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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