Two Big Twists
The season finale of Hunters begins one year ago with Ruth being watched before sitting with Meyer and discussing his life. After briefly mentioning Jonah, she quickly steers the conversation away from this, going back to mention how big and empty the room is. Meyer’s car plunges over the edge of the cliff as Sister Harriet dives into the water and drags Meyer to safety. The Colonel however, is nowhere to be seen. Back at his place, Jonah arrives and sees that Meyer is shook up from his encounter. He turns to Jonah and tells him it was his birthright to lead the Hunters but letting Travis go free has changed his mind. With his Hunters gig over for now, Jonah heads back to see Cheeks and they discuss superheroes. While they do, Millie mourns her Mother who passes away before heading in to prison and seeing Travis. She offers a deal but he sees right through it – knowing that she’s only here because she has nothing on him. As she leaves, he gives her one last warning while biding his time to escape. Back home, Millie is visited by Congresswoman Handleman, who recruits her to join the cause in finding and tracking down the Nazis, given she knows all about Operation Paperclip. At the same time, Biff dons a disguise and a new passport and heads into Russia, away from the conflict. Jonah looks through his Grandmother’s things again and reads the letters, in particular the one regarding The Wolf being arrested and Meyer suffering nightmares. These letters bring back memories of her cookbook, which is enough for him to begin sifting through her belongings and finding a file labelled Zuchs. It’s here he begins to piece together the identity of The Wolf, leading him to Dr Mann. Heading in for a check-up, Jonah fingers the gun in his back pocket and contemplates killing him. Although he hesitates in the office, Jonah knocks him down outside and brings The Wolf to Meyer’s house. Meyer plunges the knife in The Wolf’s skull but he doesn’t say a prayer beforehand, which immediately rings alarm bells for Jonah. As he thinks back to the letters, his blood runs cold as he realizes the horrifying truth – Meyer is actually The Wolf. As Meyer sits down with a glass of whiskey, he tells Jonah about his ordeal and how he managed to get away from the camp. The man he killed isn’t The Wolf, he’s actually the SS Surgeon who changed his face and turned him into Meyer after killing the real Meyer in cold blood back in the Holocaust Camp. His reasons for hunting come down to a blood lust but Jonah stands his ground and tells him it’s not his fight, it’s the Jew’s fight. Jonah grabs the gun in his back pocket and fires a bullet into the fake Meyer’s chest, following it up with a knife to the lung. In the aftermath of this, Jonah sits with the group and reveals the truth about who Meyer really was. Having cut the head off the snake, Joe leaves in anger only to be run over and bundled into the back of a car outside. As the car races off, Travis speaks to his lawyer and tells him he wants to stay inside the prison. In order to do that and prove a point to the inmates, he murders this Jewish man and goes on to rally the inmates to his cause. With Joe and Mindy both gone from the scene, the remaining Hunters band together as Jonah rallies the troops and tells them Millie is now hunting them in America. Sister Harriet takes the opportunity to discuss moving out of America and taking the fight into Europe instead. As the episode, and series, comes to an end, we cut to Argentina where Joe is brought before The Colonel who’s still alive. As he’s sat down to eat with the family, including four identical blonde children, an aging Adolf Hitler arrives and begins eating with the group. If there’s one episode that shows how bloated and overlong this series has been – it’s this finale. The first 20 minutes literally catch up with the characters with no plot development aside from Meyer being saved. Of course, the back-end of this episode more than makes up for this with a couple of bombshell reveals – one that works perfectly and the other, not so much. Learning just why Meyer has been acting so erratically throughout the series is a nice touch and brings into perspective just why he killed Tilda so abruptly too. Was she going to divulge the truth about him? It’s an interesting prospect to ponder and the idea of him riling up these Jews and convincing them to join his cause while he himself is a Nazi is a cruel sense of irony that backs up some of the themes running throughout the series. Hunters has ultimately been a show about blurring that moral line of right and wrong. While some of the Nazi antagonists have felt a bit cartoonish with a lack of compelling depth, the violence, various twists and dramatic spikes of tension are enough to make the ride worth taking. So there we go then. With no word on a second season for now and plenty of unanswered questions hanging over this one, the unsurprisingly polarizing reception to this show puts serious doubts over a second season. Given the 10.5 hour run-time of this one, the big reveal with Meyer does make the wait worth it but Adolf Hitler still being alive? Not so much. It’s a nice spin but also one that’s been done a few times before and the twist just doesn’t quite nail it, especially given the glacial pacing at times leading up to this.
