proverbs of hell

FUTAMONO: A soup dish served in a lidded pot. Most obviously a reference to the final scene, in which Jack discovers Miriam in a covered hole.

WILL GRAHAM: You’re moving smoothly and slowly, Jack, carrying your concentration like a brimming cup.

Another case of using one of Thomas Harris’s characteristically vivid similes in an unexpected context – originally it is Francis Dolarhyde who thusly carries his concentration as he sets up to peruse home movies and decide on his next victim.

JACK CRAWFORD: And then you told him to kill Hannibal Lecter.

WILL GRAHAM: Nothing I said made that happen, Jack. It just happened.

JACK CRAWFORD: Don’t seem too broken up about it.

WILL GRAHAM: There is a common emotion we all recognize and have not yet named. The happy anticipation of being able to feel contempt.

Two Thomas Harris lines in rapid succession. This one comes from Hannibal, where the emotion play across the face of Margot Verger as she’s preparing to introduce Clarice to her brother. Its poetry comes from the fact that we do not, in fact, quite recognize the emotion, as the act of recognizing an emotion is in a large part coextensive with the act of naming it. The emotion does, however, cohere – once it is named, even in the nine-word formulation offered by Harris, it immediately becomes possible to recognize it, which in turn perpetuates the experience of it.

WILL GRAHAM: I have contempt for the Ripper. I have contempt for what he does.

JACK CRAWFORD: What does he do, Will?

WILL GRAHAM: What does he do? What is the first and principal thing he does? What need does he serve by killing?

And the hat trick; Will’s question is the same one Hannibal asks of Clarice regarding Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs. I can’t see anything else in the scene that looks distinctively Harrisesque, so doubt Fuller got a Hannibal Rising line in as well, but then again, that’d be the book that doesn’t stand out.

WILL GRAHAM: The Ripper kills in sounders of three or four, in quick order. Do you know why? I know why.

JACK CRAWFORD: Tell me.

WILL GRAHAM: Because if he waits too long, then the meat spoils.

JACK CRAWFORD: He’s eating them? Hannibal Lecter is Garret Jacob Hobbs? A cannibal?

WILL GRAHAM: Not like Garret Jacob Hobbs. Hobbs ate his victims to honor them. The Ripper eats his victims because they’re no better to him than pigs.

I was tempted to make this entire post consist of an annotation regarding the pigs comparison, but it would amount to a rewrite of my previous essays “Capitalist Pig” and “Capitalist Pig 2: This Time It’s About Cancer.”

HANNIBAL: A remarkably-lean organ, the heart. Funny how we revere and romanticize a simple pump. Merely a muscle. Yet such a potent symbol of life and the things that make us human, good and bad. Love and ache.

ALANA BLOOM: All of them skewered.

HANNIBAL: It’s a thematic dish.

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Sorry about the slow posting schedule of late – Jack’s on a brief holiday while he finishes up the Austrian School essay for Neoreaction a Basilisk, and I’m really bad at remembering to queue these on Game of Peaks night. Normal service should resume soon, and your patience is appreciated.

MUKŌZUKE: Literally “set to the far side,” which refers to the dish’s placement on the tray, a small dish of seasonal sashimi. The key detail for our purposes is that the dish is sliced.

FREDDIE LOUNDS: Send someone else, Jack. She’s one of yours.

Freddie is entirely sincere here, offering a genuine concern for Jack. This is not part of some larger heel turn on her part, a fact emphasized by her photographing Beverly’s body and, subsequently, Will in his face mask. Rather, it is out of a sense of genuine horror and, more broadly, a sense of clear morality – the same one that fuels her consistent loyalty to Abigail Hobbs, even after death. The grounds on which Freddie will take actual moral stands are few, but the resulting stands are a key part of her character.

As the saying goes, there’s always doubt until you see a body. This, then, is one of the more emphatic settlings of the matter in television history. In one sense, Beverly is quite literally fridged, or rather freezered, this being a necessary part of displaying her body like this. In most other regards, however, she avoids this trope, although it was actively discussed at the time, with Hettienne Park herself defending the show against accusations of both racism and sexism, pointing out (not unreasonably) that it’s more significant that an Asian woman got cast as a character with the last name “Katz” than that the character was killed off as had been planned since day one. The more substantive observation would be that the key point of fridging is that the character is killed to provide emotional drama for male leads. While Will, Jack, and the other (admittedly mostly male) characters do respond to her death with grief, this is not even the main point of “Mukōzuke.” Beverly’s death matters primarily for the ways in which it changes the state of play for the show, forcing Will to change his tactics and incrementally ratcheting up the inevitability of Jack eventually figuring out what’s actually going on with Hannibal.

At last, the image from the season two poster appears in the show. The appeal, of course, is much like the final lines of the first season – the inversion of one of the defining images of Hannibal Lecter.

BEVERLY KATZ: You said you just interpret the evidence. So interpret the evidence.

This is not the first time that Will’s investigative approach has been described as interpretation, but given the setup of Will being wheeled to a staged, framed tableau and the degree to which this particular work on Hannibal’s part is straightforwardly communicative the word stands out more in this context than many,

WILL GRAHAM: I strangle Beverly Katz, looking in her eyes.

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\TAKIAWASE: A mixture of vegetables and a protein in which the ingredients are cooked separately; on the whole a fair description of an episode in which the characters are unusually segregated.

WILL GRAHAM: Your father taught you how to hunt. I’m going to teach you how to fish.
ABIGAIL HOBBS: Same thing, isn’t it? One you lure, the other you stalk?
WILL GRAHAM: One you catch, the other you shoot.

Will makes a second attempt at the hunting/fishing conversation that went so unsatisfyingly in “Relevés.” This time, instead of becoming obsessed with accusing Abigail, he comes up with a suitably witty retort to her comparison. Although the difference between catching and shooting is likely academic to the fish.

WILL GRAHAM: Last thing before casting a line: name the bait on your hook after somebody you cherished.
ABIGAIL HOBBS: So you can say good-bye?
WILL GRAHAM: If the person you name it after cherished you, as the superstition goes, you’ll catch the fish.
ABIGAIL HOBBS: What did you name it?
WILL GRAHAM: Abigail.

It’s an interesting and quietly revealing character beat that Will stakes his successful catching of Hannibal on the question of whether Abigail cherished him. Not least because it’s very difficult to construct a credible argument for an answer other than “not nearly as much as she did Hannibal.”

BEVERLY KATZ: Hannibal Lecter has no reason–
WILL GRAHAM: That’s exactly right. He has no discernible reason other than his own amusement and curiosity.
BEVERLY KATZ: That’s hard to prove.
WILL GRAHAM: Whimsy. That’s how you’ll catch him. There will be a very clever detail to find on James Gray. He wouldn’t be able to resist. Something that’s probably been overlooked. Something hidden.
BEVERLY KATZ: I’ll look for clever details. But I’m not looking for Hannibal.

One of the purest instances of aesthetics being used as investigation techniques. It’s not even the relatively cliche aesthetic principle of Hannibal’s need to prove his superiority. Instead it comes out of his basic love of dramatic irony – the same thing that leads him to stitch the muralist into the center of his own design or to kill the judge in a way that comments on the flaws of his jurisprudence.

A straight-up killer of the week, but one that serves in most regards to highlight the rapidity with which returns are diminishing on that front. Its main appeal is this visual of a body that is partially other, and specifically partially an object of nature. But this is visibly just the mushroom people from “Amuse-Bouche” done with bees instead. Meanwhile, the case in general is completely segregated from the other plots – neither Will nor Hannibal do any work on it, and its only direct contribution to the plot at large is that an offhand comment that inspires Beverly, who literally pops her head into this plot just to hear that comment. For the most part, this just seems to be here to check a box. The box is certainly checked, but it’s tough to say more than that.…

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HASSUN: A sushi course with small side dishes that sets a seasonal theme. Janice Poon discusses it in terms of balancing opposites, which could be made related to the weighing of guilt and innocence involved in a trial with relatively little critical legerdemain. 

A bewildering and suggestive opening image as Will is shown imagining his own execution from the perspective of the executioner. This is an entirely plausible thing for Will to do – indeed the idea that Will would actively try to empathize with his potential executioner is really interesting. But its substance is in practice merely “unsettling cold open,” the impact of the image left entirely for the viewer instead of the narrative. In one sense this is emblematic of the episode, which is very much the season’s “Œuf.” It’s actively identified by Fuller as the weak link, and sees the show attempting its spin on courtroom drama instead of police procedural, only to find that the move to the second half of Law and Order is a step further than the forced perspective brilliance of its iconography can sustain.

This smirk off the line where the prosecutor asserts that Will is the smartest person in the courtroom is interesting; its most superficial reading is standard issue “Hannibal gloating about how clever he is,” and yet given the depth of his investment in Will’s development it’s equally likely that this is a smile of genuine satisfaction that his friend is finally getting the critical reception he deserves.

JACK CRAWFORD: My instincts have not yet arrived at conviction.
KADE PRURNELL: Mine have. With the benefit of no prior involvement and no personal connections to the accused.
JACK CRAWFORD: Meaning, I can’t be impartial.
KADE PRURNELL: Of course you can be impartial. But right now, you’re not. You have to believe something. As long as there is reason and evidence to believe. You have reason. You have evidence.

It’s interesting that Prurnell’s case here frames belief as a moral obligation as opposed to a logical consequence. She is, after all, presumably not saying that all things there is both evidence for and some reason to believe are true. Rather, she is suggesting that an FBI agent has a duty to believe in these circumstances that Jack is being lax in. For all his faults, even Jack ain’t buying that bullshit.

JACK CRAWFORD: He can think like anybody. He has pure empathy and projection. He can imprint profiles on the blank slate of his mind for us to read.
MARION VEGA: Sounds like a supervillain.

Transparently untrue; a supervillain with such a thoroughly non-offensive power would be an extremely bizarre idea. A power like this is far more suited to a superhero, or, better yet, the troubled protagonist of some overly pompous post-House cop drama. Which is to say that perhaps genre-based narratology is not a great alley for Hannibal to wander down.

HANNIBAL: Tell me, Jack. Was your testimony meant to be a resignation?
JACK CRAWFORD: Something very appealing about walking away from all the noise.

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SAKIZUKE: Variantly spelled “sakizuki” and “saki-zuke,” the latter on Janice Poon’s blog, where she describes it as “a sampling of small appetizers whose ingredients, garnishes, and dishware sets the tone for the season and invites the gods to partake of the meal.” Wikipedia, meanwhile, directly compares it to an amuse-bouche, I.e. the second episode of the first season.

The killer-of-the-two-weeks here is given an unusual sort of focus. On the one hand he’s the least sketched out killer the show has ever done – he’s literally only in the script as “Muralist,” and essentially everything we learn about him is projected onto him by other characters. On the other, Roland Umber’s awakening inside the mural is used as the cliffhanger, and the second episode luxuriates in this cold open, giving the sheer and visceral horror of the mural room to breathe. Fuller has said that his inspiration for this killer was equal parts Busby Berkeley and the film Jeepers Creepers, which is a pair of inspirations that boil down to “this is why you are the perfect showrunner for Hannibal.”

The wide shot of Roland, already making a probably fatal leap into the water, being dashed upon the rocks is a surprisingly black comic beat to end on after a very straight horror movie chase through a cornfield.

In an understandable move to avoid having all of Will’s scenes for the first six episodes take place in the same set, Fuller and company have crafted a second asylum location based on bright, stark whiteness instead of gloomy darkness, with the discrete white cages doing the work of making the space disturbing. It’s a triumph of design, managing to be a more impressive location than the iconic subterranean cell.

WILL GRAHAM: I’ve lost the plot. I’m the unreliable narrator of my own story. I’m trying to place myself somewhere in the frame of my mind and I have no bearings. No landmarks to tell me who I am.
ALANA BLOOM: You have an incomplete self. We are who we are in the now and we are the sum of our memories. There are pieces of you… you can’t see.

Will opens with a pair of lines that are starkly meta even for Hannibal. (Though who among us is anything other than the unreliable narrator of our own story?) The exchange is on the whole familiar – it’s restating stuff we’ve been dealing with explicitly (Hannibal doesn’t really deal with things in any other way) since “Rôti.” Of course, there’s a reason for this.

WILL GRAHAM: I’m… very confused.
ALANA BLOOM: Of course you are. Ideas and perceived experiences have the same effect on our minds as tossing a rock into a pond. It all ripples.
HANNIBAL: Let us help you, Will. Let me help you.
WILL GRAHAM: I need your help.

This exchange is followed by a scene of Will, still shaking with the emotion of this scene, being led back to his cell, where, once alone, the mask of overwrought emotion drops and it becomes clear that he was manipulating Alana and Hannibal through this entire exchange.…

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KAISEKI: An umbrella term for multi-course meals in the Japanese style – roughly equivalent to what renaming “Apéritif” to “Haute Cuisine” would imply. The gesture towards the whole season makes sense for an episode that opens with a flash forward to the finale. (I should disclaim that my knowledge of Japanese cooking is wildly less than my knowledge of French cooking, and that I’m going to be much more reliant on Wikipedia for these than I was for the first 13 parts.)

The flashforward to the Jack/Hannibal fight scene from “Mizumono” is interesting. The flash forward in general was trendy in television around this time, mostly due to the influence of Breaking Bad, which used them habitually. But Breaking Bad’s default use of them was cryptic – they’d show short flashes of something that would hang over episodes or seasons as a mystery. This, on the other hand, is more of a promise at the expense of suspense. Hannibal pledges up front that Jack is going to figure out what Hannibal is up to, thus reassuring viewers before the season even starts that all of this business with Will being in prison will eventually be over. This has obvious narrative function – asking the audience to sit through six full episodes of Will in prison is a big ask even with the reassurance. But it’s striking how little else there is that actually relies on this flash forward, to the point where it begins to become easy to forget.

HANNIBAL: Kaiseki. A Japanese art form that honors the taste and aesthetic of what we eat.

The first time Hannibal has done a title drop. It’s a bit over-obvious, but a reasonable concession given that, unlike the first season, the episode titles are rarely cognates of identifiable English words. (The second season remains the only one where I routinely have to go look up which episode is which, and I’d be surprised if blogging it changes that.) Hannibal’s framing of Kaiseki in terms of uniting taste and aesthetic is, of course, utterly characteristic.

JACK CRAWFORD: I feel guilty eating it.

HANNIBAL: I never feel guilty eating anything.

JACK CRAWFORD: Can’t quite place the fish.

HANNIBAL: He was a flounder.

Hannibal’s really laying the “I’m going to tell you point blank that I’m a cannibalistic serial killer then chuckle silently as you miss it” on a bit thick today.

HANNIBAL: I last prepared this meal for my Aunt Murasaki under similarly unfortunate circumstances.

JACK CRAWFORD: What circumstances were those?

HANNIBAL: A loss. This is a loss. Will is a loss. We’re mourning a death.

The namechecking of Lady Murasaki is a rare acknowledgment of Hannibal Rising, very much the runt of the Thomas Harris litter, and the line characterizes Fuller’s approach to that book: acknowledge its canonicity while mostly ignoring the details. The loss in question is almost certainly Hannibal’s sister Mischa.

HANNIBAL: We can’t define Will only by his maddest edges.

JACK CRAWFORD: We can’t define Will at all.

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The Patreon is healthily above $320 now, so podcasts are good to go. That said, there’s been a scheduling snafu on this one, so I’m not actually sure what day it’ll post. Sorry about that.

SAVOUREUX: I’ll just quote Fuller: “a savoury dessert appealing to diners with no interest in a sweet ending to their meal.”

Will is unambiguously hunting here, as opposed to fishing, and right on the heels of making the distinction with Abigail. There are more visceral demonstrations of the idea that Will has been pushed to the edge, but this is perhaps the clearest demonstration that this edge consists of more than just the side effects of encephalitis, also encompassing a genuine moral shift.

The first appearance of the Wendigo, aka the mature form of Will’s stag hallucinations, reflecting his understanding that the figure he’s been stalking is in fact Hannibal. What’s interesting, of course, is that Will doesn’t know that Hannibal is the copycat killer yet. His appearance here could be mere foreshadowing – that is, broadly speaking, the point of a hallucinatory cold open after all. But more to the point, it suggests that Will does not know all that he knows, and thus that his relationship with Hannibal is already motivated by a murderous desire.

One of Hannibal’s great feats of the supernatural. Not, mind you, getting Will to eat the ear, which we see in season two. Rather, making the timeline for this work. Even if we take Hannibal’s final scene with Abigail in “Relevés” as taking place before Will’s return to Virginia (despite appearing in the episode after), figuring out when Hannibal broke into Will’s house to force feed him the ear is a challenge. The answer, obviously, is that it took place in lost time.

Another clue Abigail is alive, however, is the fact that Hannibal feeds her to Will in the expectation that he’ll vomit her up, as opposed to consuming her.

HANNIBAL: What happened? Why was she afraid?
WILL GRAHAM: I hallucinated. I hallucinated that I killed her. But it wasn’t real. I know it wasn’t real.

In which Will is possessed by BOB.

More seriously, for all Will’s deterioration, his confusion about what is and is not reality is increasingly seeming to clear up. This, however, is not so much a process of rejecting his hallucinations as it is one of determining which of them are real.

The sequence in which Winston stands outside the police car whining plaintively at Will’s arrest can safely be described as “a bit fucking much.”

BEVERLY KATZ: I can’t do the silent treatment. I can’t pretend I don’t know you and I can’t pretend we don’t both know what I’m finding under your nails. You called me once because you didn’t trust yourself to know what was real. This blood is real, Will.
WILL GRAHAM: I know.
BEVERLY KATZ: Do you know how it got there?
WILL GRAHAM: Not with certainty, no.
BEVERLY KATZ: Certainty comes from the evidence. I didn’t want to find any evidence on you.

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RELEVÉS: Properly “removes,” but best understood in the sense of a relief pitcher, with the idea being that the course replaces the previous one. In practice, it is the big set-piece course, and so functioning much the same way that “Rôti” did.

GEORGIA MADCHEN: They say what’s wrong with you?

WILL GRAHAM: Just the fever. They’re trying to find out what else.

GEORGIA MADCHEN: They won’t find anything. They’ll keep looking and keep giving you tests and keep giving you false diagnosis and bad medicine. But they won’t find anything wrong. They’ll just know you’re wrong. (Pause) I hope you have good insurance.

One assumes the FBI has decent insurance, but it’s a delightful joke and, given how little time we actually get to spend with an on-the-mend Georgia, probably the key

The sense of being wrong, as opposed to having something wrong with you, is a deep-seated fear for Will. It’s worth recalling his description of the Chesapeake Ripper as “one of those pitiful things sometimes born in hospitals” that fails to die, a description that puts Hannibal in much the same place.

GEORGIA MADCHEN: They said I might remember what I did. I don’t want to remember.

WILL GRAHAM: You know what you did, Georgia.

GEORGIA MADCHEN: But I don’t remember it. I don’t remember it like I did it. It feels more like some horrible dream where I killed my friend.

Thankfully this comes well after Moffat’s use of a similar line in “The Wedding of River Song,” and so we can safely conclude that any influence was on Fuller and company as opposed to the other way around. Nevertheless, this serves as a late echo of the themes of identity and memory in “Rôti.” What’s striking is the aspirational approach that Hannibal takes to the conjunction of memory and identity. Georgia wants to  control what she remembers so she can control who she is.

HANNIBAL: Silkie chicken in a broth. A black boned bird prized in China for its medicinal value since the 7^th century. With wolfberries, ginseng, ginger, red dates and star anise.

WILL GRAHAM: You made me chicken soup.

The script calls says, “Hannibal offers a supportive smile. Of course he did,” but Mikkelsen’s reaction, which is considerably funnier, has him looking slightly miffed at Will’s reductiveness. Would Hannibal still have turned on Will if he hadn’t insulted his soup? Probably, but still.

It’s also notable that the black boned chicken makes this one of the rare meals we can confirm is non-cannibalistic. (Although “a broth” offers some concern.)

Amusingly obscured from all subsequent discussion of this murder is how Hannibal successfully tampered with Georgia’s oxygen chamber to both remove her grounding bracelet and slip a plastic comb in. This is probably for the best, as calling attention to it would damage the “he might not literally be the devil” interpretation that the show takes such tortured pains to maintain the faint plausibility of.

Given that Georgia’s issues with memory provide a thematic counterpoint to Gideon, it’s a pity room for her couldn’t be found in “Rôti,” as her swift incineration in this episode seems like a waste of a character who, while she probably didn’t have a substantial arc in her, was still probably good for a few more scenes.…

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RÔTI: Roast, specifically roasted game birds, but in this case likely a straightforward case of “and now we arrive at the big centerpiece courses.”

HANNIBAL: Someone who already doubts their own identity can be more susceptible to manipulation.Dr. Gideon is a psychopath. Psychopaths are narcissists. They rarely doubt who they are.

DR. CHILTON: Tried to appeal to his narcissism.

HANNIBAL: By convincing him he was the Chesapeake Ripper.

DR. CHILTON: If only I had been more curious: about the common mind.

HANNIBAL: I have no interest in understanding sheep. Only eating them.

One of Hannibal’s more bluntly callous secret confessions. Its unusual viciousness is probably explained by his understandable frustration at having to relate in any way, shape, or form to Chilton. Also interesting is the selection of animals for the metaphor – a departure from the show’s default choice of pigs that flags the particular disdain with which Hannibal holds Chilton.

DR. CHILTON: I thought psychic driving would have been more effective in breaking down his personality.

HANNIBAL: Psychic driving fails because its methods are too obvious. You were trying too hard, Fredrick. If force is used, the subject will only surrender temporarily.

Hannibal is, of course, obliquely discussing his own efforts to make Will Graham believe himself to be a killer. Of course, it’s not as though Hannibal isn’t using force, after all – he literally killed a man to ensure Will’s diagnosis would remain secret. Hannibal’s real point is, as ever, aesthetic – Chilton’s approach was clumsy, heavy-handed, and, most damningly, lacking in elegance.

There’s an odd structure to the episodes from “Trou Normand” through “Releves.” “Rôti” seems to want to follow up directly from “Trou Normand,” flashing back to the totem pole as a metonym for all the murders Will has been looking at, while putting Georgia Madden off to the side. Then “Releves” will pick up the Georgia Madden case, as though it would prefer to follow up on it. Was there a change in episode order? If so, other than the disjuncts, it’s a sensible one that results in Will’s psyche disintegrating further with each episode, but there’s an odd sense of cycling through several parallel stories of Will’s collapse.

Given that the script for “Buffet Froid” compares Will’s misdrawn clock to Dali, it’s fitting that this episode should go with the amusing image of a melting digital clock. Although on the whole the focus on imagery of rushing water for Will’s delusions is slightly odd given that he’s running a fever. Presumably it’s meant as an extension of the frequent motif of Will awakening drenched in sweat, but there’s a clear contrast between last week’s “set his mind on fire” and this week’s flooding. The easiest reconciliation: Will’s delusions are in fact a respite from his illness – he hallucinates water as a means of calming his body down. This is clever, but doesn’t really work.

DR. CHILTON: I can’t take responsibility for your actions, Dr. Gideon.

DR. GIDEON: Sure can. It’s why I’m suing you.

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BUFFET FROID: Literally “cold buffet,” referring specifically to a charcuterie platter of thin-sliced meats. In this context, a joke about Georgia Madden’s shredding skin.

It goes without saying that there is a strange unreality here, but this is presented very differently from how Hannibal usually proceeds. It’s never before had to conjure a disposable POV character just to kill her off a few minutes later. Part of this is the peculiarities of Georgia Madden – she’s unsuitable to be a POV character herself, and there’s only one other choice. But a more basic reason is that this is the opening of a horror movie, with Madden being positioned as something that comes at the show from an odd angle She doesn’t quite belong in this series. Unlike with “Œuf,” a previous case of a killer of the week who’s not quite right for Hannibal, this is something the show is at least conscious of  this time.

Timeline of events.

• May 2013: “Buffet Froid” airs.
• July 2013: Steven Moffat casts Lars Mikkelsen, brother of Mads Mikkelsen, in “His Last Vow”
• February 2014: Moffat writes “Listen,” featuring a monster that grabs your ankle from under the bed.

I leave you to your own conclusions.

HANNIBAL: We both know the unreality of taking a life, of people who die when we have no other choice. We know in those moments they’re not flesh, but light and air and color.

WILL GRAHAM: Isn’t that what it is to be alive.

Hannibal’s line here is a characteristically interesting blend of deceit and honesty. His account of people becoming “light and air and color” is quite untethered to the handful of instances of actual necessity in which Hannibal has killed someone, and for that matter an unusual description for Hannibal, whose victims are pointedly never “not flesh.” Some explanation is offered by the source, which is unsurprisingly the Thomas Harris novels, where a similar account is given by Francis Dolarhyde, who describes killing this way while projecting this assessment onto Hannibal. Its repurposing into a half life with which Hannibal ensnares Will into mutual aesthetic appreciation is clever.

The misdrawn clocks are one of the defining images of the latter part of the first season – an immediately arresting image that communicates wrongness and sinister intent without actually having anything overtly horrifying about them. In this regard they are much like the trypophobic food designs, the cluster of numbers and vast expanse of white space both communicating a sense that this is not right even beyond the contextual horror of Hannibal’s manipulations, which are suddenly revealed to be far more advanced than the audience had realized. Note, of course, the consistent feature of Will’s breakdown: the decoherence of time.

JACK CRAWFORD: You contaminated the crime scene.

WILL GRAHAM: I thought I was responsible for it.

JACK CRAWFORD: You thought you killed that woman?

WILL GRAHAM: Sometimes with what I do —

JACK CRAWFORD: What you do is take whatever evidence there is and extrapolate. You reconstruct the thinking of a killer, not think you are a killer.

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