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Hannibal: Savoureux

“Apparently, Dr. Lecter, this is how I go.”

Will Graham finally comprehends he’s on a show called Hannibal and it’s divine to behold, I tell you, DIVINE.

I hallucinated that I killed her. But it wasn’t real. I knew it wasn’t real.

Fantastic are the gifts of Will’s mind because even encephalitis is no real match. The illness, with all its horrors, just equals a little more work for our favorite empath to figure out the parameters of reality. He's so facile at slipping out of his existence into someone else's with the work he does (as Hannibal keeps reminding him) that he's developed a compensatory mechanism. In fact just give him time to adjust to his new circumstances, he will, with the same clarity in which he applies his skills to insane crime scenes, be able to tell the difference when he's hallucinating. Even though he’s somewhat cloudy on the whole Abigail/Minnesota thing, he knows he didn’t kill her. Or ingest her ear. Or kill a half dozen other people and make fishing lures out of them. Especially that last one.

However far over the edge you were leaning, I was hoping that you wouldn’t fall.

All of the people who surround Will were hoping this. (Well, everyone who's not the Chesapeake Ripper who by the way can barely contain his glee that Will called him first.) Every last one of them was living in some nebulous fantasyland that when people say they're okay, they mean it. Because it's the same one we all live in. Will couldn't even meet Jack's eyes on his porch right before Jack threw the book at him. (That phrase just never fails to bring the drama!) Jimmy and Brian try to shuffle past him, ignoring the situation, just two pros relying on their training to pull them through this awkward crime scene. Beverly can't do it though. She and Will make eye contact as he's being escorted in handcuffs past her. Their faces both scream, "I am deeply fucked up over this -- thank god though we are walking in opposite directions because really, this shit is too much." No one understands what's going on. And I mean no one.


Guess you dodged a bullet with me.

If the BAU can hardly cope with Will, Alana is completely undone. Some of Caroline Dhavernas' finest scenes in the series are when she's with Jack in his office and he tells her what's happened. She swerves the lines of a professional and personal reaction with every successive beat like someone who's turned the wheel too hard. It's awe-inspiring. Then this happens.


Followed by this.


By the time she shows up to see Will in jail, she's a shell. If it's not the best scene between Alana and Will, it's up there. (And you know how obsessed I was with their kiss. Which was/is amazing.) We see surface, for the first time, Alana's childlike coping skills. Will, you're not this. I'm sorry but you're just not. You can't be. Because I said so. I'll take all the dogs for, like, ever, no problem. Just NO. Total human perfect denial. Because of course her feeling "wounded" has not a thing to do with the difficulty of her ethics being challenged.

Now Will Graham is a serial killer taking trophies?

It's hard to judge what I loved more -- seeing everyone who's gathered at the forensics lab collectively blow a gasket about the fishing lures or Will's reaction when he hears this latest piece of evidence to his horrible crimes against humanity. All five FBI (or FBI adjacent) team members, in their own special way, just totally lose their shit when they realize what those lures were composed of. I can just hear David Slade using every imaginable idiom that means 'freak out' to direct: Okay, you guys, in this scene Jack needs to hit the ceiling, Alana will fly off the handle, Beverly -- you flip your lid, and so on... But when it dawns on Will that this is without doubt a frame-up, I was cheering just as loudly. To say nothing of the small heart attack I had when Will pulled a Gideon and broke out of the police transport to go on the lamb.

Are we going to re-enact the crime?

Ahh, the road trip. What a sick fourth act. The dialogue between Hannibal and Will is drop dead gorgeous all over the place. The scales have just fallen from my eyes. What exhilarating stuff as Will allows himself to experience what's true -- what's always been true for us, what he's known for a long time in the depth of his consciousness. It takes so much fidelity to one's heart to shine light like that on something so dark. "Perhaps you came to find yourself," Hannibal says in the Hobbs' kitchen. Because Hannibal is always kind of saying what's actually happening even when it's occluded or concealed in a riddle of some sort. Will locked up at the BSH looking not the least bit worried is pretty much the best ending to this season ever. That whole truth will set you free thing subverted in a way that only a show called Hannibal can accomplish.

Parfait.

Odds and Ends

*There is a deleted scene on the S1 dvds: Will goes to Alana’s after breaking out of the police van. It’s really tense and awesome but the best part is you get to see Dr. Bloom’s house, which is as f –ing gorgeous as every other domicile on this visually inerrant show of course!

*That goes for Bedelia's house as well which we see the exterior of during morning then night then morning in a typical Hannibal time elapse. (to see how outstandingly beautiful and modern it is in different lights?)

*The direction. David Slade. I don't have the vocabulary to adequately describe my admiration for this man's contribution to this show. The same man who talks about 'pulling light off of the actors' in a scene before he shoots. WHO SAYS THAT.

*When Beverly is scraping under Will's fingernails and the dried blood, like snowflakes, falls out -- just all of it the visuals, her attitude, Will's stance. I'm in a puddle.

*The therapy session with Bedelia that Hannibal did show up for was so dazzlingly lit. For grief. The curtains drawn but for a small sliver of muted light. I'm drooling again.

*Finally, the bullroarer, you guys. That surround sound of nightmarish proportions that only Brian Reitzell could be responsible for? The one that fills out the teaser where Will dreams he's shot the stag in an inky black forest? I just -- I mean, it's uncontrollably upsetting.

Quotes

Beverly: “I can’t do the silent treatment. I can’t pretend I don’t know you and I can’t pretend we don’t both know what I’m finding under your nails.”

Alana (to Jack): “SHUT. UP. Just stop talking.” (LOL)

Will: “You’re flushed. You been yelling?”
Alana: “Screaming is more like it.”

Bedelia (about Abigail): “You were having influence on her?”
Hannibal: “I was hoping I was.”

Hannibal: “Trying to save him, I lost Abigail. It’s hard to accept I could fail them both so profoundly.”

Beverly: “Four of the lures are made from materials including human remains.”

Jack: “This job doesn’t generally lend itself to optimism. I desperately want to be optimistic about an alternative to what every fiber of evidence is telling me you did.”

Hannibal (to Will who has stowed away in his stacks): “Hello, Will. How are you feeling?”

Will: “I know who I am. I’m not so sure I know who you are anymore. But I am certain one of us killed Abigail.”

Will: “You have no traceable motive, which is why you were so hard to see. You were just curious what I would do. Someone like me. Someone who thinks how I think… ‘Wind him up and watch him go.’”

Jack: "In my time, I've seen some people broken by the world. I've seen them broken in hideous, off-handed ways, but never like this. Never like this."

4 comments:

  1. Those final five seconds were worth thirteen episodes of time just to get there. I gasped as these two men stared each other down and addressed each other in such a measured and formal manner. Wow.

    Another great review in a season full of them. Thanks, Heather, for reviewing this show. It wouldn't have been the same without you.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Chris,
    I cannot imagine watching Hannibal/doing these reviews without you.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I love this review, as much as I love this episode.
    The review's visuals as punctuation (especially the dog & Alana's meltdown) made me laugh. And that's quite an accomplishment for a show as dark as "Hannibal".
    True be said, this reviewer's comic distance makes even cannibalism digestible. "Merçi beaucoup" for that... I think.
    Keep it up you twisted reviewer. You have a fan!!! Parfait!

    ReplyDelete
  4. No one saw the body. is there any way Abigail could be alive? not likely if Hannibal is the killer.

    ReplyDelete

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