Amazon’s Hunters season 2 episode 5 recap: Blutsbande

On the fifth episode of the new season of the Amazon Prime Video series Hunters, the aftermath of the attack at the Hotel Palladio sends the hunters spinning for their bearings. In a series of flashbacks, we see how Ruth has grown suspicious of Meyer, too.

Roxy’s been shot in the shoulder and though everyone is cursing Joe for the fracas, Lonny and Mindy need to get their composure back and bring her to a medic, stat. Jonah heads to the HQ and reports what happened to the rest of the hunters.

Chava is reluctant to rescue Clara but Harriet cites that Georges was family, too.

Hunters season 2 episode 5 recap: Flowers lead the way

Jonah had clocked newspapers pointing to Villa Sonora covering the van’s windows. They head to that village, an hour outside Buenos Aires along with Millie and Harriet.

Splitting up at Villa Sonora, Millie confesses to Harriet that she mistakenly killed a bishop suspected of being a Nazi. She is conflicted and wants to disappear.

Harriet convinces her that she did the right thing, for the right reasons. They seal it with a kiss.

They’re about to give up but Jonah spots a flower shop and remembers that Travis had thrown him a flower from the back of the van to taunt him. Identifying the flower, they inveigle the shop owner to tell them about his supplier for the purple flower.

He says they’re from a small flower farm called Los Olmos.

Hunters season 2 episode 5 recap: The Wolf in Berlin

Flashback to a few years earlier and Meyer is telling Ruth that he needs to go to Berlin to track down a Tomas Arendt. Once there, he goes to a stamp shop and asks for Arendt.

The store clerk says he’ll be back Friday. Instead, Meyer goes into a butcher shop called Zuchs and interacts with the shop owner’s daughter and then the old lady of the place.

Meyer seems flustered, so he buys some ribs and a goulash. When the shop owner says the ribs are pork, he says it’s alright and that he’ll still buy them.

Later, when he visits Angela Zuchs’ grave, the shop keeper from the stamp shop is there too. He correctly identifies Meyer as The Wolf, so Meyer shoots him with a silenced gun.

That was a bad move.

Hunters season 2 episode 5 recap: Roxy and father

At the Nazi HQ, Joe intimidates Clara, while Joe is left to watch her. Hitler and Eva have an argument about acquiring a bomb to drop on one of the major cities.

Insulted, Hitler whacks Eva with a rifle butt. End of argument.

Clara manages to whack Joe and escape from the basement where she’s been imprisoned. Travis however, catches up to her.

As Roxy is brought into the ER and prepped for surgery, she flashes back to her days as a Black Panther. She’s trying to get her older sister Imani out of trumped-up charges but her dad, a former activist who was jailed, is having one of it.

Her dad urges her to just be there for her daughter. That if she wants to be a hero, but she just needs “to be a mother.”

Hunters season 2 episode 5 recap: Los Olmos gun battle

Millie, Jonah, Harriet, and Chava arrive at the Los Olmos farm. Inside the house is mostly empty, but they discover a single glass of milk on one of the tables.

Down below, in the basement, the Nazis are waiting for them to huddle up in the center of the room before they shoot them through the floorboards. When the shooting starts, Millie begins to panic.

She tries to get out but quickly realizes the Nazis are outside too. They’ve been surrounded and lured into an obvious ambush.

Joe goes up to present another angle of fire when Travis also comes up from the basement holding Clara as hostage. As Travis stares down the hunters, bargaining for an exit, Joe experiences a crisis of conscience, flashing back to being tortured and brainwashed by Hitler.

Joe shoots Travis in the head. Add another Nazi to the body count.

Though his former team still doesn’t trust him, Joe confesses he knows where Hitler is and the exact structure of their defenses. If they want the Fuhrer, they need him.

Hunters season 2 episode 5 recap: Review

Okay, while I liked most of the aftermath of the shooting at the hotel, I got to say that the finale firefight of this episode must be one of the more absurd gunfights I’ve ever watched. None of the women with side arms reloaded.

In fact, only Travis and Joe are seen to reload and everyone else seems to have unlimited ammo. That led to Jonah killing all the Nazis outside, since he was the only one not in the house.

The quick scene changes for the flashbacks of every other character, other than Meyer, is done in such a brusque and swift way that the viewer feels zero importance is given to them. They feel like casual set dressing for NPCs, if this were a videogame.

It would have been really great to linger on the dynamic between Roxy and her former activist father. Instead of them narrating in their own words how their situation came to be, it would be great to have even half an episode devoted to this.

I mean, bailing your daughter out of jail would be a great time for some family conflict resolution. Even Joe’s surreal montage of Hitler’s brainwashing only tells us he was tortured into becoming a Nazi.

But we’re only given flashing images of a bunny being stroked, along with horrific stuff like fingernails getting plucked by pliers. I’d have thought Joe would be more resilient than that, cause, you know, he’s a soldier and a bad^&*.

After all, the episode title translates to “blood ties.” I’d love for a more, show don’t tell episode, next time showing exactly how those ties bind.

You can stream both seasons of Hunters on Amazon Prime Video now.