Hunters “The Trial Of Adolph Hitler”

Well, here I am at the end of this particular road. Was it a good trip?

Let’s say at least I liked it better than season three of Jack Ryan.

So here it is. Hitler is on trial, and arguably, the episode’s trial is more focused on new characters, both Jewish, one Black. The Black man is the prosecutor. The other man is Hitler’s defense attorney, and those two have some really interesting discussions. The prosecutor wants to send Hitler to prison for his crimes. The defense attorney, a much more timid man probably because he knows he’s defending Hitler, just wants to make sure Hitler gets the fair trial he deserves and isn’t just sentenced to the maximum penalty just because he’s Adolph Hitler. And the defense attorney does his best while being portrayed as timid at times, refusing to do things Hitler requests of him because that wouldn’t be right and so forth.

See, unlike Jack Ryan, Hunters proved itself adept at introducing new characters late in the game and making them matter. This is the final episode. Once the trial portion of the episode is over, and Hitler is indeed found guilty, these two characters disappear from the narrative. Their job was done, and the episode actually gave them personality in a conflict that felt like it mattered. True, the Hunters are scattered around the courtroom (two of them appear to be working for TV production or something), and Mindy is even one of the many Holocaust survival witnesses for the trial itself. Oh, and the series remembered Murray existed. But these two briefly appearing characters actually seemed to mean something to the overall narrative.

Plus, Hitler’s downfall is the prosecutor basically gets him to admit to everything the same way Tom Cruise got Jack Nicholson to confess in A Few Good Men. If you’re gonna steal, steal from the best.

Oh, and then Eva and Travis show up to rescue Hitler. There’s some action. Travis, who survived getting shot in the face, is killed. Eva is killed. Hitler goes to jail and rails from his prison cell that he is more than a number. The Hunters all go off to happy endings, including Jonah after Clara forgave him (because of course she did), Harriet and Millie are now a couple, Lonny somehow won an Oscar, and so forth. Joe alone doesn’t go to Jonah and Clara’s wedding, but he seems happy on his own. Harriet even reveals to Jonah that it was Meyer who got Jonah’s grandmother killed because she got suspicious about who he really was.

Ah, but the twist: Jonah might still be hunting Nazis! That, or he can’t look away from any elderly German tourist without thinking the guy’s an escaped Nazi, and both of those are perhaps tragic. He’s got this dark side that, no doubt, led him to hunt Nazis, and while Nazis are bad and deserve to be taken down, it is the sort of thing that will ruin his life if Clara gets the idea that he didn’t stop like he said he would. Maybe Joe, Roxy, Lonny, and Mindy can stop. Harriet and Millie are another story, but the others can stop. But Jonah? Well, that’s the real question in this last episode’s last shot, isn’t it? Jonah went from a fun-loving pothead to, well, this guy who gives out dark looks to old tourists.

And that was Hunters, a show with a different tone and style depending on the scene or episode, one that went with a pulpy, heightened sense of reality that often clashed with the more mundane scenes that could have come from everyday life and that just so happened to have got Al Pacino in a lead role. But somehow, it still largely worked. The weirdness was a feature, not a bug, and quite frankly, I wish it had stayed that weird. It made season two, while never bad, not quite as enjoyable as season one.

Let’s say 8.5 out of 10 dead Nazis.

So, now what? I got a return date for Titans. It’s sometime in April. I need something to fill in the gap. Well, I did want to check out the TV adaptation of Paper Girls.