Hunters season 2 episode 7 recap: The Home

On season 2 episode 7 of the Amazon Prime Video series, Hunters, Jonah has arrested Hitler and attempts to smuggle the old fascist out of Argentina to face a UN tribunal. An anecdote about ghosts moves us to a mysterious house, where an old couple’s lives are upturned and secrets are revealed.

Jonah’s got him. Hitler’s still making threats, but the old man is pliant enough otherwise.

The walk is going to be long, so when Hitler flings an insult about ghosts, Jonah riffs on it and tells the Fuhrer about a story involving a house, a married old couple, and the invisible dead.

Hunters season 2 episode 7 recap: A haunted house?

We flashback to war-time Germany, July 1942. We see a very cool-looking, two story house with a moss-covered roof, situated in a bucolic neighborhood.

It seems like a crazy old couple lives there. The old man and woman seem to talk to invisible people and have conversations with each other that are non-sequitur.

Or maybe at the onset of Alzheimer’s. They play some demented kind of board game.

The old woman prepares three ducks to cook and doesn’t mind the blood all over her face when she beheads the animals. The vibe is very Clive Barker meets Wes Anderson.

Then one day, three Nazis in SS uniforms arrive art their house. Strapping young men, the Aryan blonde beast kind favored by the Reich.

One of them moves a snail on the old couple’s driveway. Seems like the sensitive kind, for which the other two elder ranked soldiers, one tall guy—clearly in charge and highest ranked—and a corpulent guy, chide and berate him.

Hunters season 2 episode 7 recap: Meet the Hansoms

It turns out the old couple, the Hansoms, are pretty famous. At least the old man, Heinrich, is.

He’s a popular architect who’s built plenty of structures for the Reich. They all raise sieg heils to the painting of Hitler atop the living room mantle.

The Hansoms become a bit agitated at the questioning and behave like senile old folks; meaning selective hearing, nervous laughter, and odd conversational tangents. Even an impromptu dance at one point, after being questioned at the age of the house.

Turns out they built the place themselves. Gave “birth” to it, they declare.

The Nazis take it in stride but it turns out they’ve been sent on intelligence rumors that the Hansoms may be harboring fugitives. Jewish fugitives.

It’s at this point that the Hansoms and the SS trio are at an impasse. The couple claim that there are indeed people all over the house.

Dead people. The three Nazis are frustrated.

They can’t tell whether the old couple are just senile or they’re playacting. Just to err on the side of due diligence, they check all over the house.

Hunters season 2 episode 7 recap: They’re hunting for Jews

While the youngest sits with the Hansoms, the two others search upstairs. The fat one goes through granny’s underwear and smells her bras.

Then he disrupts the toilet by taking a dump. The tall one explores the old architect’s studio and discovers a set of pull-down stairs to an attic.

While the couple tell the young soldier about their dead child and how he’s still in the house, the two upstairs encounter hidden doorways after poking around. Both of them fall to grisly deaths, as they do find hiding Jews among exquisitely curated gardens, cleverly hidden among the rafters and basement of the Hansom house.

It alludes to the weird board game the couple was playing at the start of the episode. Apparently, there are also deadly traps in the house, designed just for snooping interlopers like the three Nazis.

And yeah there’s at least three Jewish families with several kids hiding in the house. Boom, two down.

All that’s left is the youngest soldier. Being a failed architect, the young SS confesses that he feels the house has structural inconsistencies.

Still, Helga and Heinrich try to play it all off as ghosts ruling the house, not ready to give up the ruse. Turns out behind the main living room wall hides a young boy and a baby.

It’s all the kid can do to keep the baby in his arms from crying. The young Nazi’s nerves are now frayed.

Hunters season 2 episode 7 recap: He is not a killer

He doesn’t know if it’s the gothic old couple or the Lovecraftian house or the fact that after strange noises, neither of his two comrades are answering him. Several very tense seconds pass as the Hansoms try to convince the soldier to stand down.

He’s going to shoot the old man. Then decides he can’t and he’ll shoot the wall instead.

He puts the gun down, weeping. This young one is not a killer.

Then a baby’s cry is heard clear as a whistle. Things go sideways in an instant.

The soldier shoots the wall, looks inside, and sees the young boy handing off the baby to a woman. He keeps shooting at the wall as the boy tries to evade the bullets.

The Hansoms come in. Old Helga chops the soldier’s ear off with a cleaver.

Before he can shoot the old woman, Heinrich restrains his arm and makes him kneel, enabling Helga to bring down the cleaver on the young soldier’s head. A few moments of panic as he swerves and judders, then falls dead right in front of the Hansom’s board game.

Three Nazis down. There’s blood everywhere.

The three bodies are disposed of in the nearby bog. No idea how the elderly couple were able to drag three dead weights but maybe the Jews helped them?

Hunters season 2 episode 7 recap: Zev and the old architect

In any case, problem solved. After some cleaning and repairs in the house, it’s back to the daily grind of hiding from the Reich authorities.

Hopefully nobody notices the three missing SS soldiers who came to the house. Now we are shown the Jews conversing with the old couple as the house is opened up in visuals, like a cross-section.

Everything makes sense now. The seeming Alzheimer’s quality of the jokes, singing aloud, non-sequturs which were really code words, and the talking to empty air.

Apparently, the young boy holding the baby is named Zev. Viewers who’ve come this far in the series will recall that Zev is the significant other of Chava.

He was the boyfriend who went missing, parting ways with Chava after ideological differences put a wedge between them, after they had hunted so long together. Zev in 1942 has become like a surrogate son to the Hansoms.

Heinrich teaches him design tricks and he plays a lot of the board games with the old couple.

Hunters season 2 episode 7 recap: “Father’s home!”

Of course, it’s all too good to last and within a week more, soldiers come to the house to investigate the missing SS trio. “Father’s home!” calls out Heinrich, their code for danger, for the Jews to be quiet and take up their hiding places.

This new trio are all senior enlisted from the ravaged, cruel look of them. One of them, a skinhead, spots a snail in the driveway—is it the same damn snail?

But no mercy within him this time, he removes the shell and throws the snail one way, the shell another. The couple repeats the same song and dance for this trio.

And the soldiers inevitably go to investigate the house, leaving one with the old folks. The two guys return and apologize for wasting the Hansom’s time.

They are about to go when the third guy, the SS who stayed on the couch shoots Heinrich, then Helga. Hansoms are dead.

Hunters season 2 episode 7 recap: The Rigards take over

While the other SS soldiers are shocked and indignant, the skinhead soldier reasons that he liked the house. Plus, this way they’ll go back with some good loot, meaning they’ll make up a story about how the old couple had indeed been harboring Jews and were the ones responsible for murdering the three missing SS officers.

Skinhead then gets to keep the house and they’ll return as conquering heroes who’d eliminated Jewish collaborators. Everybody happy.

All the SS get to keep their jobs and their heads. The Jews hiding in the house can barely keep their composure.

Zev cries out but is silenced by his elders. Skinhead SS, who’s named Tomas Rigard, moves in his wife and son a few days later.

They have no idea anyone’s in the house with them. The Jews debate whether they should go and evacuate, but with an SS outpost just a few kilometers away they decide to stay.

It’s Zev who forages in the still hours for them, playing cat and mouse with the couple should they wake up. Just as he’s finished loading his bag from the refrigerator, the SS soldier’s boy Friedrich spots him.

Fortunately, one of the women, Rivka, catches them and brings back Friedrich into the hideout.

Hunters season 2 episode 7 recap: Revenge for the Hansoms

This looks like trouble. The Jews lure Tomas and his wife out to the bog by pretending to be the German boy, saying the Hansoms had taken him as revenge for their murder.

They knock both Rigards out and drown them. There are brief hours when the Jews come out and celebrate their freedom.

Then they formulate a plan wherein Zev and Rivka, with their hair dyed blonde now, will pretend that they’re the Rigards and that Tomas the SS officer has left them without a word of goodbye. If the plan works, they’ll be able to extend their masquerade indefinitely.

Maybe even until the war is over. The Rigard boy, Friedrich, is still alive and being held quiet by one of the Jewish guys.

As scheduled, an SS officer arrives, this time because the Jews called them. Rivka executes their play, saying that she had discovered that Tomas was having an affair and that he had fled Germany, fearing that the Reich would lose to the Americans.

Hunters season 2 episode 7 recap: Burning down the house

It’s almost too good to be true that it’s all going according to plan. The SS officer is about to leave until the Rigard boy escapes and wrests the knife from his Jewish captor.

He catches Rivka at the door, stabs the Jewish lady before the SS officer shoots her. Chaos ensues.

Zev pushes a lever and the SS officer falls to a hole that disembowels him. Zev signals to the rest to prepare as the rest of the soldiers invade the house.

All the preparations take effect. Guns are fired from behind walls, under beds, and from holes in the sink. All murders synced to some very rousing classical music.

Before the house burns down, one of the men hands Zev the baby and tells him to take the rest of the kids and escape into the woods.

Flash forward to the 80s and Jonah is at the banks of a river at night. A boat comes to fetch them.

It’s Zev manning the craft, now bearded and old. When he pulls in Hitler, he flashes back to his time at the house, to the time he learned how to be invisible; how to be a ghost.

Hunters season 2 episode 7 recap: Review

This is the most perfect episode out of the whole second season. I kid you not.

It’s a simple enough premise, with some deft sleight-of-hand to hide what is, in retrospect, obvious twists. A Schindler type character hides Jews in his cleverly-designed house, pretending it’s haunted by ghosts, but laid out with traps and murder holes in case people do come looking.

What makes this episode so good has very little to do with the rest of the season or the arc it’s developed so far. It’s the pacing and the relatively quick, yet meaty character development, that gives it juice.

The chemistry between Zev and the Hansoms is undeniable. The marauding force of the SS investigators coming to call is the outsider coming to town.

What few instances of chaos come into the proceedings as a monkey wrench to expectations, serve as very welcome surprises. There’s the cruel SS officer Tomas Rigard who shoots the Hansoms.

Then there’s the young Friedrich who escapes from his Jewish captors that gives them all away. Unexpected X factors, both.

These narrative scrambles are plausible and efficiently deployed. I can’t argue with the flawlessness of it.

It’s like a short story well told and with the right tempo changes. The fact that it only ties in very tangentially with the main story of Jonah and Hitler’s capture, is both its only blemish and, I guess, requirement.

Still, I thoroughly enjoyed this one and would have liked a spinoff about the adventures of Zev and Chava, if only the whole series wasn’t cancelled after this season. I watched this episode again and I’m still picking up details I missed the first time.

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