Ideas may be bulletproof, but nobody’s tried plasma rifles
Another Thursday, another Eruditorum Presscast, this time with Daniel Harper and I talking about Smile, which neither of us disliked particularly, and which both of us found loads to complain about.
If that sounds fun, listen here. If that doesn’t sound fun, LISTEN ANYWAY OR WE’LL TURN YOU TO FERTILIZER.…
COQUILLES: Coquilles are shells, referring either to shellfish like oysters or to casseroles served in a shell-shaped dish. The poetic meaning would involve something about how people are just shells for the higher angelic spirit within. The crass (and likely intended) meaning is a visual pun based on what happens when you flay wings off of someone’s back.
POLICE OFFICER: Do you have a history of sleepwalking, Mr. Graham?
WILL GRAHAM: I’m not even sure I’m awake now.
The best interpretation of this line, of course, is that even Will has noticed the weird way in which the sky moves at the wrong speed and fucking stags keep showing up, and has come to realize he lives his life in a strange and murderous dreamscape. Either way, though, he’s right.
HANNIBAL: I’d argue good old-fashioned post traumatic stress. Jack Crawford has gotten your hands very dirty.
WILL GRAHAM: Wasn’t forced back into the field.
HANNIBAL: I wouldn’t say forced. Manipulated would be the word I’d choose.
Manipulation is a vital yet inchoate topic in Hannibal, and this line sets up much, both about the next episode and about Jack. Later in the episode, as Jack tells Will that he’d feel guilty about all the murders he didn’t help stop if he returned to teaching (a statement designed in part to ensure he would), the blunt reality that Jack is an exceedingly manipulative man. This does not mean that his genial and reasonable persona is a facade – he is legitimately a good person who seeks to make the world a better place by preventing murders. But his goodness is ruthless, and he does not question it, which can and does prove tragic for those pulled along in its wake.
JACK CRAWFORD: Mr. and Mrs. Anderson according to the register. Mutilated, displayed. Thought it might be the Chesapeake Ripper but no surgical trophies were taken.
This marks the first mention of the Chesapeake Ripper, setting up “Entrée,” where that plot finally begins in earnest. This is a somewhat odd decision – this plot starts up early enough to have clearly been in mind all along, and yet it’s curiously and conspicuously absent from the initial setup, in ways that, through the first four episodes, actively fail to make sense. The biggest of these, of course, is a matter of narrative necessity – Will can’t make the obvious connection between the copycat killer and the Chesapeake Ripper because the end-of-season plot hinges on him not noticing it. Nevertheless, the fact that Will has clearly been consulted on this case at some point seems like something that should have come up in his early conversations with Jack.
JACK CRAWFORD: Who’s mocking who here?
WILL GRAHAM: He’s not mocking them. He’s transforming them.
Budish’s killings are a tacit mirror of Francis Dolarhyde’s, with the person being transformed through the acquisition of wings being the victim instead of the killer. Notably, where Dolarhyde seeks to transform into a demonic figure, Budish transforms his victims into angels, furthering the sense of him occupying the negative space around the absent (and as of yet unmentionable) Dolarhyde.…
It’s hard to avoid the “damn with faint praise” opening of “well it’s better than In the Forest of the Night.” In a whole bunch of very obvious ways, after all, it is. The balance between the ridiculous and the dramatic is better struck. Cottrell-Boyce sets himself the non-trivial Ark in Space challenge of spending half the episode with nothing but the TARDIS crew wandering around an alien setting figuring out the rules, and he generally rises to the challenge. And there’s a sense that he’s figured out what the program can and can’t do well, and so is avoiding pitfalls like relying almost entirely on child actors or an outlandish visual spectacle that’s ultimately going to amount to throwing some traffic lights in the middle of a Welsh forest and pretending it’s good enough.
The “damn with faint praise” aspect, however, comes from the fact that you can’t actually put the bar much higher than “oh, hey, Cottrell-Boyce avoided fucking up this time.” The script still never soars. Worse, as with In the Forest of the Night, the moments where it tries to soar are generally its weak points. The script has an awkward habit of leering in and insisting that you find it clever, and these bits don’t often correspond to when it’s being clever. The repetition of the “skeleton crew” joke twice in rapid succession and the thickly laid on “can’t you call the police” line are the two most obvious examples. But equally frustrating are the things it doesn’t unpack – the declaration that the Vardies are a form of sentient life isn’t set up nearly well enough, and more broadly the resolution is full of ideas that are actually worth exploring, but that the script has left no time to explore because it wanted to be an ostentatious two-hander for a while.
Another way of looking at this, then, is that Cottrell-Boyce has retreated emphatically to Doctor Who standards. We’ve seen this story before, varyingly as New Earth, Planet of the Ood, Silence in the Library, The Girl Who Waited, and probably a few others I can’t be bothered to think of. And fine, we’ve clearly seen next week’s before as well, but Sarah Dollard can at least be trusted to find new angles on things. Cottrell-Boyce, on the other hand, ends up using the Doctor Who standards to carry the weight that his actual scripting can’t.
The most straightforwardly clear of these standards, of course, is the “new companion sees the future for the first time” template. And this is the clear point of spending more than half the episode as a two-hander – to give Bill a nice long stretch of time to settle in and define herself in the companion role. In this regard, Cottrell-Boyce has been given a rough brief. The last time another writer was handed a new companion’s second story it was Neil Cross doing The Rings of Akhaten, which actually shot quite late in the Series 7 block.…
Right! So apparently we’re doing podcasts after all! Thanks to everyone who backed the Patreon and made this happen. That link there where it says “backed the Patreon” is a link to the Patreon, btw, and you can click it and give me even more money.
Anyway, I’m joined this week by our very own Jane Campbell to talk about “The Pilot.” That link is to the podcast. You know, if you were confused.…
ŒEUF: One of the least nuanced titles (and indeed episodes) of the show, œuf simply means eggs, a straightforward reference to the episode’s themes of family and parentage.
WILL GRAHAM: Sometimes at night, I leave the lights on in my little house and walk across the flat fields. When I look back from a distance, the house is like a boat at sea. It’s really the only time I feel safe.
One of the more curious interpolations of Harris’s original novels, this comes from his 2000 introduction to Red Dragon in which he describes the circumstances of writing it, working in a small shotgun house in a cotton field while taking care of family in Mississippi. Fuller’s addition (this scene having been imported from the previous episode, where it originally preceded Hannibal and Abigail’s end-of-episode encounter) is that Will feels safe when he does this. This is curious – the security and isolation of his house as a boat in the sea coming only when he is outside of the boat, lost in the darkness of the vast sea. This suggests that safety, for Will, is a sort of dissociative state, only attainable when he is outside of himself.
WILL GRAHAM: I got so close to him. Sometimes I felt like we were doing the same things at various times of the day. Like I was eating or showering or sleeping at the same time he was.
HANNIBAL: Even after he was dead?
WILL GRAHAM: Even after he was dead.
HANNIBAL: Like you were becoming him.
WILL GRAHAM: I know who I am.
The use of “becoming” foreshadows Red Dragon, but the larger point here is the clarification as to why Will requires dissociation to feel safe: because the thing he is afraid of is himself. In other words, the surface bucolic tranquility of the image (and indeed of Will) is a feint – the point is the isolation that it provides Will, an isolation that can only be completed by removing himself from the equation as well.
WILL GRAHAM: Table has been set. Family dinner. I wasn’t invited. I take my seat at the empty plate. My seat. My place setting, next to Mrs. Turner. I am the guest of honor.
“Œuf” occupies a strange position in Hannibal. Fuller had the episode pulled from the running order, with “Coquilles” airing in its place and the arc-relevant scenes of “Œuf” being released online. The cited reason was the social climate following the Sandy Hook Massacre, but the episode’s resemblance to those events is at best oblique. Indeed, pulling it was in many regards odd, in that it’s the episode with by far the tamest actual murders in it. One suspects that the reasoning was at least partially prosaic – “Œuf” is something of the black sheep of Hannibal. It’s the only episode in which neither Fuller nor his main deputy on the show Stephen Lightfoot have a writing credit, and it is consistently a tonal mismatch with the series. At the heart of it is the logic of the murders themselves, which are rooted in a “true crime” psychology you’d expect to see on a dozen other crime-of-the-week shows, as opposed to in the phantasmagoria of excess that Hannibal actually trades in.…
I’ll confess, I went into this with no small amount of pessimism. It was hard (and still is, really) to imagine Moffat crafting a better way to go out than Series Nine. Sherlock felt so utterly tired and creatively spent that it became easy to fear that Moffat was simply done. The Return of Doctor Mysterio was neither here nor there. So it was easy to assume that we were already past the peak in terms of what I wanted out of Moffat writing Doctor Who. And with the sure to be frustrating Chibnall era looming, well, my excitement’s definitely short of 100%. None of that’s changed based on The Pilot. That’s not to say I didn’t like the episode or anything. It was fun; in no way a classic, but Moffat’s season-openers generally aren’t. It’s just a sort of necessary bit of context. My initial setting here is cautious engagement.
And perhaps more to the point, that feels like the mood. I’ve been thinking about the Capaldi stretch of TARDIS Eruditorum, which I reckon will happen in 2018, Patreon willing. And obviously, there’s a Pop Between Realities on Brexit and the awful Doctor Who-less shitstorm that was 2016. I don’t think there’s been as obvious a Pop Between Realities since Jekyll. Which implicitly asks the question “what does it mean to do Doctor Who in the age of Brexit and Trump,” which is of course an awful question in the same way that “what does it mean to do Doctor Who after 9/11” was, but it’s a real one that asks itself, stupid and trite as it is. And of course there’s never been an era of Doctor Who that’s up to that task any more than there was one that was up to any other vast cultural task one sets upon a fucking kid’s show, but it’s worth saying, all the same, that the fandom mood going into The Pilot was not exactly one that seemed to think Moffat was going to acquit himself particularly well in those terms.
Let’s start with the title, then, with all its contradictions. On the one hand, an overt promise of newness, actively flagging the episode as a jumping on point. On the other hand, the paratext of Doctor Who never drops out. The writer, lead actor, and probably both members of the supporting cast are all going away in twelve episodes and the show is getting a complete overhaul. It’s the beginning, but the moment has been prepared for.
Within the context of this self-consciously late period reinvention the focus drifts naturally to Bill, who is the actual primary focus of this episode. Broadly speaking, she’s a solid creation. The companion who knows sci-fi tropes is one of those ideas that’s simultaneously obvious and never actually been done, and Moffat’s approach to it, whereby she knows tropes as opposed to making specific references, is a good way of keeping it from falling into most of the more blatant traps of the concept.…
POTAGE: A thick soup, and a rather striking shift in the heartiness of courses that would probably destabilize a meal coming before egg and oyster courses. In this case, it flags the fact that this is an episode concerned entirely with the larger arc as opposed to with a killer-of-the-week.
WILL GRAHAM: I like you as a buffer. I also like the way you rattle Jack. He respects you too much to yell at you no matter how much he wants to.
ALANA BLOOM: And I take advantage of that.
For all the problems with her character (see next note), Alana is quickly established as intelligent and competent. But even here there’s a certain drabness to her effectiveness, which stems at best from authorial fiat and at worst because he’s unwilling to yell at a woman. And given Jack’s relationships with other female characters, at worst is more likely. As for Alanna taking advantage, well, it’s tough to identify when she does this as opposed to either going along with Jack or protesting ineffectually.
ALANA BLOOM: Brought you some clothes. Thought a change would feel good. I guessed your size. Anything you don’t want keep the tags on. I’ll return it. And I brought you some music, too.
ABIGAIL: Your music?
ALANA BLOOM: If there isn’t anything you like, I got a stack of iTunes gift cards. I’ve got a stack of gift cards. I don’t do well redeeming gift cards.
ABIGAIL: Probably says something about you.
ALANA BLOOM: Probably does.
But what? To some extent this question has no answer. Alanna is after allthe show’s great cipher, a character whose purpose is first to prevent the show from being a complete sausage festival (quite the job), and second to be whatever else the show happens to need. This sort of characterization gestures broadly to the motiveless quirkiness of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a role Caroline Dhavernas and Bryan Fuller had already explored and complicated more than a decade earlier in Wonderfalls. Hannibal, however, is not a place where pixies thrive, and these traits never quite add up to anything sensible.
ABIGAIL HOBBS: I don’t know how I’m going to feel about eating her after all this.
GARRET JACOB HOBBS: Eating her is honoring her. Otherwise it’s just murder.
The obvious reaction to this is the oft-giffed “cool motive, still murder” bit of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, but that’s manifestly not the ethical system Hannibal means to be working under. This is played as a desperate justification, a point emphasized by the original script, which had Elise Nichols’s body visibly mounted on the wall in this scene, thus moving the revelation that Abigail knew what her father was up to forward by several episodes. But the scene also plays Abigail and her father’s relationship as one with real tenderness, affection, and love. As before, the show is taking the idea that his cannibalism is a means of honoring his victims utterly seriously. Garret Jacob Hobbs isn’t wrong to insist that what he does isn’t “just murder.” …
Just a heads up to everyone in case you’re just sort of sitting there going “oh, the Patreon always hits whatever goal Phil sets,” we’re currently only $1 over the threshold where I’ll be reviewing the next season of Doctor Who. And that’s because someone upped their pledge from $1 to $9 to ensure it would happen. Basically, what that means is that if anyone’s payment doesn’t go through at the end of the month, reviews will stop. Meanwhile, We’re a whopping $19 away from me doing podcasts for every episode, which is starting to look like it probably won’t. So this is a post, a week before the series starts, where I conspicuously link the Patreon in the hopes that you’ll go contribute.
I know that the world is awful and there are better things to spend money on than this site. And I’m honestly OK with not doing podcasts, or hell, not doing reviews. The idea of watching Moffat’s last season with the same intellectual privacy I watched his first has a real appeal. Equally, the podcasts were a blast last year and it just wouldn’t feel like a season of Doctor Who without it completely taking over the site, y’know? So I hope you can find a buck or two in your budget to toss towards the Patreon, because I’d like to do these things. But they take time, and there isn’t enough of that in my life at the moment.
In other news, work continues on both Neoreaction a Basilisk and Eruditorum Volume 7. The former will be out this summer, the latter hopefully this year. I’ll get back to Last War in Albion after Neoreaction a Basilisk is out the door, but that’s occupying my “write extra stuff” time. (Well, this month I’m just being naughty and writing the first chapter of my cyberpunk book because I haven’t had time to write something for myself in a year now and I deserve it.)
Anyway. Thanks to everyone who does support the site, and who supports Jack and Josh in their endeavors. It’s a pleasure writing for you all. And if you do want Eruditorum Presscasts for Season Ten of Doctor Who, here’s that conspicuous Patreon Link again.
See you next Saturday, hopefully.…
We’re currently $11 shy of Doctor Who Season Ten reviews on Patreon, and $31 shy of podcasts. It’s probably not quite that bad, as there are some declined pledges from March that will hopefully straighten out, but if these are things you want, please support the site by backing it on Patreon.
AMUSE-BOUCHE: Literally “mouth amuser,” its function is much the same as an apéritif, but it is a bite-sized food item and thus more substantial, in much the same way that this episode, liberated from the amount of setup and exposition that “Apéritif” had to do, gets to be. A stuffed mushroom cap would be an entirely appropriate choice of amuse-bouche.
The tiered concrete at which his students sit give the sense of Will having retreated back into the bone arena of his skull.
The show’s distinctive establishing shots are as important as its richly saturated color palette in creating its Chesapeake Gothic atmosphere. The time lapse establishing shots, with clouds whizzing overhead, frame what happens as taking place outside of time, in a fractured dreamscape. Fractured time is a recurring motif in the show, where it serves to indicate the blurring of internal and external landscapes. Here the process is virtually literal.
HANNIBAL: You saved Abigail Hobbs’ life. You also orphaned her. It comes with certain emotional obligations, regardless of empathy disorders.
WILL GRAHAM: You were there. You saved her life, too. Do you feel obligated?
HANNIBAL: I feel a staggering amount of obligation. I feel responsibility. I’ve fantasized about scenarios where my actions may have allowed a different fate for Abigail Hobbs.
An endearing quirk of Hannibal’s pathology is that, while he certainly will lie when it’s required of him (“Pork,” for instance.), he prefers not to. This speech is one of the most nuanced. The second two claims are reasonably straightforward – especially “I feel responsibility,” although “fantasized” is the funniest of them. The first, however, is the interesting one, simply because it is honest. Hannibal really does feel just as much paternal attachment to Abigail as Will following what happened. Where Will (somewhat wrongly) views her as something like a human version of one of his rescued dogs, Hannibal is well aware that Jack’s suspicions of her are correct, and his paternal attachment is much more similar to her actual father’s. Which is to say, he both wants her as an apprentice and potential meal.
BEVERLY KATZ: Zeller wanted to give you the bullets he pulled out of Hobbs in an acrylic case, but I told him you wouldn’t think it was funny.
WILL GRAHAM: Probably not.
BEVERLY KATZ: I suggested he turn them into a Newton’s Cradle, one of those clacking swinging ball things.
WILL GRAHAM: Now that would have been funny.
Will’s sense of humor foreshadows his affection for Hannibal, whose aesthetic in his murder tableaus is not entirely dissimilar to making a Newton’s Cradle out of the bullets that killed Garret Jacob Hobbs.
…JACK CRAWFORD: Lecter gave you the “all clear.” Maybe therapy does work on you.
APERTIF: A pre-dinner drink to whet the appetite. In this case, it is an expansion of the Garret Jacob Hobbs case, which, in Red Dragon, is essentially presented as a precursor to a precursor, the case Will worked before Hannibal.
WILL GRAHAM: I shoot Mr. Marlow twice, severing jugulars and carotids with near surgical precision. He will die watching me take what is his away from him. This is my design.
The idiosyncratic “design” sets up the show’s defining perversity: the idea of murder as something that is aestheticized. Significantly, it is Will who introduces this term, whereas Hannibal’s only murder of the episode is Cassie Boyle, which he commits as a pastiche of Garret Jacob Hobbs’s murders. So the two characters begin as doubly opposed. On one level, Hannibal is the creator in that he commits art murders, whereas Will, as the detective interpreting those murders, is the critic. On the other hand, it is Will who is presented as the imaginative figure, whereas Hannibal is reduced to a responsive role, reinterpreting other people’s murders.
It is also worth highlighting what, precisely, the design of the initial murder was. It is not the precision of the kill shot – the technical acumen with which Mr. Marlow’s death is executed. Rather, it is the psychological configuration he wishes to bring about that is the design. There is obviously a degree of megalomania here – a desire towards the demiurgic. But there’s also a healthy dose of a good old-fashioned Ballardian “make the external landscape match the internal one” to it. Regardless, the important takeaway is that murder is about far more than mere meat.
The pendulum is extrapolated from a throwaway line in Red Dragon. It immediately serves to introduce the fractured narrative space of Hannibal, simultaneously dividing space, time, and reality, all in multiple senses.
JACK CRAWFORD: Where do you fall on the spectrum?
WILL GRAHAM: My horse is hitched to a post closer to Aspergers and Autistics than narcissists and sociopaths.
Positioning Will as on the autism spectrum is an interesting move with regards to his stated skill at empathy. In practice the show plays more than a little fast and loose with what exactly it is that Will does, and its resemblance to empathy as conventionally understood is tenuous. Nevertheless, given the common myth of neuroatypical people lacking in empathy, putting Will on the spectrum has to be taken as one of the show’s more charming conceits.
(In practice, neuroatypical people are good at understanding other neuroatypical people, just as neurotypical people are good at understanding other neurotypical people. The construction of empathy as something that only counts when it’s neurotypical serves a disturbing double purpose, both tacitly establishing that neuroatypical people don’t really count as human and routinely being trotted out as a justification for precisely that belief.)
…ALANA BLOOM: Normally I wouldn’t even broach this, but what do you think one of Will’s strongest drives is?
JACK CRAWFORD: Fear. He deals with huge amounts of fear.
