Hunters has launched its 10-episode first season on Amazon Prime Video, and if you've burned through it already, you'll have noticed the final episode contains at least two massive 'WTF' moments. Major spoilers follow for season one of Hunters.
One involves the reveal of the Wolf, the Nazi surgeon who committed heinous acts in flashback to the Holocaust, and has been the target of the group throughout season one. In episode 10, we finally discovered who the Wolf was. While it's a big moment,
The other big twist? We'll go into that more below, but it's a hell of a setup for a potential Hunters season 2.
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Hunters ending explained: 'Meyer Offerman' is actually The Wolf
For the entire first season of Hunters, the titular characters are searching for a group of Nazi war criminals living undercover in America, including their leader Wilhelm Zuchs, aka The Wolf. It's established that the Wolf was a Nazi surgeon at a concentration camp – and for the entire last episode we're led to believe that Friedrich Mann (William Sadler) is actually The Wolf.
After Meyer Offerman (Al Pacino) kills Mann, Jonah (Logan Lerman) susses out what's really going on: this is not the real Meyer Offerman.
The Wolf is actually the character we've come to know as Meyer, who's been living in disguise for over 30 years since the end of the war, when the Wolf escaped a death sentence for his crimes. Jonah discovers this by piecing the clues together: this Meyer does not offer a prayer before he quickly kills Mann, which the real Meyer vowed to do when he'd eventually confront The Wolf.
Meyer achieved this long deception with the aid of plastic surgery given to him by Mann, and by ensuring the real Offerman was killed and buried as he stole his identity. The real Meyer was Jonah's grandfather.
The Wolf then lived his life as Meyer Offerman, never returning to his job as a surgeon because it'd give away his identity. He instead works in a factory when he comes to America.
The twist is pretty predictable – it's set up very firmly by episode 5's ending, when the fake Offerman is almost outed by Tilda Sauer (Barbara Sukowa), before Pacino's character suddenly kills her, which shocks the other members of the hunt. At that point, you're firmly made aware that Offerman isn't who he says he is.
It's a really nasty twist that's bound to be divisive – but the way The Wolf tries to justify his twisted logic and make himself the victim does feel very real. It's a horrific act of appropriation that ends season one with a big moment. Jonah shoots The Wolf dead, and breaks the news to the rest of the hunters, who are naturally shocked.
The real Meyer Offerman, then, was long dead. And the fake Meyer Offerman is finally dead too.
"We knew very, very early on that was going to be something we were building to," co-showrunner Nikki Toscano told Refinery29 about the twist. "It was really just about maintaining and managing everything that we needed to do in order to have a lot of things retroactively make sense if the audience were to watch it a second time around. Then they could see some of the clues were there without [us] blowing the reveal."
Oh: Hitler is still alive in Argentina, and 'The Colonel' is actually Eva Braun
Oh, that. The last moments of the show reveal that Adolf Hitler is alive, living in Argentina. The character we've come to know as The Colonel (played by Lena Olin) is Eva Braun, too, his wife. In real life, of course, both committed suicide in Hitler's bunker in Berlin in April 1945.
Hunters' suggestion that Hitler is still alive in Argentina is based on a long-time conspiracy theory that he and Braun escaped to South America. This is extrapolated from a real-life phenomenon of Nazi war criminals hiding in Argentina and other South American countries after WW2 (these methods of escape were called 'Ratlines', and here's a great BBC article on it).
It's so famous as conspiracy theories go that The Simpsons referenced it in the episode 'Bart vs Australia'. In Hunters, Hitler appears to live on a big estate with four identical Aryan children. It's unclear which actor is playing Hitler – the lack of a full reveal of his face likely gives the producers room to recast him if the show gets a second season.
The ultimate orchestrator of the Fourth Reich in Hunters, then, is Hitler himself. And season one ends with Joe (Louis Ozawa) captive at the dinner table with Adolf and his weird kids.
Well, it should make for a hell of a season 2, if it happens.
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