With just two more episodes to go this season, the investigative team on Ten’s hit reality show Hunted is going to extreme lengths to try to capture the last remaining fugitives in the game.
But some measures taken in Sunday night’s episode didn’t go down well with viewers, who accused the Hunters of playing dirty.
Sunday’s episode focused heavily on Bondi couple Lavinia and Nick, who had lasted two weeks in the game without detection because they had largely remained off-grid.
The couple had been staying at remote campsites, not contacting friends or family, and had not touched the bank card given to them at the start of the game to access any of the funds contestants were given to survive.
But they were getting tired, hungry and desperate, so decided to head into a nearby town to grab some money from an ATM.
At the same time the Hunters, frustrated by their lack of leads, decided to freeze the couple’s ATM card. Cut to “CCTV” footage from the ATM, as Lavinia tried and tried to get some money out, only to be told her card wouldn’t work. The Hunters cheered and laughed as she struggled to work out why one of their few lifelines in the game could be taken away before they’d even used it.
Elsewhere in Sunday’s episode, the heavy-handed tactics of the hunted ground crew continued to have viewers siding with the fugitives and those helping to hide them.
Friends Puneet and Kris dropped by the remote country property of one of their contacts, but soon sensed that the Hunters might have been on to them and quickly fled.
Their intuition proved correct: Two Hunters weren’t far behind, and told property owner Graham and his wife – who looked visibly rattled at the intrusion – that it was “in their best interests” to tell them the truth, while filming them with their phones, searching the property and demanding information.
In the end, the hunted team managed to capture three more fugitives last night: teammates Puneet and Kris, as well as Nick, leaving his fiance Lavinia on the run by herself with no money.
That leaves only two complete teams in the race for the $100,000 prize money: Stathi and Matt, and Jake and Rob, two pairs of friends who have both gone to extreme lengths to evade detection, with elaborate disguises and undercover aliases.
The penultimate episode of hunted airs on Ten at 7.30pm tonight, before Tuesday night’s season finale.
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