“Neither of us is free. He’s not done.”
Hannibal seems to create a perpetual sense of claustrophobia, engulfing the audience in its characters and their mind games. Everyone in the show is trapped in some way, whether it be through emotional connection or steadfast loyalty or fascination or mere expedience; the walls are closing in as the Earth spins on its axis.
My, what a show.
I’m impressed by how we can go completely, next level bananas, and yet it still feels like the writers aren’t doing it just to do it. Certain things are still being reined in for what will ultimately result in an amazing payoff, and the layers and the mind games and the beautiful imagery and the character work are just seamlessly blending together. The show manages to ratchet up the tension each week without giving in to silly plot twists or contrivances. Truly excellent stuff right here, and we’re not even halfway through the season.
Hannibal Lecter is a fascinating character, but it’s extremely difficult to sympathize with him after we see what’s been done to Beverly. He still possesses a certain amount of humanity, but there’s no denying that he’s also a monster, someone who’d slice Bev up and display her as a form of grotesque, unsettling art.
Hannibal is full of death, but the way the show handles it is so artful.
The various crime scenes dreamed up by the writers showcase a wide variety of imaginative, unique, and truly unsettling imagery, and that’s no different with the bee (BEES?! Sorry, I had to make that reference) corpse this week. However, what I want to expand upon is the idea of death from a psychological and emotional perspective.
Will Graham is on trial.
Interestingly, the trial isn’t necessarily about Will; rather, it’s about how those around him view the situation, view the topic of his innocence, view him as a person. Although the episode veers into a courtroom setting, and although it stumbles a bit due to its place-setting nature, we still are privy to some very interesting character explorations.
“One of these things is not like the other.”
“Sakizuki” opens with a terrifyingly intense sequence, one in which Roland Umber, the man caught in the eye of people from the end of last week’s episode, attempts to escape. The camera follows him as he agonizingly rips himself free, tears through a cornfield, and ultimately plunges to his death.
This right here is art.
Season 1 of Hannibal burst onto the scene with an operatic, intense, and beautiful thirteen episodes that transcended our expectations, and it’s back and better than it was before. When we last left off, the roles of Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham had been switched, leaving Will behind bars and Lecter to take his place in the real world; now, Fuller’s exploring the various nuances and complexities behind the inversion, and it’s some fantastic television.
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