“Hunters” starts with some backstory on Regan as a child. It also highlights the issue of sounds on the creature’s hearing. The younger Regan attacks another girl who will not stop jumping rope outside her house. The slapping noise of the cord hitting the sidewalk hurts her ears.
“Maid of Orleans” takes the Hunter back to her childhood and we learn that her father is also a Hunter as well as her mother, who we never meet in the flashback sequences. This episode feels very much like a cross between “Predator” and “The Terminator”franchise.
In the present Regan, Briggs and Flynn all head to the jungle and with the bickering between the local guns for hire and the clicking noises it feels like Arnold Schwarzenegger may come bounding out of the underbrush at any moment.
The atmosphere works and puts the viewer on edge. The fact that Briggs is trigger happy adds to the tension. Keeping with the Predator theme, a young woman they rescue tells Flynn that a monster came out of the jungle and took her mother.
Instead of the 1987 film monster, these kidnappers are the “leather-faced fodder-muckers” that McCarthy (Julian McMahon) did business with last week and something much more frightening. Regan knows the leather faced creatures very well as it seems that they killed her family.
It is also revealed that the younger Regan (Britne Oldford) killed a rabbit and ate it raw while on the run. Flynn and his team reach the camp and find it empty of life and surrounded by dead bodies. The dead are mangled and torn apart.
As they move through the camp something is watching Regan. Later she finds a footprint. The camp was a heroin factory but one of the bodies found has the same holes in it as the heroin addict’s corpse found at McCarthy’s place.
More memories of Regan before the ETU emerge, sex, smoking crack and attacking the police brings her in contact with the organization. In the jungle, Flynn bonds with the alien agent who reveals that Briggs has a love/hate relationship with her.
Regan also tells Flynn that she did not know she was alien till her parents told her. The FBI agent is also starting to believe that his wife Abby was a Hunter after all. A “monster” kills all the local gun’s for hire sand the leader, Mato. Alarmed and angry, he goes to call for backup. Regan shoots him in the back of the head, per ETU protocol.
Mato (Deniz Akdeniz), who Regan killed with a bullet in the back of his head, wounded the creature before being executed and the remaining team start to track the creature down despite Jackson ordering them to abort.
Briggs finds a punji stick trap and it slows the team down while Flynn treats the other ETU agent’s injury. Briggs explains why he dislikes Hunters and Regan.
The Hunter ETU agent tracks the creature on her own. She finds the “monster” and the description is an apt one. This Hunter looks anything but human and it is indeed wounded. Rather than kill it, Regan reaches out and touches the creature.
Thus far, it seems that there are several varieties of the same Hunter species. Not all Hunters are created equal with some being less human than others. There are also, apparently, warring Hunter factions on Earth.
Briggs tells Flynn (Nathan Phillips) that regardless of what the aliens look like that underneath it all they are monsters. Regan shows, via her flashbacks, a certain vulnerability that, despite her alien nature, makes her rather endearing.
“Hunters” airs Mondays on SyFy. Tune in and watch this serious and intriguing thriller.
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