hannibal

SECONDO: The heavier of the two main courses, typically meat-based. This is in no way a heavier or more substantive episode than “Primavera,” so do what you want with that.

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: Forgiveness is too great and difficult for one person. It requires two: betrayer and betrayed. Which one are you?

HANNIBAL: I’m vague on those details.

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: Betrayal and forgiveness are best seen as something more akin to falling in love.

HANNIBAL: You cannot control with respect to whom you fall in love.

Bedelia is recapitulating Bella with her account of forgiveness. Hannibal does not notice this, which speaks to his overall state: Hannibal is sullen, withdrawn, and even pouty here – his “I’m vague on those details” feels like an admission of weakness unlike anything we’ve really seen from him before. It is not quite an admission of regret for “Mizumono,” but there is a clear sense that Hannibal feels as though his response was in some way disproportionate or rash.

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: You’re going to get caught. It’s already been set into motion.

Bedelia glimpses the Aristotlean unities underpinning Hannibal’s reality.

Every season of Hannibal has an early episode that works according to a narrative logic unlike the rest of the series; “Œuf” in Season One, and “Hassun” in Season Two. “Secondo” joins them, putting Hannibal in contact with the classically and unreconstructed gothic. Unlike “generic cop show” and “legal thriller,” this is actually a genre collision with deep roots in Hannibal’s DNA, as opposed to things with deep roots in the NBC primetime schedule.

I groused last week that Will’s “conjuring ghosts” was a thread that was insufficiently pulled on. This, however, where he conjures an imaginary Hannibal to serve as his interlocutor, is clearly a variation on the tendency. But Hannibal is the object of Will’s pursuit – in a normal version of “Will does the crime scene thing,” Hannibal would be the role he steps into. This thus lies somewhere between conjuring up Abigail to accompany him and his usual practice, a reflection of and commentary on the peculiarity of Will and Hannibal’s relationship.

WILL GRAHAM: The spaces in your mind devoted to your earliest years… are they different than the other rooms?

WILL GRAHAM: Are they different than this room?

HANNIBAL: This room holds sound and motion, great snakes wrestling and heaving in the dark. Other rooms are static scenes, fragmentary…

A rare quote from Hannibal Rising, which is entirely appropriate given that this episode is basically the show’s one big concession towards adapting that book. That doing so should produce the seasonly “out of genre” episode speaks volumes about this late contribution to the ouvre, apparently written purely so that Dino De Laurentiis wouldn’t have his own Hannibal Lecter origin piece written. (Fuller himself has suggested he views it as having a slightly more lowly canonical status, noting that he knows the other three Lecter books far better than Hannibal Rising.)

Even to a knowledgeable reader, the discovery of a young Asian woman with a rifle on the Lecter estate is not quite what one would expect, doubly so because it’s not Lady Murasaki, who goes entirely unmentioned in this episode (although she was alluded to in “Kaiseki”).…

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PRIMAVERA: Hoo boy. OK, so the course of an Italian menu between antipasto and secondo is supposed to be “primo.” This is often a pasta course, but can also be a risotto, a soup, or some similar hot course. One such dish certainly could be pasta primavera, which is a pasta and vegetable dish that takes its name from the Italian word for spring, which is “primavera.” This dish, however, is not actually Italian – it’s an American dish dating to the 1970s and likely first prepared in Nova Scotia. And more to the point, “primavera” on its own is not actually a food word at all. In fact this episode belongs more to the titling scheme of the second half of the season, as we’ll see in a bit.

HANNIBAL: I let you know me. See me. A rare gift I’ve given you. But you didn’t want it. 

WILL GRAHAM: Didn’t I? 

HANNIBAL: You would deny me my life. 

WILL GRAHAM: Not your life. 

HANNIBAL My freedom, then. You’d take that from me. Confine me to a prison cell. Do you believe you could change me the way I’ve changed you?

WILL GRAHAM: I already have.

HANNIBAL: Fate and circumstance has returned us to the moment when the teacup shatters. I forgive you, Will. Will you forgive me?

The lengthy reprise of “Mizumono” (the episode does not actually get to new material until around six minutes into it) serves two purposes. First, it addresses the very large “we have no money” problem that Hannibal had acquired by effectively cutting 10% of the episode and replacing it with already filmed material. Second, it reframes the end of “Mizumono” from a cliffhanger to the commencement of an action with an inevitable conclusion, a sense tacitly echoed by the quasi-palindrome of Hannibal’s final line. 

“The third season is the best one” is one of those straightforward critical opinions that doesn’t seem to need extra justification. Part of this is the doomed yet noble way that Fuller responded to the increasing pressure of the show’s declining ratings. Sure, Season Three offers the nominally saleable hook of directly adapting two Harris novels, but it also does shit like an archly symbolic shot of a shattering teacup that then reforms into Will Graham’s face, casually expecting that viewers will take this in stride. The ones that remained did. 

WILL GRAHAM: It’s hard to grasp what would’ve happened, could’ve happened. In some other world… did happen. 

ABIGAIL HOBBS: Having a hard enough time dealing with this world. Hope some of the other worlds are easier on me. 

WILL GRAHAM: Everything that can happen happens. Has to end well, and it has to end badly. Has to end every way it can. This is the way it ended for us. 

ABIGAIL HOBBS: We don’t have an ending. He didn’t give us one yet.

Compare Will’s version of the many worlds hypothesis to Blake’s Eternity – a simultaneity existing outside of time in which all things happen at once.…

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ANTIPASTO: And so we move to Italian cuisine for seven episodes. Antipasto is the starter course, distinct from the amuse bouche or sakizuki in that it is a heavier dish, often with cold meats, as befits this unusually dense premiere.

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: You no longer have ethical concerns, Hannibal. You have aesthetical ones.
HANNIBAL: Ethics become aesthetics.

I have suggested in the past that my interest in Hannibal is that Hannibal presents a vision of the perfected man. This exchange is central to that contention. I had made an assertion along the same lines as Bedelia’s assessment many times prior to “Antipasto” airing (although its relevance was improved in shooting, where the line changed from “ethical problems”), routinely making the claim that I had abandoned ethics in favor of aesthetics. That said, Hannibal’s retort here is, to my mind, flatly incorrect, suggesting that aesthetics are a degraded (or ascended) version of ethics.

My contention, on the other hand, is that aesthetics are in fact the base form of philosophy from which all other forms follow. Our sense of aesthetic pleasure is fundamental knowledge from which our wider understanding of the world is structured. Even epistemology extends from aesthetics – what we recognize as true is rarely based on logical analysis (though even if it were, rationality is little more than a sense of harmony and balance) but on a notion of truth that is clearly akin to beauty or sublimity.

What is crucial about aesthetic judgment is what Kant describes as the “subjective universal” quality of them. They are, in empirical fact, individual and private judgments. But they are made with a sense of normativity – a belief that others ought to agree with them. (Kant believed that this only applied to beauty and sublimity, as opposed to the agreeable [judgments of visceral pleasure – “this human leg tastes good”] and the good [ethics], but this is wrong in both directions. Our notions of agreeableness are clearly made with at least some normative force, whereas ethics are not nearly as objectively determined as he’d like to think.) It is from this sense of normativity that the faculty of taste – the idea that aesthetics can be cultivated and refined. Which is where the notion of the perfected man comes in. Hannibal’s ontological force comes mostly from the fact that he has better taste than anyone else, both in literally sensory terms and in the sense of refined desires. It is this, for instance, that his ability to manipulate so effectively comes from: he understands what the most exquisite temptations are. Similarly, it is what his astonishing capacity for improvisation is based on. It’s not merely a hyper-intelligence and cleverness, but an immediate instinct for what the most interesting course of action would be.

All of which raises the question of what Hannibal’s aesthetics actually are. Which, helpfully, is much of what this episode is about. We can set aside the myriad of accurate but glib answers. Yes, Hannibal detests rudeness and values the confirmation of his own superiority (his line about being “happy to sing for his supper” is particularly funny), but these are obvious details that don’t do much to reveal the whole.…

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MIZUMONO: Dessert. Unlike savoureux, mizumono is in fact sweet, suggesting that the show has allied itself with Hannibal’s perspective as opposed to Will’s.

The shooting script called for a flash forward of Will screaming in pain from the end. Instead the episode begins with a moment of quiet ritual, with Hannibal writing out, in exquisite calligraphy, an invitation to Jack, setting their eventual confrontation as a piece of theater – a staged event the shape of which is defined by formal considerations of etiquette.

The opening sequence, which cuts between both Hannibal and Jack talking to Will and enjoining him to their side in the coming face-off. This is in some regards an odd framing for the episode, in that Will is never really given the chance to take a side, arriving on the scene after Jack and Alanna have already been dispatched. But it’s such a weird and uncanny visual that one is inclined to lay the blame on the denouement for not paying off its setup than on the setup. (Even more uncanny is the reaction shot to this, a split-screen Will.)

The otherwise unmotivated reappearance of Garret Jacob Hobbs – who seems at this point slightly dated in the face of Will’s newer murderous temptations and inclinations – is mostly here to set up the unexpected return of Abigail later in the episode. 

For all that Hobbs is fairly unmotivated foreshadowing that doesn’t work on its own merits, however, it is the excuse for the episode’s best hallucinatory image, and indeed one of the series’ best, as Will’s house is projected into a thicket of branches that implicitly suggest antlers as well. It’s massively oversignified, except that every interpretation works and speaks cogently to Will’s position and state of mind.

Bella’s return and evident deterioration is an unexpected gut punch. Like Bedelia’s return in “Tome-Wan,” its effectiveness springs from a combination of inevitability and a lack of immediate setup. Of course Bella is doing this poorly – we just hadn’t had cause to think about it by dint of not seeing her since “Takiawase.” But her inclusion is a smart and compelling choice – a way of forcing the audience to remember that Jack and Hannibal’s friendship is actually substantive. Bella’s lines about forgiveness not being a verb but rather an event that happens to you are particularly phenomenal, as is her aggrieved “you moved my punctuation mark.” 

Hannibal’s demolition of his life – done, with characteristic irony, out of compassion for the patients who would be exposed to invasive scrutiny in the ensuing scrutiny – is an effective way of flagging the degree to which everything is about to burn down and the stable foundation of the show as “Will and Hannibal solve crimes with the FBI” is about to collapse in favor of something stranger and weirder. 

As may be clear by this point, I am not entirely enthralled by “Mizumono,” which I view as a contrived conclusion to a deeply underwhelming run of episodes that leads into an effective season cliffhanger.…

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TOME-WAN: A miso or vegetable soup with rice. This signifies nothing more than the approaching end of the meal.

WILL GRAHAM: Can you explain my actions? Posit my intentions? What would be your theory of my mind?

HANNIBAL: I have an understanding of your state of mind. You understand mine. We’re just alike. This gives you the capacity to deceive me, and be deceived by me.

WILL GRAHAM: I’m not deceiving you, Dr. Lecter. I’m just pointing out the snare around your neck. What you do about it is entirely up to you.

HANNIBAL: You put the snare around my neck.

This is going appreciably differently from Will and Hannibal’s previous efforts to get people to murder the other for them. Hannibal’s first line is the closest thing to an explanation – at this point they are so enmeshed in one another’s psyches that trying to kill each other is, as Steven Moffat would put it, their flirting. Will, however, misses the real takeaway, which is Hannibal’s note that he has the capacity to deceive him. Spoilers: this is going to go badly for Will. (Admittedly that spoiler is basically just always true.)

HANNIBAL: Why did you tell Mason Verger I want to kill him?

WILL GRAHAM: I was curious what would happen. It’s true, isn’t it? You do want to kill him. Or you want me to. Either way, you’d like him dead. I’m just giving you a little nudge.

HANNIBAL: Mason is discourteous. Discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me.

WILL GRAHAM: Are you thinking about eating him?

HANNIBAL: Whenever feasible, one should always try to eat the rude.

Hannibal’s motive is at last stated explicitly, and it’s exactly what you’d expect: he eats people because they are ugly. Though in typical and glorious arrogance, he extends this to a general principle of cannibalism.

Will’s aesthetic has evolved rapidly over just a couple of weeks. There is still intimacy to his imagined murder of Hannibal – looking into his eyes as he cuts his throat. But there is an added vein of theater – Hannibal being fed to pigs, and the set piece of hanging him, slitting his throat, then dropping him to the pigs. Although we cannot reduce Will to a set of influences, it is in this case not even a little hard to track those influences.

WILL GRAHAM: Hannibal is trying to manipulate me into murdering one of his patients. Mason Verger. I can manipulate Hannibal into killing him instead.

JACK CRAWFORD: What’s Verger done?

WILL GRAHAM: Hannibal considers him rude. That’s motive enough. It’s as though committing murders has purged him of lesser rudeness.

This exchange shines light on an aspect of Hannibal’s pathology that’s usually overlooked, which is where his sense of excessive civilization comes from. Will’s hypothesis – that his murders purge him of baser instincts – is almost correct, but puts the emphasis in the wrong place (although the context begs to have the wrong question posed). It is not that Hannibal’s murders purge him of rudeness, but that they place him higher on the food chain than humans, thus rendering him more civilized than mere civilization.…

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KŌ NO MONO: An assortment of pickled vegetables. Janice Poon suggests that this signals the approaching denouement, and also makes a nice metaphor about the vegetables sharpening the senses, which is what Alanna needs. The reality is that the second season is not so much going off the rails as plummeting down the gorge, watching mournfully as the rails disappear into the sky.

The script calls this the Wildigo, which is the best part of the entire conceit. That a silly portmanteau is the best part speaks to the intense and pointless violence being done to the show’s narrative principles here. “Kō No Mono” is primarily structured around a cheap and theatrical bit of audience deception, maintaining the illusion that Will killed Freddie. This is already cheap – a way to manufacture drama out of structure when you obviously don’t have it in your actual character work. This is a common way for formally inventive storytelling to run aground – when the formal complexity becomes a way of making a story work in the first place instead of working better. Mostly Hannibal avoids it, not least because it’s got the core of the Harris books, which clearly and demonstrably do work dramatically. But here it’s out on a limb, dealing with stuff of its own invention and in the narratively tricky spot of mostly getting pieces lined up for a big dramatic finish, and it’s being found out.

But that is mostly a macro concern of the episode – a reason the whole doesn’t work. This specific scene, on the other hand, manifests a far more egregious problem. There have been various aspects of Will’s behavior that are hard to reconcile – we talked about his inexplicable sadism towards Freddie last week, for instance. And we’ll get to his at times bewildering mode of interaction with Alanna in good time, though that can mostly be reconciled. But those are questions of behavior. This, on the other hand, is firmly located in Will’s dreamscape. Hallucinatory as it may be, there is no room for subtle interpretations here – this scene is about Will’s horror at turning into Hannibal in the wake of killing Freddie. But, of course, he hasn’t done that. One doesn’t even really suspect he’d like to – Freddie annoys him, but his sense of murderousness has never focused on that. And using the dreamscape for narrative bluffing like this is massively problematic. The show can and does violate spacial and temporal coherence with aplomb in favor of this dream reality, but it can do this purely because of the implicit pact with the audience that the dreamscape is in a sense more real than mere reality – that it accurately captures the interior lives of the characters. To use the dreamscape for something that is mere narrative contrivance to generate unearned suspense is almost as fundamental a betrayal of the audience as abruptly caving on the “no sexual assault” rule would be.

HANNIBAL: Among gourmands, the ortolan bunting is considered a rare but debauched delicacy.

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NAKA-CHOKO: A citrusy soup, used as a palate cleanser. Hannibal does suggest that a meat has citrus notes, but that’s a stretch. Not even Janice Poon tries to explain this one.

It is tempting to say that this episode opens with a revision of the previous one’s finale, but based on the scripts it’s more accurate to say that the previous episode’s finale was revised to be a streamlined version of this opening, cutting the actual fight scene down to Randall bursting through the glass (and making one other major change, which we’ll get to in a moment). Here we get the psychic landscape version, in which Will murders Randall-as-representation-of-Hannibal, which, in light of the cuts to the previous episode, becomes the sole and definitive version.

WILL GRAHAM: I’d say this makes us even. I sent someone to kill you, you sent someone to kill me. Even-steven.

HANNIBAL: Consider it an act of reciprocity. One positive action begets another.

WILL GRAHAM: Polite society normally puts such taboos on taking a life.

HANNIBAL: Without death, we’d be at a loss. It’s the prospect of death that drives us to greatness.

The other post-shooting script revision to the end of “Shiizakana” is the addition of the first line of this scene, which, while good for the line in that it gets to stand out as the solid punchline it is, but in hindsight is not as good an ending as a silent face-off between Will and Hannibal over Randall’s corpse and also screws up the start of this episode.

Hannibal’s happiness at Will not only killing someone again but at bringing him the corpse as a present, meanwhile, has him in an unusually loquacious mood, admitting casually to his artistic genius in a way he’s usually too polite for.

The scene of Hannibal washing Will’s bloodied hands, especially after a bit of dialogue in which killing Randall with his hands was equated with intimacy, is actually probably even slashier than the bondage murder at the start of “Shiizakana.” Astonishingly, however, it’s not the most explicitly homoerotic thing in the episode (homoerotic being distinct from slashy, though obviously not unrelated).

HANNIBAL: Don’t go inside, Will. You’ll want to retreat, you’ll want it as we want to jump from balconies, as the glint of the rails tempts us when we hear the approaching train. Stay with me.

WILL GRAHAM: Where else am I going to go?

HANNIBAL: You have everywhere to go. As long as you buttress your mind against deterring forces like guilt. You should be quite pleased. I am.

Hannibal’s first line is interpolated from Hannibal, where it’s originally used to describe Clarice’s desire to step inside Hannibal’s old cell, as opposed to a retreat inside one’s own mind. But for all that I tend to go on about the distinctive flair of Harris’s language, it’s worth noting that Hannibal’s second line, at least based on my searches, appears to be entirely the product of Steve Lightfoot, seamlessly picking up on the textual tone of the preceding Harris line even as he comes nowhere near the sheer flair of Harris’s metaphors.…

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SHIIZAKANA: A hot pot dish, meat-based and the nominal main course. I’m going to go ahead and just call it “no relation” to the contents of the episode, because reading this as somehow forming a culminating centerpiece of the season is just too ridiculous.

HANNIBAL: Why not appeal to my better nature?

WILL GRAHAM: I wasn’t aware you had one.

HANNIBAL: No one can be fully aware of another human being unless we love them. By that love we see potential in our beloved. Through that love we allow our beloved to see their potential. Expressing that love, our beloved’s potential comes true. I love you, Will.

Given that it also includes Will slowly crushing Hannibal via elaborate rope bondage and the black stag, this dream sequence is firmly the slashiest scene in Hannibal.

HANNIBAL: Memory gives moments immortality. But forgetfulness promotes a healthy mind. It’s good to forget. What are you trying to forget?

JACK CRAWFORD: Doubt. I let doubt in.

For those inclined towards the “Steven Moffat was significantly influenced by Hannibal” school of thought, the similarities between this and “forgetting is the human superpower” is significant. Of course, that was Frank Cottrell Boyce, so the argument runs aground pretty quick. The study going around the popular science press suggesting that forgetfulness correlates with intelligence validates Hannibal pretty significantly. Meanwhile, the idea of forgetting as a cure for doubt is at once poignant and intriguing.

And here we get to where the episode starts to go awry – it’s a sudden and far from welcome return to the killer of the week setup, and more than that a return to the oddity of “Buffet Froid” where the episode reads as Hannibal’s take on a particular genre trope. In this case, as a strange animal slaughters a trucker while the camera pans up to the moon, we’re clearly doing a werewolf story. As a killer of the week it’s a perfectly good second season idea, but it feels like what it is – the killer of the week conceit stretching to its breaking point in ways that are fundamentally just not that compelling within the context of what Hannibal actually does well, namely its delectably oversignified exchanges between and around Hannibal and Will.

WILL GRAHAM: Do you have any regrets?

HANNIBAL: With every choice lies the possibility of regret. However, if I choose not to do something, it’s usually for a good reason.

Hannibal’s formulation – only considering the possibility of regretting not doing something – is fascinating. Some of it is context – Hannibal knows even before Will says as much that he’s regretting not killing Clark Ingram last episode. But Hannibal’s megalomania – a character trait he is even more circumspect about than his cannibalism – shines through in his complete disregard for the basic idea that he might regret anything he has done as opposed to merely missing an opportunity.

HANNIBAL: Did you make that decision on the basis of anticipating the regret you would feel taking another life?

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SU-ZUKANA: A palate cleanser, typically involving vinegar. A better title for last week, I suspect, but still fitting for this, which essentially starts off with all new concerns.

JACK CRAWFORD: How do you catch a fish who isn’t hungry?

WILL GRAHAM: You have to change tactics. Use live bait that moves and excites them to action. Gotta make him bite even though he’s not hungry.

JACK CRAWFORD: Make him act on instinct. He’s always a predator.

WILL GRAHAM: You have to create a reality where only you and the fish exist, where your lure becomes what he wants most, despite everything he knows.

JACK CRAWFORD: Wrong move and he swims away.

WILL GRAHAM: I’m a good fisherman, Jack.

Will’s framework of fishing and hunting has had time to evolve in his solitude, so that fishing takes on aesthetic qualities. Of particular interest is the creation of realities, an explicitly narrativizing approach that reframes fishing as an act of artistic creation. Already the reality he needs is coming into being.

HANNIBAL: Truite saumonée au bleau with vegetables and broth, served with hollandaise sauce on the side. Beautiful fish, Will.

WILL GRAHAM: It was my turn to provide the meat.

HANNIBAL: More flavorful and firm than farmed specimens. I find the trout to be a very Nietzschean fish. Trials of his wild existence find their way into the flavor of the flesh.

Will’s laconic line about providing the meat – sufficiently passive aggressive that Hannibal calls him on it shortly thereafter – still flags a fundamental appetite to do so. The bait, in other words, has been flashed. Hannibal, meanwhile, is going to entertaining lengths to empathize with the fish sufficiently to find aesthetic sustenance in it, elevating the trout into a would be uberfisch so that his dominance of it can feel substantive.

HANNIBAL: I agree with the pagans. The horse is divine. All beasts of burden are sacred animals.

A striking claim from Hannibal. The easy (and thus hopelessly lazy) interpretation would be to treat this as some sort of lie, but Hannibal has no motivation to do so in this instance, and he is not given to unnecessary falsehood. (Anyway, his declaration that he agrees with the pagans is too blatantly true in the general case to sustain that reading.) What, then, does he mean by sacred in the context of beasts of burden, which would by most readings be a lesser creature than the pigs he uses as his aesthetic baseline? The most likely reading is that he respects beasts of burden for their acceptance of subservience, finding a spiritual power in the fact that they do not think themselves more than they are.

HANNIBAL: The horse is a chrysalis, a cocoon meant to hold the young woman until her death can be transformed.

JACK CRAWFORD: Transformed into what?

HANNIBAL: Life. A new life. This is a birth. Or it was intended to be. This is every bit as much about giving life as it is taking it.

JACK CRAWFORD: What’s the thinking?

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YAKIMONO: A course of flame-grilled meat. There are a number of episodes this would be a sensible title for, none of which are this one. 

MIRIAM LASS: I remember a dream about drowning. Then being awake. And not awake. Being myself, and not myself. I remember I could smell salt air. We were by the sea. For weeks. Months. Longer. Days and evenings blurred, I’d wake up to the smell of fresh flowers and the sting of a needle. I wasn’t afraid. Fear and pain were so far away, on the horizon, but not close. Never close.

Miriam’s description is loosely adapted from a description of Hannibal’s brainwashing of Clarice from Hannibal. 

ALANA BLOOM: They found a witness. A survivor. The only victim of the Chesapeake Ripper who lived to tell.

HANNIBAL: Is this witness watching me now?

ALANA BLOOM: Yes.

HANNIBAL: It seems I am the usual suspect.

ALANA BLOOM: I keep having angry, imaginary conversations with Jack Crawford about that. I wish I could tell you why this is happening.

Why are Alana’s conversations imaginary? She showed no hesitation in picking a fight with Jack in season one, nor at the beginning of season two when she started an investigation into his conduct. The charitable explanation – and it’s far from clear such charity is warranted when dealing with apparent inconsistencies in Alana’s characterization – is that she does not bring the matter up with Jack because she is afraid of what Jack will say to defend his position. 

WILL GRAHAM: This is very sudden.

DR. CHILTON: The federal prosecutor has dropped all charges. Since you weren’t convicted of killing anyone, the basis for your sentencing to this institution is null and void. The Chesapeake Ripper has set you free.

Endearingly meta, given that we last saw Will early in “Futamono,” have seen none of the procedural wheels involved in this, and the cliffhanger had nothing to do with Will’s release. As a result, Will’s release feels slightly out of nowhere for all that it’s been anticipated for six episodes. 

DR. CHILTON: Why didn’t Hannibal just kill you?

WILL GRAHAM: Because he wants to be my friend. 

There’s no reason, in the script alone, why this line, which is mostly a restatement of previous sentiments, should be immediately iconic. It’s good, sure, but not in and of itself brilliant. Dancy’s delivery, on the other hand, full of both condescension towards Chilton and incredulity at the absurd thing he has to say in order to understand the basic fact of his drawing breath, is a thing of wonder and ensures that this is up there with “I love your work” and… well, we’ll talk about that next episode.

JACK CRAWFORD: You need a ride?

WILL GRAHAM: I was going to call a cab.

The untroubled ease with which Jack and Will resume their friendship is a nice callback to the tone of the final scene of “Coquilles.”

JACK CRAWFORD: Miriam thanked me. When we found her. For not giving up on her.

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