The Hunting Party: Is The Pit Based on a Real-Life Prison?

NBC‘s newest procedural crime show, The Hunting Party, was created by JJ Bailey that goes deep into government secrets, morality and the human mind. Rebecca “Bex” Henderson, played by Melissa Roxburgh, is a former FBI profiler who is reluctantly called back into the field to find some of the most dangerous serial killers who have gotten out of a top-secret prison called “The Pit.”

The first episode of the show takes viewers to a rough world where right and wrong are hard to tell apart. It’s a new take on crime dramas. One of the most interesting things about the show is the titular “Pit.” What is it? How does it work? Aside from that, is it based on a real place?

The Hunting Party Episode 1 Recap:

We meet Bex at the beginning of the show. She used to be an FBI profiler but now works at a casino in Virginia. When the Attorney General (Zabryna Guevara) and CIA agent Jacob Hassani (Patrick Sabongui) talk to her, her past comes back to haunt her. For a very important mission, they need her help to catch Richard Harris, a notorious serial killer who got away during a huge explosion at the Pit.

Bex finds out that The Pit is a secret place where the government has kept and studied the most dangerous serial killers for the past 30 years. Officially, these people were thought to have been put to death, but in reality, they were being tested on and, in some cases, helped to get better. The goal was to understand how criminals think so that horrible things don’t happen again. But sometimes the experiments went wrong and made the prisoners even more dangerous.

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Shane Florence (Josh McKenzie), who used to work as a guard at the Pit, and Oliver Odell (Nick Wechsler), who used to be Bex’s partner at the FBI, join the search. As the team searches for Richard, dark parts of the story come to light. Shane says that his job at the Pit was very secretive: he never left the block he was assigned to, didn’t know the other guards, and never talked to the warden. He also saw disturbing experiments being done on the prisoners. Video evidence shows Richard being pumped full of experimental drugs, which makes people wonder about how ethically the facility works.

The team is able to find Richard, but then something shocking happens. During a standoff with hostages, it turns out that Richard’s last victim was the one who turned him into a killer. Bex is able to restrain her, and at the end of the episode, this dangerous woman is locked up with other people in a shipping container. When Bex starts to learn more about the Pit, she finds out a shocking truth: the warden of the facility is Oliver, who quit the FBI in a big scandal after torturing a suspect to save a kidnapped girl. After hearing this, Bex starts to wonder about the morality of her allies and the Pit’s purpose.

Read More: The Hunting Party: Is Serial Killer Richard Harris Based on a Real Killer?

The Hunting Party: Is Pit a Real Prison?

There is something very scary in the middle of The Hunting Party called The Pit. The facility is in a decommissioned nuclear missile silo in Cheyenne, Wyoming. It is pictured as an underground maze that is meant to hold the most dangerous criminals in society. Its purpose goes beyond keeping people safe; it’s also a place where psychological and behavioral studies of serial killers are carried out. But is this sad institution based on the truth?

No is the short answer. The Pit is a made-up place that doesn’t exist in the real world. On the other hand, the idea behind it comes from real events, like secret government programs and the history of nuclear missile silos in the US.

According to NBC insider, Wyoming, the setting of The Pit, has a lot of Cold War-era missile silos that are no longer in use. These silos, built to house intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), were strategically located in remote areas with sparse populations. According to Annie Jacobsen‘s Nuclear War: A Scenario, the U.S. currently has around 400 such silos west of the Mississippi River, spread across states like Wyoming, Montana and North Dakota. These silos are usually found on private ranches, in national forests, or on Native American reservations. Because they are so far away, they would be great settings for a made-up secret prison.

The Fictional Pit vs. Inspirations from Real Life

JJ Bailey and Jake Coburn, who co-created and run The Hunting Party, said that the Pit is not real, but they were careful not to compare it to controversial real-life facilities like Guantanamo Bay. Bailey said in an interview, “We don’t want this to feel like a terrorist or human rights violation type thing.” The show is more about the moral and ethical questions that come up when you try to study and keep criminals who are a huge threat to society.

The secretive nature of The Pit and its experiments that aren’t clear-cut in terms of morality make me think of other times when government programs were kept secret. For instance, the CIA’s MKUltra project in the middle of the 20th century used illegal experiments on people to learn how to control their minds. Even though MKUltra mostly went after innocent civilians, the experiments at the Pit and its shady and unethical nature are similar.

The Purpose of the Pit

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In the world of The Hunting Party, the Pit’s creation was motivated by a desire to better understand and neutralize serial killers. Jacob Hassani tells Bex that the research done at the Pit is a big part of what FBI profilers know about psychopaths. This is thought to have played a big role in the big drop in serial killers over the last few decades. The reason is clear: killers can be stopped before they kill, if police can guess what they’re going to do.

However, it is very hard to say whether or not the Pit’s activities are moral. Bex finds out that not all prisoners were rehabilitated; some became even more dangerous because of the experiments. The strict privacy and isolation of the facility add to the worries. Guards like Shane were not told about the bigger plans, and not even Oliver, the warden, knew everything that was going on while he was in charge.

The Pit as a Metaphor

It’s said that the Pit’s made-up design and purpose are a metaphor for the moral sacrifices people are ready to make for safety.It makes us think about how far we should go to keep people safe. How far does trying to stop crime go before it becomes a crime? These ideas are shown through characters like Oliver, whose actions that were morally questionable saved lives but left him deeply damaged.

It turns out that the Pit’s collapse wasn’t an accident by the end of the premiere. The unknown person or people set off the bomb that freed the serial killers and have ulterior motives. It looks like this mystery will lead to a season-long plot that will reveal the facility’s web of corruption, secrecy, and hidden agendas.

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