*In the interest of
pushing more content to this blog given the glacial rate at which I am
developing some longer, more formalized pieces, I am going to go ahead and
offer some reflection on each week’s episode of Bryan Fuller’s beautiful Hannibal TV series on NBC.
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| "Hannibal Title Card." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 1 Mar. 2014. |
“Contorno” (aired 7/2/15)
Hannibal has never been more brazen or vulnerable. During
the show’s first two seasons, the titular cannibal’s murderous activities were
largely left to viewers’ imaginations. Though we sometimes saw him on the brink
of a kill (as with poor Beverly Katz back in season two), the unsavory business
of murder was generally omitted in favor of the (arguably) equally unsettling
experience of watching Hannibal prepare beautiful dishes that might at any
given time contain human beings. Season three, for all its increasingly
experimental visuals and at times ludicrously cerebral dialogue, has been the
most direct of all when it comes to Hannibal’s murders. We’ve seen him snap a
man’s neck, stab another in the head with an icepick, and disembowel and hang a
third.
The perpetrator of this violence never seems to lose his
cool poise or drop the perpetually detached expression he wears no matter the
stakes, but the fact that we are seeing all these murders firsthand now
suggests that Hannibal is no longer concerned with going unseen. Though he
seems in control of himself as usual and the assuredness with which he performs
these violent suggests confidence in his decision to draw his pursuers to him,
what remains largely unsaid is that this is a self-destructive behavior. In “Contorno”
Hannibal goes so far as to murder Pazzi and then dangle his body from his (Hannibal’s)
place of work like a grisly banner. It’s not a cry for help; it’s just further
proof that Hannibal’s heart is broken and that as with Mischa before him, Will
and what he represents have become preoccupations for Hannibal that he can only
remedy through murder.
The comparatively fast pace of tonight’s episode and the
pay-off that comes in its final moments when Jack finally unloads on Hannibal
likely comes as such a relief to the faithful who have been waiting for things
to finally start happening that the excitement may obscure the fact that this
is an altogether different Hannibal that we’re seeing. He is still a man who
would never do anything as crass as to tell an opponent to “bring it on,” but
that’s essentially what he does when he goads both Alana and Jack. Not only
does Hannibal seem to have an eerily accurate understanding of what transpired
between Jack and Bella during the latter’s final moments, but he then goes on
to all but dare Jack to kill him as well. The implication in this taunt, of
course, is that if Hannibal is going where Bella has gone, then she must not be
anywhere good.
We have seen little moments of weakness in Hannibal
before and where his curiosity or interest in testing a what-if scenario have
led him to do things that could potentially leave him exposed if they backfired
(like tipping off Garrett Jacob Hobbs way back at the beginning of season one);
however, he seems to have lost his sense of self-preservation. He is saved from
death in “Contorno” only because of a thematic technicality—because, suggests
the teaser for next week’s episode, Jack knows that Will has to be the one to
finish things. Other than the trussing and near hanging he endured at the hands
of Will’s errand boy back in "Mukōzuke," this is the worst beating
Hannibal has taken in the series. Obviously it signals the beginning of the end
for him.
Hannibal’s conversation with Bedelia about snails, fireflies,
sheep, and sheepdogs represents the doctor’s attempt to justify his dangerous
behavior by insisting on the primacy of the food chain. Firefly offspring eat
snails; sheepdogs have an innate desire to savage sheep even if their
conditioning is supposed to keep them from doing it. “Contorno” keeps returning
to the image of the monstrous firefly dotted with snails that Will created at
the end of “Secondo” because it represents an inversion of the established
patterns of animal behavior. Will is making human art. Snails are eating a
firefly (of sorts). All bets are off as to who comes out on top, and Hannibal has
made a grave miscalculation. Unfortunately, Hannibal’s lack of discretion still
spells doom for Pazzi, who decides that the “half-life” of the honor he could
regain for himself and his family name by apprehending Hannibal in the name of
justice is outweighed by the thirty pieces of silver he could acquire by
selling the doctor out to Mason. I have no idea how Pazzi thought he was going
to get away with taking a fingerprinted knife right out from under Hannibal’s
nose (one that he just put down and was bound to miss). Hannibal ought to have
at least gotten Pazzi into his apartment or somewhere less public to kill him,
but, then again, Pazzi should have known better than to step into the lair of “Il
Mostro” alone and at night.
Will exists on the fringes of this episode. His travels
with Chiyo do yield a mention of Hannibal’s aunt Lady Murasaki, but her
attendant’s motivations remain inscrutable. She knows Hannibal’s location
somehow and tosses Will off the back of the train because, she argues, a
violent gesture is the only kind he understands. What is the message here,
then? Chiyo does not see herself as a killer—at least, she does not continually
replay the act of killing her former prisoner in her head, suggesting that she
either forgives herself or is a bit of a psychopath herself. The teaser for
next week shows her setting the sights of a rifle on Hannibal, so she clearly
plans to kill him for his treatment of her (still an ambiguous question mark
for the most part) and his duplicity in having her guard and harm what seems to
have been an innocent man. Does she toss Will off the train to protect him or
to keep him from stealing her own revenge? Either way, she clearly thinks
little of their shared revelation that he must kill Hannibal to stop himself from
transforming into him.
On the fringe of the fringe this week, we have Mason and
Alana continuing their plan to have Hannibal captured and eaten. Although Mason’s
aggressive sexual taunts are beginning to irritate me (after only two episodes), it is nice to have him
cut through the faux-artistry at times with a disgusting, crass spin on the
show’s preoccupation with food and eating. Sadly, Margot is missing from these
brief visits to the Verger home.
There are still two episodes left until we hit Red Dragon proper. Next week is “Dolce,”
which means “sweet,” suggesting that we are having dessert… “Just desserts”
perhaps? At any rate, the meal is winding down. The following week is “Digestivo,”
which refers to a drink that comes before or after a meal, apparently to aid
digestion.[1] That title in particular is ripe with meaning. On the one hand,
it seems that the story of Hannibal in the wild is drawing to a close, but a
new chapter of the story is also beginning. Given that the process of digestion
involves mulling over the meal that has been consumed, it stands to reason that
“Dolce” could settle the principle conflict of the first half of the season
while “Digestivo” deals with the resulting fallout.
Note:
[1] I’m using a simple “_____
meaning” search to get this information, so there may be additional nuance here
I’m missing.
