Hannibal season 2

[J.T.]

I will have to watch it On Demand this weekend. NBA Finals is tonight.  I am looking forward for this season to be all Red Dragony and stuff.

[ChesterCopperpot]

Alex Sepinwall has seen the first three - spoiler for one of the episodes

 

   

The second episode features perhaps the single most disturbing image in the show's history, and when the scene featuring it was over, I didn't know whether to laugh, applaud, or schedule a therapy appointment.

 

Given this show - I'm not sure I want to see it

[Reed]

That episode was amazing. Gillian Anderson is so great as a Hitchcock blonde.

 

And Hannibal is totally losing it. He's so obsessed with Will he's willing to risk getting caught just to see him again.

[J.T.]

Logged into my FiOS OnDemand account and watched during lunch.  We're off to a great start!

[(BP)]

I forgot how gorgeous this show looked. It was surprising how quickly they blew through Italy, but I suppose there's a lot to get to if they're doing Red Dragon this season. I love when verbatim lines from the books are snuck into the dialogue.

[Reed]

At first I did have questions like, "How can Hannibal impersonate Dr. Fell so easily in this age of the internet?" "Why isn't Hannibal all over TV or on America's Most Wanted"?

 

Now I think this show is better if you accept that realism has gone out of the window

 

OR

 

Since it's been implied by Bryan Fuller Hannibal is the devil, he has subtle superpowers and can bend the world to his whims. 

[TheVileOne]

Yeah, it's totally unrealistic, but the show has sort of embraced that sort of dark fairytale quality.  Lots of expressionism and abstract sequences.

[Reed]

To be fair, they did try to answer that whole "Why does Baltimore have so many weirdly creative serial killers?" plot hole when Hannibal implied he'd been influencing some insane people on the side.

[piranesi]

Funny thing is I totally buy an Italian museum being that lax in vetting someone if he's wearing a nice tie and is suave as fuck.  It's kind of funny too that they're using Santa Maria dei Fiori as the establishing shot for Hannibal's new apartment.  That's kind of absurd as it's one of the most recognizable buildings on earth.

 

The music was so great.  During the dream sequences they were using fragments of Debussy Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun.  Perfect because we started in Paris and because that piece of music is about a dream.

 

This episode also already had one of the best lines of the whole series "There is no morality, only morale."

 

This is one time, though, that I was annoyed at how much they gave away in the preview after.  They deliberately told us nothing of anyone but Hannibal for the whole episode to keep us guessing, then NBC dumps an entire season's storyline on us in the clips. 

[Reed]

I loved Bedelia's face when she realized Hannibal is fattening her up to eventually eat her, Hansel and Gretel-style.

 

It'll be interesting to see how she plans to get out of this without 1) ending up dinner 2) going to jail. 

[EVA]

I was annoyed by that also, but in one of the post-mortem interviews he did, Fuller said that just because you saw someone in the preview, that doesn't necessarily mean they're alive. With the shows use of everything from flashbacks to hallucinations to just weird dream logic in general, pretty much anything is possible.

But they're probably all alive.

[EVA]

God, the climax of season 2 gets me every time, and I must have watched it a dozen times by now.

[Reed]

Michael Ausellio said he knows about the ending of season 3 and hints there a big twist.

 

I am very intrigued. 

[EVA]

I've been a little suspicious of everything we've seen since the show-y move in the premiere where Hannibal says something like, "Let this be the fairy tale then," and a curtain gets pulled back.

[Reed]

He got caught at the end of season two and season three has all been IN HIS MIND PALACE~!

 

Nonsensical theory but worth considering.  Or not, I guess. 

[TheVileOne]

What a twist!
 

[EVA]

He got caught at the end of season two and season three has all been IN HIS MIND PALACE~!

 

Nonsensical theory but worth considering.  Or not, I guess.

Whatever the ending turns out to be, I'm pretty sure it will involve Hannibal walking tall like the first two seasons.

Nonsensical theory #2: Everybody died at the end of season 2. Season 3 is Hannibal struggling with his grief and imagining a fairy tale world where Will lived to pursue him.

Fuller has said that season 4 would be a drastic departure, and I can't think of much they could do more drastic than kill Will. At this point, Fuller & Co. seem both confident enough in their storytelling and the fact that they're playing with house money in the ratings department that they're willing to try pretty much anything. It's clear from the first two episodes that they wrote this season with zero concern for viewership.

Which is amazing. If only more shows were allowed to exist without concern for anything but the story.

That said, the ratings situation has gotten even worse. The premiere tied a series low, and this week's episode dipped even lower. Season 4 is definitely not going to be on NBC.

[Reed]

There's this whole "what is real and what isn't?" thing hanging over this season and they referenced the mind palace AGAIN on last night's episode near the start. 

 

Yeah, at least some of this isn't really happening and is going on inside Hannibal's head. I just don't know what.

 

Will being dead all along is an interesting idea. I mean, the whole deal with the stream. Will did seem to give up and go along with death, like Hannibal told him to.

[EVA]

And here we have yet another episode with references to mind palaces and fairy tales. A GAME IS AFOOT.

To stretch this nonsensical theory even further, pretty much everything we've seen Will do so far this season could easily be construed as wish fulfillment for Hannibal. In 3.2, we see Will using his keen understanding of Hannibal - he, who, beyond his cannibalistic urges, longs to be understood by another human being above all ese - to track him down and begin the process of reconciling their relationship. Now, we see Will traveling to Hannibal's childhood home - where Hannibal himself claims he can't return - and tidying up some of his leftover business, creating a Hannibal-esque murder tableau in the process.

WILL IS DEAD is going to be my CTHULHU IS GOING TO SHOW UP AT THE END OF TRUE DETECTIVE theory this season.

[J.T.]

Will gets stabbed in the preface to Red Dragon so nothing is going on in the series that isn't according to script.  He will survive and the Red Dragon plot will take hold midway through Season 3.

 

Graham eventually becomes an alcoholic recluse in the interim between Dragon and Silence, that is how they will transition from Will to Clarice Starling as the primary protagonist.

 

Or at least I hope that is what happens.  I know they have license to do what they want, but the only Hardy novel I really dislike is Hannibal.  The transition from Red Dragon to Silence is note perfect and I'd hate for Will to just end up another victim because I like him as a character.

 

Too bad that we probably won't get an extended re-imaging of Silence of the Lambs. I imagine this series will be cancelled midway through this season.

[(BP)]

I think Will is a composite of the book Graham and Clarice. I don't think we'll ever get to Starling even if they could work out the rights to Silence. I liked the ambiguity they left to the Mischa stuff as I'm not a big fan of any of that from the books. Next week looks absurdly and grotesquely fun. Can't wait.

[EVA]

Agree with you about how they've handled Hannibal's past so far. Hannibal Rising was rubbish and one of the worst examples of overexplaining the villain I can think of, so I like that 1) they've created ambiguity about what actually happened at the Lecter estate, and 2) even Hannibal basically said, "Yeah, but none of that really made me what I am."

[piranesi]

And here we have yet another episode with references to mind palaces and fairy tales. A GAME IS AFOOT.

To stretch this nonsensical theory even further, pretty much everything we've seen Will do so far this season could easily be construed as wish fulfillment for Hannibal. In 3.2, we see Will using his keen understanding of Hannibal - he, who, beyond his cannibalistic urges, longs to be understood by another human being above all ese - to track him down and begin the process of reconciling their relationship. Now, we see Will traveling to Hannibal's childhood home - where Hannibal himself claims he can't return - and tidying up some of his leftover business, creating a Hannibal-esque murder tableau in the process.

WILL IS DEAD is going to be my CTHULHU IS GOING TO SHOW UP AT THE END OF TRUE DETECTIVE theory this season.

 

It's not a bad theory given what we've seen so far, but the previews hint at a more conventional story starting back up.  It is really admirably bold how far they have gone in this surreal direction.  I imagine they are losing viewers even among their loyal fans.  It's just so weird and fragmented and hard to follow.  And they have fully committed to exploring this interior monolog style at least for the first part of the season.  This season is like some weird Orson Welles staging of Shakespeare.  It's all memory rooms and cobwebs and people staring into candles.

 

But the Mason Verger stuff looks a lot more normal plot-ish.

 

Still, the dream/story/fairy-tale references are piling up: "Any pain can be borne if you put it into a story."

[TheVileOne]

How much of a sociopath is Bedelia to just sit there watching those two poor schmucks gourd themselves on Hannibal's last victim, with such bemused fascination?  The woman is a freaking nutcase.  

 

Best exchange?

 

"Technically, you killed him."

 

"You killed two people from the Caproni."

"I can only claim one.  Technically."

[EVA]

Also worth noting: Will forcing Chiyoh into a position where she had to kill the prisoner was a mirror of Hannibal causing Bedelia to "technically" kill the guy from the museum.

HURM.