John Corbett Drives The Hunting Party Finale With Xander Wax
john corbett appears in a Season 2 finale sneak peek from The Hunting Party as Xander Wax, the serial killer at the center of NBC’s Thursday, May 7 episode at 10/9c. The preview puts the character’s poisonings, not a chase scene, at the center of the hour.
In the clip, Bex, Hassani, Shane, and Morales learn Xander Wax’s location after a partial fingerprint turns up on a self-checkout scanner in D.C. Bex calls him “a very smart individual,” a rare line that lands less like exposition than a warning about how much work the team still has left before the finale closes.
Wax in D.C.
Xander Wax is described as a trained biochemist who may have killed at least 10 people and could be responsible for as many as 40. His method is the reason the character feels less like a one-off villain and more like a case study in scale: he used highly lethal animal venoms as poisons, then left them on public objects such as elevator pumps and sugar packets for random people to handle.
That pattern makes the deaths easy to misread and hard to trace. Bex says the victims were mistaken for people who died of heart attacks or strokes, and she adds, “He didn’t care who he killed. For him, the thrill was the randomness of it all,” which is a colder motive than the usual procedural setup allows.
Tylenol Case Echoes
Executive producer JJ Bailey linked the character to the Tylenol killer case from the 1980s, when poisoned bottles of Tylenol led to “15 layers of packaging and security” on bottles now. Bailey said the creative team wanted “this character who enjoyed setting the trap and not knowing who he was going to catch or when, and that sadistic nature of just the random chance and what led you to that moment to pick that thing that he put this poison on,” a description that matches the finale’s emphasis on chance over motive.
Executive producer Jake Coburn gave the clearest read on Corbett’s role, saying, “When you learn about his methods, they just paralyze you with fear,” and Bailey said Corbett “adds this little bit of swagger to it that I think is pretty fun.” That combination makes Xander Wax feel designed for one episode of pressure, not a long trail of clues, which is why the finale preview lands as a business move as much as a plot tease.
May 7 at 10/9c
The Hunting Party airs its Season 2 finale on Thursday, May 7, at 10/9c on NBC. The show still has no Season 3 renewal, so this episode carries the weight of both a finale and a possible handoff point for viewers who want to know whether Wax is stopped before the last frame.
