Hannibal, Season 3 Episode 7: Digestivo

"Digestivo" feels more like a season finale than a mid season episode. The last six episodes have been methodical in assembling pieces and moving them around the series' board in order to get all of Hannibal's characters to this point, but it's been seriously worth the wait. 

This is by far one of the best episodes of the show to date and it was apparent going into it based on "Dolce's" ending. Mason Verger plays the most typically villainous character this series has introduced and that's saying something. He lays out his plan in a typical fashion too, telling Hannibal that he'll eat him piece by piece and take Will's face to use as his own. This level of evil does less to inspire fear in Will and Hannibal as it does to bring them together. They know now more than ever they need each other to survive. Will goes so far as to bite off part of a man's face in self defense and Hannibal looks at him like a proud father. The look on Mads Mikkelsen's face actually brought a smile to my own.

Genuine insanity ensues as the episode goes on. Hannibal is tied up and treated like livestock. Will is prepared for surgery to have his entire face removed. Knowledge that there is a Verger child after all is only seen as a mild surprise after it is revealed that the child is being carried by a comatose pig. It is actually amazing that in a show that focuses so strongly on its male leads, it's the women who manage to save the day. Alana and Margot go to Hannibal's paddock and address him like the animal he appears to be. They release him on the condition that he'll use his banshee-like powers for their own purposes. Hannibal's happily agrees. So after being unleashed upon the Verger estate, Hannibal murders Mason's surgeon (though not before removing his face instead of Will's), milks Mason's semen as a gift for Margot, feeds Mason to his pet eel, and finally takes Will away from all of this madness and danger, all the while aided by Chiyo, providing covering fire with a sniper rifle. It's the most thrilling sequence in a television show I've seen in ages.

Hannibal and Alana even manage to have a reunion where they finally are able to come to an understanding between one another. Alana finally realizes what Hannibal truly is: he's an enigma she'll never even hope to solve. But she's fine with that because she sees that somewhere inside of him there is humanity hiding, only rearing its head when absolutely necessary. 

Will and Hannibal get their own bit of closure as well. Will finally releases himself from his obsession with Hannibal. He finally understands there is nothing but death and darkness on that road. Hannibal lives on a similar road but because he embraces that death and darkness it's never seemed quite as terrifying to him. Jack explains to Chiyo at one point in the episode that Will and Hannibal are "identically different;" the perfect description. Will finally breaks away from Hannibal and by doing so is finally released from Hannibal's control. It is a moment of sheer triumph for Will that the show has been working towards for two and a half seasons now, even though when the police arrive to take Hannibal away, they find him gone. They question Jack and Will and just when the man hunt seems about to begin anew, Hannibal appears and surrenders. Hannibal has always ever only let people believe they are in control of him. It's incredibly fitting that even now at the end of everything, Hannibal doesn't lose. After everything they still didn't 'catch' him. The episode ends with what I really wish were the last line of the entire series. Hannibal gets to his knees with guns drawn on him. He looks at Jack, and then past Jack at Will before saying "I want you to always know where I am. Where you can always find me." It's one of the most chilling lines of the series and there is still so much more to come. In fact, the last act of Bryan Fuller's Hannibal is actually the legend's first. The Great Red Dragon. 

Hannibal, Season 3 Episode 2: Primavera

In many ways, Primavera is a companion piece to this season's first episode, "Antipasto". The first episode provides insight into Hannibal and Bedelia's flight across Europe and how they've been living since the massacre that concluded season two. This second episode does nearly the exact same thing but shifts its focus toward Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) and the thought-to-be deceased Abigail Hobbs (Kacey Rohl). We learn of the medical magic woven to keep Will alive but even though we're privy to the surgeon's workings, we get no further understanding of what really happens after season two's finale and have no idea of the fate's of either Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne) or Alana Bloom (Caroline Dhavernas). Once again though, Hannibal quickly reminds the audience that this series really doesn't care what the viewers want to know. In a show that's so heavily focused on murder investigations, it never gives in to the audience's desire for more information. It's a genius form of forcing the viewer into Will Graham's mind. This season only benefits by adopting the attitude of not caring one bit who it hurts. 

Tonally the episode is a mirror image of the premiere but presentation-wise it's anything but. Where "Antipasto" is elegant, clean, and arousing, "Primavera" is confused (in a good way), messy, and very distressing. The entire episode is handled as if through Will's own fractured psyche and it makes for some truly insane viewing. Will's visions take up enormous portions of the episode. One particular vision involves a shattering tea cup and I truly thought it was going to blow out my sound system. Sound design is often overlooked on television and Hannibal is a series that never underestimates the true power of using music and sound to jolt the viewer out of the comfort of their living room. 

The similarities continue in pairing a female figure alongside the male protagonist. The pairing in both cases is an odd one. Bedelia is Hannibal's hostage. So is Abigail, though not by Will's hand. Will and Abigail find themselves constantly bound together but where her exposure to Will keeps landing her in lethal situations Will needs her to be his muse. Since the series' first episode Abigail has always been the force driving Will forward. Being responsible for killing her father, Will sidesteps the fact that Garrett Jacob Hobbes was a psychopath and instead views his tie to Abigail as a life debt. Unfortunately Will's patronage has wound up getting Abigail's throat slit on two separate occasions now. 

Another great mirror in this episode is the introduction of Inspector Rinaldo Pazzi (played by Fortunato Cerlino, who I'm always happy to see after first meeting him in the Italian mob film, Gomorrah). Will meeting Pazzi is important and not just to forward the plot. Pazzi is a man obsessed, just like Will. They've both had significant brushes with Hannibal and both have allowed those brushes to consume their lives. Pazzi met Hannibal years and years ago as the hunch suspect to a murder as artfully composed as any in the series. Hannibal's youth was spent murdering and then arranging his victims into art pieces. The episode takes its title from Botticelli's Primavera and Hannibal arranges two people into the poses of Chloris and Zephyrus (close up here). This visual gives a great echo of a line from the premiere that I quoted in my last article. "You no longer have ethical concerns, Hannibal. Only aesthetical ones." It's appropriate that at this point in the series this is the earliest of Hannibal's deeds brought to light. Botticelli's painting represents the birth of spring so why not having Hannibal's first chronological murder be so tied to the birth of something? Even if that birth is that of a monster. Inspector Pazzi also allows for another tie to the first episode of this season. Pazzi is a constant reminder that Will must find Hannibal to achieve any kind of completeness in his life. When Hannibal and Bedelia met Dimmond (Tom Wisdom) in the premiere the same thing became true for our villain. Dimmond and Will bear VERY similar features and though Dimmond had never met Will, his face alone is a constant reminder that he needs Will just the same as Will needs Hannibal. The two of them will wander the cosmos forever, killing with intent or accidentally, until they find one another. 

The Simple Art of Codependency - Hannibal Season 2

The finale of this season of Hannibal isn’t titled “Imago” because it wouldn't have fit the season’s theme of Japanese food preparation. However, about halfway through the season’s final episode, two characters let us know why it would have made a perfect alternate title. For those who don’t already know it’s the final form of an insect’s transformation from larva to adult and bringing it up anywhere in the second season would have been appropriate. The fact that the Bryan Fuller and his team of writers decided to keep this conversation close to the chest until the finale was a great idea though. It packed far more of a wallop when it arrived because Hannibal allowed itself to change this season. It stopped being a series that followed a case of the week formula (albeit a more gruesome take on the recipe than any on record) and only allowed itself a thin overarching season plot. I can’t stand television like this but Hannibal did it so well that it became a tolerable formula. From week to week the show presented its viewers with a ballet of blood that turned murder into a legitimate art form in every way that shows like Dexter, which frankly can go fuck itself, managed to fail at. But by changing the formula that the series' fans had come to know and love, season 2 of Hannibal knocked our expectations of the show on their ear. The show slowed waaaaaay down. No more was it merely a killer of the week kind of show. Hannibal tried for a new kind of horror. It took Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) who we’d all begun to rely on as an infallible source of true justice and has him switch sides with Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen). The pair begin taking pages out of each other’s books and the result is a season that shows us what can happen when two men who are each incredibly dangerous in their own way begin to allow the boundaries between them to blur. 

Hannibal got itself famous (at least with critics) for being one of the most beautifully shot and beautifully violent (again, just with critics) series to ever grace the small screen. The fact that it lives on NBC is a mystery to rival the Tunguska event. I watched the series after having seen all but the latest Hannibal film (Hannibal Rising) and enjoying all of them despite Brett Ratner’s horrific track record as a filmmaker - Red Dragon is by far his best film - and the pure awfulness of the series’ final chronological installment, 2001's Hannibal, which is up there with Ridley Scott’s worst films. It got me wondering why none of the films, with the exception of Hannibal, ever attempted anything as inventive as the visual style that the TV series has made its bread and butter. Director of Photography John Mathieson uses the already gorgeous palette provided by Florence, Italy to help Scott's Hannibal take on new life as a thing of visual beauty. Hannibal’s series cinematographer James Hawkinson seems to have taken brief inspiration from Mathieson before going off on a wild quest to create a show that would rival even Game of Thones in how painfully beautiful it was to look at.  

That visual style really ends up being the only thing about Hannibal’s second season that resembles its first. The plotlines this time around have felt more like Lecter himself was listening to music and painting to the tempo. It began at a fairly rapid clip with familiar faces dropping like flies but as it carried on it began to slow down and spend a lot of its time meditating on Will and Hannibal’s relationship. Hannibal tries as hard as he can to drag Will down (or up?) to his level and become a killer while Will resists. We, of course, begin to see cracks, sometimes big ones, in Will’s defense and we begin to genuinely fear for him in a way we never had to in season one. We now have to fear for his very soul.

This season also manages to invert the previous season’ structure by making Will a reliable narrator once again. When we first met Will in season one he was a good but troubled cop who was beginning to unravel by the end of the pilot. We had to watch over the subsequent twelve episodes as Will came completely apart at the seams due to his time in therapy with Hannibal Lecter. But after last season’s left field (though not unwelcome) finale, we got to watch Will rebuild himself back into someone who’s both sane and very dangerous to those who continue to walk the earth doing evil. He becomes the only person with enough mental capacity to outsmart Hannibal but because the writers never make it easy on him we really never know how it’s going to go down. This matching of wits may actually be why the writers decided to make Hannibal and Will some kind of genius sadistic team in the season’s latter half and pit (sorry for the incoming pun) them against Mason Verger (Michael Pitt) whose appearance represents both a wonderful callback to Gary Oldman’s stellar performance but also a unique source of total fear. Mason is a dangerous foe and even though lovers of the film series know his fate we still aren’t quite sure if the tv version is going to take the same road to get there so all our favorite characters are suddenly in harm's way.

Watching the season back in a rapid fire fashion results in some very thrilling television. Apart from a court room drama episode (the season’s low point for sure) the first half of the season moves incredibly quickly and the framing device presented in the premiere’s opening minutes keeps you aching to get back to it at the end of the season. Hannibal plays a much larger role this season than he did before. He gets his hands far more dirty and doesn’t just come off as some kind of god that the law abiding characters of the series waste their efforts trying to stop. Instead we see Hannibal as a fallen angel who's so enamored with humanity that he allows others to see a very human side of him and even though he rarely makes a mistake, he’s a much more sympathetic monster than we got in the first season and it makes it that much more interesting when Will finally goes toe-to-toe with him. The odds are finally evened up. Fuller and his writing staff have established that they like their creative liberties, which means the stakes are quite high.

Hannibal’s second season allowed itself a lot of creative license and I applaud them for doing so. The show pulled back on its gruesome nature but it traded a gimmick for far better long form storytelling. Not to beat a dead horse but I can’t believe this show ran on NBC. It’s astounding when you think about the kinds of themes this season focused on and how many times it made its viewers stare into the heart of human darkness and didn’t let them look away when it opened its eyes and stared back. The second season is the series’ imago; its final transformation. I have no fear for the third season but it became clear while watching the finale that the writers were prepared to throw in the towel. The series was renewed but extremely late in this season’s run and the finale’s final moments are certainly geared toward the idea that they could have been the shows last. I await it excitedly but I think Hannibal will be forced to reinvent itself again in order to keep becoming the best thing it can be.