‘Hannibal’ Recap: Losing Face

Never let it be said that the news of its cancellation made Hannibal any less Hannibal. On the contrary, even though the man himself was barely in it, tonight’s episode was one of the most Hannibalish Hannibals ever to Hannibal. It nested flashbacks within flashbacks, toyed with the flow of time, danced back and forth between fantasy and reality, remixed past events like an accomplished DJ, and was insanely gory.

It will be left to scholars to determine whether opening “Apertivo,” this week’s ep, with a slow-motion closeup of a bullet entering a man’s face and exiting through the back of his head in a geyser of viscera influenced NBC’s decision to cancel the series days before it aired. But the fact remains: Hannibal is, without exaggeration, one of the most visually and narratively audacious shows in the entire history of television. It’s to the Peacock Network’s credit that they let it get away with murder for as long as they did.

And I’m not just talking about whatever induced psychogenic fugue state the Standards & Practices people must have been put in to allow full-on Hellraiser levels of violence to run in what was once the Thursday night Must-See TV timeslot. Think about the leap of faith required to take this episode, which essentially establishes the groundwork for every character on the show following last year’s season-ending bloodfest save Hannibal himself, and air it fourth.

It’s an experiment in deliberate dislocation: threaten the lives of all your heroes to close a season, then start the next one half a world a way, focusing only the man who (might have) killed them. Slowly roll them back into the story, without truly explaining how they got from there to here. In one notable case — that of Abigail Hobbs — spend most of an hour treating her as alive before revealing that she’s dead. In another — that of Alana Bloom — wait till you’re a month into the season before telling us anything about this before-the-title player’s fate at all. Then, and only then, jump backward through time to before the beginning of the season and set up the relationships and goals that drive not only the episodes to come, but the ones we’ve already seen. Both creator/showrunner Bryan Fuller and all his creative and business partners in this crazy-ass enterprise took a tremendous risk by structuring Season Three this way. I’m genuinely uncertain that we’ve ever seen anything like it.

The truly perverse thing about all this — the astonishing gore, the math-rock complexity — is that this week’s episode is stuffed with good old-fashioned plot payoff. Tops on the list: Will Graham’s long-overdue explanation for why he called Hannibal to warn him that the FBI was closing in. “I wanted him to run,” he mutters to Jack Crawford, who nearly lost his life to Lecter after Will dropped him a line. “Because he was my friend…and because I wanted to run away with him.”

Needless to say, this complicates the image of Will as a heroic figure considerably. Yes, Hannibal himself is responsible for the broken state in which Graham finds his psyche these days, and yes, Hannibal had already sussed out that Will and Jack were running game on him when he used his superhuman sense of smell to detect the scent of a still-living Freddie Lounds on Will even after he’d supposedly killed her. In those senses, Will is neither truly responsible for his action, nor did it really make a difference. Still, as with his attempt to have Lecter killed earlier in the second season, Will crossed a line by trying to rescue Hannibal from the consequences of his crimes in an effort to maintain, as he puts it, “a mutually unspoken pact to ignore the worst in each other in order to continue enjoying the best.” If you’d concocted other, less unsavory reasons for the call — mine was that Will knew Jack would be coming to Hannibal alone so he tried to spook Lecter away rather than allow his FBI colleague to walk into a lethal ambush — you’ve got to let them go. For that moment, at least, Will truly was Hannibal’s man.

Now? It’s hard to say. A lot changed for everyone during that climactic bloodbath, as we saw last night. Hannibal’s deliberate murder of Abigail might have changed the equation for Will, just as getting dumped out the window has apparently turned the once genteel Dr. Alana Bloom into a spirit of vengeance. How else to explain her willingness to team up with as noxious a figure as maimed Mason Verger?

Dealing with this cackling creep was a bridge too far for freaking Frederic Chilton, for chrissakes, a guy whose thirst for fame and a sense of superiority knows no bounds. That Alana rushes in where Chilton fears to tread is a concerning development indeed.

So too is the arrival on the scene of Cordell, Mason Verger’s manservant. Look familiar?

He should: He’s True Detective’s goddamn Yellow King. When you cast TV’s most notorious serial killer as a mere henchman, it says something about the hellscape you’ve constructed.

Which makes Will’s episode-ending voyage by sailboat across to Europe, where his story began a couple episodes back, less of a trans-Atlantic journey and, in an echo of Jack Crawford’s euthanization of his ailing wife Bella, more a symbolic crossing of the Styx. He’s headed to the underworld and into the unknown — the two places where Hannibal is most at home.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) is a freelance writer who lives with Diet Coke and his daughter, not necessarily in that order, on Long Island.
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