1.13 Savoureux Generally speaking, the first season of most shows, even the good ones, tend to be their worst. Babylon 5, Star Trek: The Next Generation, even Buffy the Vampire Slayer: looking back, you wonder how they ever got renewed. Only a handful have come roaring out of the gates from the very start. Hannibal has been one of those few. And it has ended its first season as strongly as it began. If we had any doubts whatsoever about the depth of the game that Hannibal has been playing, of the sheer scope of his machinations, then Savoureux would definitely quell them. I’m not sure we’ve ever seen Lecter, in any of his incarnations, devise something as complicated or downright thorough as this. His pièce de résistance, of course, is the flies. This last nail in Will’s coffin is a stroke of mastery not only by Lecter, but by Bryan Fuller. A couple of weeks ago, I posited a theory about Dr. Du Maurier possibly being a projection of Lecter’s mind based on some striking similarities between the two characters. Some commenters felt I was reading too much into what we were seeing. But while I was wrong about what we saw meant, in a show like this one, there’s no such thing as reading too much into what we’re seeing. Until we find out that even this was in Lecter’s control – as we have been in Fuller’s control – the entire time. And this is what has made Hannibal such a joy this first season. Some of the elk stuff aside early on (though an argument could be made even in defense of that), I’m not sure there has ever been a network television show this tight. While lush in its cinematography (who would have thought murder and cannibalism could look so delicious?), Hannibal is incredibly economical in just about every way imaginable. Scenes, dialogue, fantasy shots… all are only are long as they must be to accomplish their task in this narrative. This is easy when the series is action-based; show the event and move on. But in a show that is centered around the psychology of the characters, there’s an extremely difficult balance to be maintained between revealing only those emotional aspects necessary to drive the story forward and giving the actors the wonderful emotional scenes that they (and we) crave but which can distract. We get two of these great leanly emotional moments this week. In one, Hannibal sits stoically, except for the unshed tears in his eyes, talking to Du Maurier about his “failure” with Will. “I was so confident in my ability to help him. To solve him.” It appears, on some level, that his emotional reaction to the outcome of his game is real. And certainly, we are getting more and more evidence that he has little to hide from his own shrink: between the discussion about the nature of veal and Du Maurier’s warning over their meal (“You have to be careful, Hannibal. They’re starting to see your pattern.”), it seems obvious that she knows a great deal about Lecter’s true nature, thus leaving him little need to hide much from her. Of course, as he has all season, Fuller keeps us guessing. After all, if she does know what he is, shouldn’t his tears surprise her? But Du Maurier remains as unreadable as ever. And what this lean-ness buys us is so much more story. The sheer amount of ground this season has covered in thirteen short episodes is impressive. But it’s also quite challenging. After all, Fuller cuts so close to the bone that often we are required to do some of the narrative lifting ourselves: because everything is essential and nothing (not even the tertiary forensic characters) is wasted, we are called upon to provide a good deal of the connective tissue. But this has only made the show more satisfying. A good part of the reason that shows like Babylon 5, ST:TNG, and Buffy struggled that first year is because they initially underestimated their audiences. Each became much smarter as the years went on because they came to understand that their audiences were not only intelligent enough to follow them on the paths they eventually took but that we wanted to be challenged to keep up. Which is perhaps why we’ve gotten the series we have: Fuller may have believed he’d be lucky to get a second season or even that he’d get all the way through the first one, so he fit every bit of story he could into these few episodes. The last scene doesn’t read like a cliffhanger really, which is what I think we were all expecting. It feels more like the end of The Usual Suspects. Hannibal is unmasked (at least by Will) but it’s too late, and it’s only in the last few seconds that we get a glimpse at the real evil behind all the events we’ve been witnessing. In other words, had NBC not renewed Hannibal, we would still be left with a riveting, gorgeous, and amazingly complete story. Read Laura’s review of the previous episode, Releves, here. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
