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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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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