Will ‘The Hunting Party’ Return for Season 2? Is [Spoiler] Dead? EPs Break Down Finale (Exclusive)

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Hunting Party Season 1 finale “Jenna Wells.”]

The Hunting Party fans are going to need a second season after that wild finale! (The NBC drama has yet to be renewed.)

The Season 1 finale ended with Oliver (Nick Wechsler) seemingly dying in Bex’s (Melissa Roxburgh) arms, the reveal that Shane’s (Josh McKenzie) mother is a former inmate, Colonel Lazarus (Kari Matchett), who graduated, Hassani (Patrick Sabongui) shot and hospitalized (and the reveal his wife is dead), and some answers about what was happening in the Pit (some of the inmates were given a drug that served as an empathy modulator). Below, executive producers JJ Bailey and Jake Coburn break down the finale and tease what could be coming in a second season.

Is Oliver dead?

JJ Bailey: You have to wait until Season 2 to get the answer.

What can you say about his fate?

Bailey: The moment that you see at the end of the season is going to be hugely motivating for Bex and for the rest of the team.

Jake Coburn: We like keeping our audience in a place of wanting to continue to be a part of this story. That’s the ultimate goal as storytellers, is to take people on a great ride and then hopefully leave them wanting more. We have a very clear idea for where this story continues, but we’ve got to keep it bottled up for now.

James Dittiger / NBC

Would the Season 2 premiere pick up right from that moment?

Bailey: It’ll be pretty quick.

Should Oliver live, what can you say about what that could mean for his and Bex’s relationship going forward? The finale ended with that moment of her admitting how she feels.

Coburn: There was an honesty in this moment between the two of them. And whether he lives or doesn’t live, I think that honesty will resonate in a powerful way.

Shane’s mother is Lazarus, a former inmate, and she graduated. That barcode on the foot was a great way for the reveal. Was that always the plan?

Bailey: That was always the plan. That actually came from one of our writers, Paula Sabbaga, in the mini room we had before we were even picked up the series. We just were like, oh, that’s it. That’s how you do it. And so from that moment on, that was where we were always heading with that storyline.

With that reveal, can we trust everything that she has said so far?

Coburn:  I wouldn’t trust a lot of it.

What can you say about how Shane will react to that reveal?

Bailey: He’s going to find out for sure, but I think he’s really going to struggle with it because I don’t think it’s a secret at this point that the reason he works there is he was looking for mom. He knew she was an inmate there, but he didn’t know that she’s “graduated.” So I think in Shane’s mind, he’s always thought, “I can find out who my mom is, I can get some answers, but there’s no way to have a relationship with this person. She’s a serial killer who’s in the Pit.” But what happens when that person you thought you could never sit down with in a public setting and have any kind of relationship with turns out to be a colonel in the military? That changes everything for Shane and for better or worse and mostly probably confusing for him on an emotional level.

Speaking of graduated … can there be anything about that if she’s graduated and become a colonel?

Coburn: She was down there and she’s now left, and what that process was that she went through is part of the mystery.

Bailey: That’s a lot of what Season 2 is exploring. What does graduated mean? That means you completed a process, right? What does that look like in the context of a serial killer in a prison like the Pit? We’re going to unspool what that means. And to your point, with her being a colonel in the military, my bet would be that she probably graduated a while ago and then climbed the ranks.

David Astorga / NBC

Coburn: And also this “graduated” was said by Dr. Dulles [Matt Frewer], who’s not the most reliable source, so there’s going to be a lot of questions in Season 2 about what that actually meant and eventually focusing for Shane on, how do you deal with this information?

Shane had a choice to make at one point, go see Dulles or go and help Bex. Was he at all seriously torn between the two in such a major way that he could have chosen Dulles?

Bailey: I think Shane is such a good dude that in any version of there being someone’s life in danger or him getting what he’s always wanted, he’s always going to pick saving the person. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t an internal struggle for him. But I like to think of Shane as the guy who almost always does the right thing for the right reasons. And I think hopefully the audience feels the ride and wonders what decision he’s going to make because the answer to that question is huge for him.

Coburn: It was designed to leave the audience going, “Where…?” and you don’t see him again until he fires that shot. So we wanted to create that operatic soap opera tension of, will he, won’t he show up?

Why have Hassani’s wife be dead and then reveal that like you did?

Bailey: We’ve always wanted Hassani to feel like a guy who had personal secrets. In the pilot, Bex reads him right away and she’s like, you’ve got a daughter, you’ve probably got more kids. And he admits that he does. We wanted him to be a guy who felt like he had these big business secrets just like every CIA spook you’ve ever seen. But then ultimately, we wanted him to be holding something personal back. We wanted him to not just be the company man that’s protecting secrets. We wanted him to have a personal secret that he was struggling with and something that connects to the journey that the rest of the characters are going on — Shane with his mom, Bex dealing with her trauma from her past. They all have to deal with these bigger personal things.

Coburn: Working for the FBI or the CIA, it’s not a job where you are supposed to lead with personal vulnerability, if that makes any sense. And so I think that they do have armor on because they have to go out and do such a difficult job and they bottle a lot up. I understand why someone like Hassani kept something deeply personal to himself. I don’t tell JJ so many things about my life,

Bailey: I know it all. … We didn’t want Hassani to tell our team. We wanted our team to come to this knowledge because in Season 2, helping Hassani find closure with this — obviously he hasn’t yet. He’s still wearing the wedding ring. He hasn’t told anybody. I think in Season 2, giving him a personal journey where he can find peace and acceptance through conversations with Bex and with the team, it provides an opportunity for them to grow closer in Season 2 as those personal things do get revealed by choice as opposed to finding out without him telling the team.

The team has been shut down, but obviously Season 2, there has to be a way to get them back. Is there anything they can do to change Mallory’s (Zabryna Guevara) mind?

Coburn: That will be the key thing of the first episode of Season 2. It will be all about how they succeed at figuring out a way to change her mind so The Hunting Party can continue.

David Astorga / NBC

Bailey: In Season 1, Bex is sort of brought into this, and in Season 2, she’s going to have to be sort of pushing to get in. Does that make sense? So I think it’s a different journey for her to get the team restarted as opposed to being brought in and caught up to speed.

Coburn: And everything that took place with Oliver, regardless of his fate, I think is also emotionally all mixed up in that. So it is even more personal.

Could Mallory have graduated as well? 

Bailey: We can neither confirm nor deny any of it.

I feel like there are different silos in which different kinds of drugs could have been used on inmates, i.e. the Pit got the empathy modulator, another one got a different drug. Can you confirm if that could be the case or should we be thinking that these other places could have been using a different kind of treatment where a drug wasn’t the main part of it?

Bailey: That’s a great question. Obviously we have a number of silos that are sort of interconnected down there and we know what different silos were doing. Each one does have a different purpose, but there’s also an overlap to sort of the larger plan.

Coburn: Yeah, it’s not like six versions of what you’ve seen. It’s more like —

Bailey: — working in concert.

Coburn: Six facilities that are all part of the same instrument.

Why kill off James Whitmore?

Bailey: We talked about keeping that character alive for longer.

Coburn: He loved being on the show.

Bailey: He did. He was a fantastic actor

Coburn: To a certain extent, he’s the big bad of Season 1 and I think when you’re telling big stories like this … We always talked about Blade Runner, that was a common because at the end of Blade Runner, Rutger Hauer crushes the skull of Tyrell and it’s his creation come back. That was always sort of a reference point of it, was sort of our Rutger Hauer moment that his most brilliant creation has returned to kill him and does it in this grand way.

Bailey: But I also think to harkens back to something you said earlier about trusting Lazarus. By taking Whitmore off the table when our team has those questions about, can we trust what she said, he’s not available as a resource to them. So it complicates their journey and verifying what Lazarus has said or not.

Did you consider any other cliffhangers for the finale?

Bailey: I think we had one that we had discussed about with Morales [Sara Garcia]. It’s something we’re still going to do, knock on wood, in Season 2.

How are you feeling about the chances of a second season?

Coburn: Good. Nobody knows anything. This business makes no sense sometimes. The FBI spinoffs got canceled and they get like 6 million viewers every week. Things don’t always make sense, but the support from the network and the studio has been very optimistic.

What else can you say about what we’d see in a second season?

Bailey: I think we’ll see a lot of the team sort of bonding on a more deep level. With the Hassani piece and then with the Shane revelation and with our team learning all these various things about each other, I think we’re going to be able to see our team dynamic solidify in a really great way.

I’m really excited to explore more of the purpose behind the Pit. Season 1, we sort of dangled a little bit out there and we talked about bits and pieces. Season 2 is really going to get into it and bring the various storylines together when Shane learns about his mom and when the team learns about who Lazarus really is and that she was an inmate at the Pit and they start understanding what the Pit ultimately was and various pieces of it and then how they connect.

Will there be anything that significantly changes about the search for these killers?

Coburn: It’s the same concept, but the big difference is more time is passing and the longer these serial killers are out there, the more time they have to build whatever the insane thing is that they are building towards. Richard Harris in the pilot really was on the run on some level, and what you’re seeing is even in the finale, that’s a killer who’s had some time out there to move personas. So I think that the time difference is going to be a big deal.

Could we see them teaming up? Could we see two parters about the same killer?

Bailey: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely a possibility, and to Jake’s point, I think we’re going to be able to see a lot more sort of dynamic stories because of that — killers who don’t have to move from city to city, but maybe have been in a place for several weeks and put down roots a little bit or gone back home or reconnected with people or teamed up. I think the fact that time is expanding is going to open the world for us creatively.

Would the team expand or are you looking to keep the same core team and then people would come in and help but not necessarily be part of the team permanently?

Coburn: There will be other characters coming in, but I don’t think the core three is ever going to really not be the core three.

The Hunting Party, Streaming now, Peacock