Elizabeth Sandifer

THE GREAT RED DRAGON: After thirty-three episodes named after food, we change gears abruptly to episodes named after works of art by William Blake. This episode does not designate a specific work but rather a series of four paintings in a larger series of water colors illustrating the Bible completed between 1800 and 1806 four of which have titles beginning “The Great Red Dragon.” Thankfully we still have food to illustrate this episode as part of the delightfully barmy decision to let Hannibal still cook in prison, and we can get on to the Blake works starting next episode. 

Although Time has on a few occasions in its history had articles on Blake exhibitions, he is not generally considered cover material, and if he were it seems unlikely The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun would be the image gone for. But for all its mild silliness, there’s a certain logic to having Dolarhyde encounter the Great Red Dragon in a print magazine, given that Dolarhyde exists in a constant tension with modernity, as we’ll get to.

The first thing to be emphasized about Dolarhyde is his intense physicality—he is, as they say, a beast. This is something of a novelty in Hannibal—there’ve been a handful of killers whose physicality has mattered in some sense (Randall Tier and Georgia Madden spring to mind), but none where the basic threat and danger of them is so rooted in raw puissance. 

Finally the influence runs in the opposite direction as Hannibal shamelessly rips off Sherlock.

One step away from the outright defining image of Hannibal. It is notable, compared to other depictions of Hannibal in a cell, for its relative lushness—Hannibal’s cell is large and decorated with an ornateness that contrasts utterly with the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane as depicted in Seasons One and Two, and he’s afforded a myriad of luxuries unlike the sparse hells usually associated with his incarceration. There are a number of reasons for the change. First, Hannibal here is a character we’ve spent thirty-three episodes with already, and does not need to be a beast at the heart of a terrible dungeon in order to be scary. Second, and somewhat contradictorily, Hannibal here is not monstrous in the same way as in previous versions. Hannibal has made much more peace with the inherent tension of revulsion and adoration the monster in a horror movie elicits. A grand room from which Hannibal grants audiences to lesser creatures is fully in line with what this version of the character is.

ALANA BLOOM: Congratulations, Hannibal. You’re officially insane.

HANNIBAL: There’s no consensus in the psychiatric community what I should be termed.

ALANA BLOOM: You’ve long been regarded by your peers in psychiatry as something entirely Other. For convenience, they term you a monster.

HANNIBAL: What do you term me?

ALANA BLOOM: I don’t. You defy categorization.

The previous episode asked whether Alana could ever have understood Hannibal. Certainly her attempted distinction between defiance of categorization and monstrosity points towards “no,” although the fault is just as plausibly Fuller and Lightfoot’s.…

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DIGESTIVO: An after-dinner (and after-coffee) drink such as grappa or limoncello. As we’ve completed the actual Italian portion of our adaptation of Hannibal in order to return to the US, this is on the whole sensible.

JACK CRAWFORD: Hannibal Lecter, il Mostro di Firenze, narrowly escapes the Questura. That how the story goes?

INSPECTOR BENETTI: Missed him by that much. The good Dottor Lecter is once more in the wind. But he left one last victim. Open him the way Lecter opened the other one. Open him all the way.

Something of a rarity in Hannibal, Benetti is an utter shithead who gets to display this act of staggering and monstrous corruption without any consequences. He disappears from the narrative entirely, having nothing to contribute past this point. Indeed, this is the last scene to be set in Italy, and there is essentially no unfinished business there, this dickbag excepted. 

CHIYOH: You’re sitting at Hannibal’s table. You know him. You know Will.

JACK CRAWFORD: I know them. They are identically different, Hannibal and Will.

This is a deeply odd time for Jack to lapse into gnomic hedging, even if it is generally his default state. “Identically different” is a particularly sub-par contribution to the genre, saying little (and nothing Chiyoh doesn’t already know) and doing so in a way that is downright ostentatious in its capacity to frustrate. He is admittedly heavily drugged, but “identically different” manages the impressive feat of not actually describing Will and Hannibal’s mirrored quality in any particularly accurate way.

MASON VERGER: There’s a hush over Muskrat Farm, Cordell, like the quiet of the old Sabbath. Smells like salvation.

As we prepare to say goodbye to Mason Verger, let’s pause to savor him dramatically unfurling Harris’s scene description as an aside to Cordell in an attempt to amp up the moment. Although his scenery-chewing “smells like salvation” is a step down from Harris’s almost Trumpian folow-up that “Privately, [Mason] compared his accomplishment to the discovery of radium.” 

ALANA BLOOM: I appreciate wanting to kill Hannibal Lecter. I am not without benefit from that.

MASON VERGER: Can’t make good on his promise to murder you if he’s dead.

ALANA BLOOM: But he’s not dead. Play with your food, Mason, and you’ll give it the opportunity to bite back.

MASON VERGER: Oh, I’m not playing, Dr. Bloom.

ALANA BLOOM: Hannibal is. He’s always playing.

Alana speaks damning prophecy here while navigating a tricky set of competing concerns; she’s previously expressed a desire to sell Mason out and get Hannibal into FBI custody. That seems frustrated at the moment, but pushing for Hannibal’s fast death undermines her stalling for time to save Will. 

MASON VERGER: You boys remind me of that German cannibal who advertised for a friend, then ate the friend’s penis with him before he died. Tragedy being, the penis was overcooked. Go to all that trouble to eat a friend, and you overcook his penis. They ate it anyway. They had to, they committed. But they didn’t enjoy it.

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DOLCE: Dessert. Nobody particularly gets their just ones here, so let’s call this a case of running out of both course names and titles in this phase of the series. 

The bath has been a fragile refuge for Bedelia over the first half of this season. Here she sacrifices this safe position, turning it over to Hannibal as she cleans his wounds after his fight with Jack. This, however, contains its own form of power, as we will shortly see.

WILL GRAHAM: Jack  .

There is an odd understatement and contrivance to this reunion – Will pops up in Florence with improbable speed and simply arrives by Jack’s side, with their reunion almost entirely underplayed. But for all that this violates scads of normative rules about how narrative functions, it’s tremendously effective. The reunion between them that mattered was in “Apertivo.” The significance of this is simply that it allows the plot to move forward, and so it does.

JACK CRAWFORD: And Hannibal would slip away. Would you slip away with him?

WILL GRAHAM: Part of me will always want to.

JACK CRAWFORD: You have to cut that part out.

A simple and moving confession on Will’s part. Jack’s response is fundamentally inadequate, asking something of Will that he cannot possibly give – the “have you tried not being gay” of addictions to cannibalistic serial killing,

HANNIBAL: I want to be able to draw these streets from memory. I want to be able to draw the Palazzo Vecchio and the Duomo.

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: You won’t be coming back here for a very long time.

HANNIBAL: Memories of Florence will be all I have. Florence is where I became a man. I see my end in my beginning.

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: All of our endings can be found in our beginnings. History repeats itself and we can’t escape it.

Bedelia’s fatalism is essentially a restatement of Aristotelean plot structure, and thus an overwhelmingly safe bet for someone currently inside a serialized television show. Her real concerns, however, are not so much Hannibal as herself and her end, as evinced by her use of the first person plural and by the next exchange,.

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: I knew you were intending to eat me and I knew you had no intention of doing it hastily.

HANNIBAL: Would be a shame not to savor you.

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: I haven’t quite marinated long enough for your tastes.

And here we see the exquisite and frankly mad brinkmanship of Bedelia’s position – her compulsion to study and observe Hannibal wedged right up against her knowledge of how that will inevitably play out. And yet in this moment at least, she navigates an escape, getting Hannibal to, at least temporarily, leave her undigested. 

CORDELL: A Buddhist singing bowl. The gong represents the start of a new day.

MASON VERGER: Buddhists don’t eat meat.

CORDELL: This isn’t meat. This is man.

Mason’s planned consumption of Hannibal is a vulgar inversion of Hannibal’s tastes. Where Hannibal eats people to show that he is more than human, Mason eats them precisely because they are human, viewing the act of consumption as elevating himself.…

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CONTORNO: A side dish, typically served with the secondo. This episode is a last chance to do small stuff before the major fireworks of the first arc of the season go off, but more to the point, as we will see, is in a meaningful sense focused on a side character. 

CHIYOH: On still evenings, when the air was damp after a rain, we played a game. Hannibal would burn all kinds of barks and incense for me to identify by scent alone. He was charming the way a cub is charming, a small cub that grows up to be like one of the big cats.

WILL GRAHAM: One you can’t play with later.

The game is more or less a direct quote from Hannibal Rising, and the nominal origin of Hannibal’s supernatural sense of smell. Although it is notable that the game is played with burnt objects, so that what is identified is not the smell of the thing, but the smell of its destruction.  In her analogy for his charm, meanwhile, we have something that’s almost diametrically opposite from Will’s “pathetic wretch that failed to die” assessment, suggesting an early and seemingly innate grandeur to Hannibal. It is difficult, as we get into the depths of the show’s third season, to argue that Chiyoh does not have the right of it.

WILL GRAHAM: He comes in the guise of a mentor, but it’s distress that excites him.

This does not in fact describe Hannibal’s initial approach to Will, in which he was largely the manufacturer of the distress. Indeed, Will appears to have Hannibal wrong here. Hannibal certainly does do this on occasion, most obviously with Abigail, but Will is wrong to treat Hannibal’s tendency towards mentorship as insincere. As Chiyoh’s incense story shows, he really does enjoy the role of teacher, which is unsurprising given that the role leads directly towards something that clearly excites Hannibal more than distress: transformation.

CHIYOH:  How do you know Hannibal’s in Florence?

WILL GRAHAM: Botticelli.

It’s interesting that Will’s answer is not, in fact, the double murder at the university, that being the thing that Bedelia assumed would bring attention to Hannibal. (Indeed, so far as I can tell nobody ever really makes anything of Anthony Dimmond’s murder at all – later in this episode, in fact, Pazzi calls Sogliato the second person to disappear.)

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: Almost anything can be trained to resist its instinct. A shepherd dog does not savage the sheep.

HANNIBAL: But it wants to.

I am not an expert on dog psychology, and far too lazy to commit to depth in researching this, but this certainly seems as though Hannibal is projecting, if only because of the research suggesting that dogs’ default behavior is in fact that of a profoundly lazy scavenger. (That and the people I’ve talked to who have pet collies that have never seen sheep, and who instead attempt to herd their families into a single room.) Nevertheless, this is a fantastic exchange, mostly because the discussion of animal psychology paints a vivid image for the real subject, human psychology, and the suggestion that human law and civilization is a thin veneer constantly threatened by an underlying savagery.…

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Check back tomorrow for the annual Eruditorum Press ebook sale, and Wednesday (probably later in the day) for my Twice Upon a Time review.

APERITIVO: The Italian equivalent of the apéritif, i.e. a before dinner drink. Eagle-eyed readers may note that this is the fourth episode of the season. The joke (and it’s a solid one) is that we’ve finally flashed back to answering what actually happened in the wake of “Mizumono,” and so this is the chronological first episode of the season. Hannibal – for all your highbrow narrative/Italian menu structure gags.

MASON VERGER: Are you wearing makeup? How long does it take you to put on your face in the morning?

DR. CHILTON: Now that I’ve got the routine down, no time at all.

MASON VERGER: Tell you what. You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.

There is something trolling about revealing Chilton’s fate from “Yakimono” before getting to Alana. Unfortunately, taken in the context of the general problems Alana has as a character, it feels vaguely mean-spirited, with Alanna being treated as an object of peril in a way that Will, Jack, and Abigail were not. Still, reintroducing Chilton opposite Mason Verger and having them bond over facial disfigurement is a nice touch.

Mason Verger, recast as Joe Anderson. The fact that his makeup is dramatically different to begin with does a decent job of masking the recasting, although Anderson is inclined to play the part with more subdued menace than Michael Pitt’s more over the top perverse relish.

The first appearance of William Blake in Hannibal. He’ll come up again soon. The painting is the Ancient of Days, and is the frontispiece to Europe a Prophecy. The figure within is Urizen, Blake’s mad demiurge of tyrannical reason. This appears to be a bespoke version of the image held at the Whitworth Art Museum in Manchester, which they suggest dates from the end of Blake’s life. (Blake did late-career versions of most of his major works with particularly ornate and detailed coloring, although the Whitworth’s version is frankly inferior to the one in Copy K of Europe a Prophecy.)

The detail of Mason owning the artwork is faithful to Hannibal, where it’s described as a “a passable print” that is nevertheless draped in black to mourn the passing of Mason’s father. Harris (or perhaps simply Starling within the book) mis-identifies it as “God measuring with his calipers,” but who’s counting? If one assumes a thorough bit of reasoning for this detail, it would point towards Verger’s role as a deranged puppetmaster attempting to control events, though to be perfectly honest it’s a pretty weird detail.

DR. CHILTON: How do you relieve the agony of waiting for Dr. Lecter’s capture? What do you fantasize about? I wonder what would happen if Hannibal Lecter was in your hands.

MASON VERGER: I worry we’re heading into territory not secured by your fee. I think I need to look elsewhere for someone to tend to my emotional well-being.

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