?” And he would talk about his son, who’s an actor, and we were sort of like, “Well…” We sort of danced around it until we were finally like, “Would he be interested?” And I think from a behind-the-scenes perspective, it was one of the most exciting and emotional parts of that episode for us was giving a father and a son a chance to do this really sweet thing of working together, even though the circumstances and the story they’re telling is horrifying.

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I would love to see Bex and Ron interacting again after what we got.

Bailey: Yeah. Look, we talk a lot about, can we bring this person back and bring that person back? And it’s always a fun idea and I’m hoping that we can find chances to do it. It’s always just sort of a logistical thing.

Coburn: It’s not for lack of ideas. As most network television shows, we have a certain amount of money and budgets. And if we could only fly in everyone we wanted to fly in.

Bailey: And I will say, though, Eric and Finnigan, too, we’re just the absolute dreams to work with. I mean, from being on set with Eric, we’re like, it’s Eric McCormick, he’s done a million hours of television. He’s such a pro. He comes on, he nails it right away, but then also between scenes, he’s hanging out with the extras and chumming it up with our cast. It felt like somebody coming onto our set who felt like a part of our show immediately, and it was such a great way to start this season.

Bex forced Mallory’s hand by threatening to go public about The Pit. What are the conversations you’ve had about ever actually revealing the truth about these serial killers to the world and what that would mean for the team and also for your show in general?

Coburn:, I think going public is probably something that won’t happen until we’re hopefully six or seven or eight seasons in because we recognize that if the world knew this was going on, they probably would send more than just three people to go… You know what I mean? So I think we’re going to take our time with how this information gets out.

Bailey: I do think it’s a fun thing to dangle, though, because one of those things we’re like we’ve talked about, I mean, there’s so many conspiracy theories out there, and just our show sort of plays in that realm. So there’s a possibility we’ve talked about of somebody spilling the beans, but then somebody having to poison the water a little bit more to confuse people, like, oh yeah, the word got out there, but nobody believes it because it’s also said in the same sentence as UFOs or whatever.

Coburn: Yeah, exactly. If you went home and there was an alien in your apartment, it would be very hard to convince people that that was actually happening because everyone would be like, “Oh, yeah, aha, there’s an alien in your apartment.” We live, and we are so engrossed and surrounded with conspiracy theories that if there was a story about a top-secret prison that has the worst serial killers in the world, people would probably be like, uh-huh, OK.

Bailey: Either that or they’d be like, “Yeah, of course, there is.”

Coburn: Yeah, I thought I read about it on Reddit.

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