On Television June 29, 2015 Issue

The savory spectacle of “Hannibal.”
By Emily Nussbaum


I stopped watching “Hannibal” in Season 1, after a corpse was carved into a cello, its vocal cords splayed like strings, then “played.” I stopped watching again when Dr. Frederick Chilton, played by the redoubtable Raúl Esparza, got his guts tugged out of his abdomen, like red-sauced linguini, while he was still conscious. I stopped watching when an acupuncturist drove a needle through an eyeball, and again when a man’s leg was roasted and fed to him. Each time, the decision felt like a sane and, maybe, ethical position. Enough nihilism, enough torture, I thought. Enough serial killers glamorized as artists and geniuses.

But that righteous high never lasted. I kept sneaking back, peeking through my fingers—a glimpse here, a binge there—either numbing myself or, depending on one’s perspective, properly sensitizing myself. Gradually, my eyes adjusted to the darkness. By midway through Season 2, “Hannibal” felt less like a blood-soaked ordeal than like a macabre masterpiece, pure pleasure and audacity. With hints of David Cronenberg and Michael Mann, David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick, it has a formal ambition that is rare for television. It reflexively turns the ordinary into the alien and vice versa. Corpses pile onto a nightmarish totem pole; bees pour out of eye sockets; men swallow songbirds whole. Over time, patterns emerge, revealing an uneasy meditation on intimacy, the vulnerability of the human body, and the power of art—its ability to make us crave something we thought we’d find disgusting.

It’s possible, of course, that I love the show because it confirms my worst suspicions about food culture. For those who haven’t seen “The Silence of the Lambs” or read Thomas Harris’s novels, from which the story is adapted, the basic plot is this: Hannibal Lecter, played with waxwork hauteur by Mads Mikkelsen, is a brilliant psychiatrist who commits hideous murders. He takes “trophies” from the bodies—a liver here, a heart there—then cooks and serves them to unwitting guests. (Most episodes feature dazzling cooking montages, notorious for making viewers hungry, then making them feel guilty.) His justification is that he “eats the rude,” like David Chang, but with slightly less rigid ethical boundaries. Hannibal is quite a catch: he plays the harpsichord and the theremin, he’s a natty dresser, and he knows his Dante. By day, he’s a libertarian life coach for his patients’ Jungian shadows, often manipulating lesser serial killers into covering his tracks—in this universe, as on “Dexter,” serial killers are as common as daisies.

Hannibal’s opposite number—his love interest, basically—is the tetchy, delicate Will Graham. Played by the sad-eyed Hugh Dancy, Will is a criminal profiler for the F.B.I. whose pathological empathy is far more crippling than Hannibal’s lack of the stuff. When he visits a murder scene, he enters a fugue state and becomes the killer, imagining the crime while murmuring the show’s mantra: “This is my design.” The two men circle each other seductively—best friends and homoerotic nemeses, client and therapist—each getting inside the other’s head, sometimes literally. Last season ended with Hannibal gutting Will with a kitchen knife after stroking his cheek—a moment of symbolic penetration that sent the show’s fans, self-proclaimed Fannibals, into raptures. This season, the third, Hannibal gave Will, who survived, a valentine: a man’s corpse that he had pulverized, then sculpted into the shape of a human heart and displayed in a church, like a holy relic.

None of this is treated even mildly realistically, and yet it’s not exactly camp, either. As the show’s creator, Bryan Fuller (the wizard behind the dreamlike “Wonderfalls” and “Pushing Daisies”), has suggested, “Hannibal” is a show that regards spectacle with a sort of worship. When “Hannibal” began, it mimicked the structures of network cop procedurals, but the show has long since shed that carapace, not unlike the way Hannibal shrugs off what he calls his “person suit,” the demeanor that lets him pass for normal. In a recent interview on RogerEbert.com, Fuller explained that, when he hires directors for the series, he tells them, “This is not an episode of television. This is a pretentious art film.” His willingness to risk looking outré and avant-garde (on NBC, of all places!) is part of a larger trend on television, inflecting series that range from “American Horror Story” to “True Detective,” “The Leftovers,” “The Returned,” “The Strain,” and “The Knick.” Some of these shows are better than others, but they all live and die by their devotion to that old Freudian concept of “the uncanny.” Among that company, “Hannibal” stands out for its ability to risk absurdity and self-seriousness, only to emerge with something gloriously strange and profound, in the realm of opera and poetry. When Will examines that heart sculpture, for instance, it folds open, ventricles falling to the floor, and then walks toward him on twisted, black, nightmare legs, transforming into a demonic elk.

And, despite the gore, there’s a disarming fairy-tale quality to the world of “Hannibal,” in part because the murders, with few exceptions, lack the misogynistic underpinnings of real-life serial killings, or even the snappy kink of Harris’s books. No one is raped on “Hannibal,” even in a fantasy; instead, the victims get repurposed as mushroom farms. When female characters get hurt—whether they’re shot or shoved out a window or, in one case, sliced finely, like garlic—there’s little gendered sadism to the act. Graphic sexual violence isn’t inevitably exploitative; sometimes it’s a welcome force for realism. But, in the arms race of suffering on television, “Hannibal” ’s elision works as a small, idealistic promise to viewers: while anything can happen, that one thing won’t.

Murder, on the other hand, is up for grabs—and treated with brazen disrespect. On “Hannibal,” corpses are fungible art supplies, like clay or oil paint, in sequences in which bodies are stitched into frescoes or twisted into grotesque displays. Skin is stretched into wings, corpses are bent into apiaries, belladonna is planted in heart cavities. It would be easy to see such choices through a cynical lens, as shock effects: Nietzsche is peachy, but sicker is quicker. It certainly makes the show a tough one to recommend to strangers. But these images coalesce into metaphors for mortality and loss. A teacup breaks and then comes back together; we see that it’s like a skull shattering, which in turn reflects a grieving man’s wish for time to go backward. Tears are stirred into Martinis. A woman’s corpse is sewn into a horse’s womb, and after she’s cut out the doctors feel a heartbeat in her torso; they slice her open and a live blackbird flies out. Symbols overlap eerily, as senses do in synesthesia: a heartbeat is a clock tick is a drumbeat. The arch dialogue has the same multiplicity, with ordinary idioms taking on sinister resonance, from “the one that got away” to “the devil you know.” “You smoked me in thyme,” one victim remarks, as he’s served a dish of himself, with typically shrewd double meaning.

In one of last season’s most spectacular scenarios, a black male corpse is discovered in the river, coated in resin. The man had escaped from an art project built by a serial killer Hannibal had never met: he’d torn himself out of a mural comprising dozens of corpses, of varying skin tones—racial diversity reinterpreted as pigment, people reduced to brushstrokes. When Hannibal climbs a ladder to the top of a corn silo, he looks down and sees a pattern: from above, the curled bodies form an eye. The image suggests outrageous ideas: one eye gazing at another, God at his creation, his creation back at God, through the open pupil of the building’s roof. Hannibal calls down to the killer, “I love your work.”

The scene was so outlandish that it made me laugh out loud. It also felt like a reminder of the show’s own double consciousness about what it means to watch from a distance, to admit that we’re voyeurs who enjoy foie gras and veal. (There are moments when one suspects the show is sponsored by PETA.) For anyone who watches modern television, Hannibal may seem familiar: he’s another middle-aged male genius with a fetish for absolute control, like Don Draper and Walter White and Dr. House and Francis Underwood. Astrologically speaking, he’s a Sherlock with Lucifer rising. But, mainly, Hannibal suggests the fantasy of the uncompromising television auteur: he’s the perfectionist who cares only that every detail of his vision be realized, no matter what sacrifices that might require. This is his design.

As Season 3 begins, the show has entered a state of feverish theatricality, adding frame upon frame, underlining its own artificiality: in one flashback, Hannibal recites the magic words “Once upon a time,” and a red velvet curtain fills the screen. A fugitive from justice, Hannibal has fled to Europe, where he’s been riding motorcycles, sipping champagne, killing people in order to steal their curatorial positions, and posing as man and wife with his former therapist, Bedelia Du Maurier (the deliciously chilly Gillian Anderson, speaking so low that their scenes are like whisper contests). It’s not entirely clear whether Bedelia is his hostage or his co-conspirator. “Observe or participate?” he asks, after he bludgeons a man with a bust of Aristotle in front of her. “Are you at this very moment observing or participating?” “Observing,” she whispers, a tear streaking her face. It’s one of many exchanges that seem designed to challenge the viewer’s role but also to suggest that we should stop fooling ourselves. Bedelia doesn’t hurt anyone, but she is too curious to look away. Like anyone who can’t stop watching Hannibal, she’s decided that what he offers is too good not to have a taste.

Ich gestehe, dass ich bei den vielen Tweets und Retweets bisweilen den Überblick verliere, da ich nicht täglich konzentriert dran bleibe(n kann).

Despite cancellation, 'Hannibal' just pulled another 180 to become an even better, scarier show

JOSHUA RIVERA



It's hard to find a show on the air right now that successfully manages to top itself every week like "Hannibal". The NBC drama — which was canceled by NBC at the end of June — has been resigned to burning through the second half of its now-final season in the doldrums of Saturday nights, where it is guaranteed to remain relatively unseen until its last episode airs.
That's a shame, because this Saturday marks the beginning of what might as well be a brand-new season, and possibly the series' most accessible jumping-on point ever.

For its final six episodes, "Hannibal" will be adapting the events of Thomas Harris' novel "Red Dragon", the work in which the evil, manipulative Doctor Hannibal Lecter first appeared. It is essentially a miniseries about the hunt for Francis Dolarhyde, a serial killer obsessed with a William Blake painting of the titular Red Dragon, and protagonist Will Graham's struggle to hold onto his sanity after he's dragged back in to a world of killers and madmen he left behind.

It also looks like something the show hasn't really been all season long: Very, very scary.

Check out this trailer that debuted at Comic-Con, previewing the second half of the season:


We've seen the first terrifying episode of this new arc (episode eight of the third season as a whole), and without spoiling anything, it holds true to everything that makes "Hannibal" great: Gorgeous, unsettling visuals, psychological horror, and riveting performances from the entire cast.

And while you don't need to see the previous episodes to enjoy it, what sets this adaptation of "Red Dragon" apart from the novel and two prior film versions (1986's "Manhunter" directed by Michael Mann, and 2002's "Red Dragon", directed by Brett Ratner) is the slow-burning history between all the characters that the show has spent two-and-a-half seasons setting up.

Hannibal Francis DolarhydeNBCThis week you will meet the Red Dragon, played by Richard Armitage ("The Hobbit" series).

Of course, a big part of what makes this new arc so immediately compelling is the addition of actor Richard Armitage as Francis Dolarhyde. Armitage is a force of nature, terribly frightening in the role without ever saying a word (and completely unrecognizable from his most famous role, Thorin Oakenshield from "The Hobbit" films). "Hannibal" has shown us a lot of depraved killers in its first two seasons, so setting up one in a way that justifies a six-episode hunt for him is a huge feat.

It's remarkable how "Hannibal" has been able to pull all this off in a way that's radically different from the first half of this season. We mentioned this in our review of the third season, but for the first half of this season, "Hannibal" was a more grandiose, operatic show than it had ever been, content to do arty character studies in Italy before bringing things to an explosive (and straight-up disturbing) finale.

The series took a risk, and it paid off in a way that was both deeply upsetting to watch but emotionally cathartic, giving viewers the release they were looking for but in its own cruel, provocative way.




Read more: http://uk.businessinsider.com/hannibal- ... z3gp99kXjh

Hannibal Season 3 Episode 8 Review: The Great Red Dragon
Loader Robin Harry at July 25, 2015 11:00 pm. 1 Comment

This week gave us another great installment of Hannibal, as Hannibal Season 3 Episode 8 brought someone new that I've been looking forward to since this show started. Francis Dolarhyde, y'all. The Red Dragon is here.

Off the bat, I have to say Richard Armitage and Hugh Dancy were both on fire this week. They were fantastic as they wordlessly brought us through changes in their characters.

Imprisoned for Three Years - Hannibal
We met Dolarhyde in the first five minutes of the episode, and it was a fantastic five minutes. There was no dialogue, nothing spoken. We just saw the man becoming the monster before our eyes. It was mesmerizing and disturbing all at once, and Armitage was positively captivating without saying a word.

We saw him get the snaggle-tooth mold which he uses to bite his victims. We saw him getting his tattoo. We saw his growing obsession with William Blake's "The Great Red Dragon" paintings. Even as we watched him move in silence, Francis Dolarhyde had already started getting inside our minds.

One of the first scenes we saw was Dolarhyde working out in his attic. Not unlike Hannibal Lecter, Dolarhyde is an attractive, physically appealing man. He is strong, ripped, and I swear they made him flex his right pectoralis major on purpose in one scene. However, we can't be caught up in his appeal.

The presentation of these characters who are gorgeous on the outside, but monstrous on the inside, is a direct challenge to us to be mindful of what we see. On a show like Hannibal, we cannot ever separate the aesthetics from what they represent. The beauty on this show, whether in the people or in the cinematography, almost always represents something dark and disturbing.

After seeing Dolarhyde, we learned that the episode took place three years after Hannibal Lecter was arrested. A lot had changed in that time. Most of all, Will Graham.

Before we even saw Will, we saw where he lived. We saw a lake with the stillest waters imaginable, with a clear reflection of the landscape on the surface of the water. That lake represented Will's new life: calm and still, with an ability to see himself clearly without the murkiness of Hannibal's entanglement.

Will now had a wife and a stepson, and a quiet life away from the madness of the FBI and Hannibal Lecter. Unfortunately, the Tooth Fairy murders sent Jack Crawford running for Will's help. Will found himself in the same predicament as he did in Hannibal Season 1 Episode 1, being forced to sacrifice his sanity for the greater good.

Jack promised Molly, Will's wife, that he would make the experience as easy on him as possible. However, he told Alana Bloom almost the same thing in the beginning. We've heard that promise before, and we know that it's not a promise that Jack is able to keep, no matter how much he wants to keep it.

When Hannibal Lecter is a voice of reason, you know things are messed up. Hannibal wrote a letter to Will, anticipating Jack's request and warning Will not to come back, for the sake of his sanity.


Dear Will, we have all found a new life, but our old lives hover in the shadows. Soon enough I fear Jack Crawford will come knocking. I would encourage you, as a friend, not to step back through the door he holds open. It's dark on the other side, and madness is waiting.

Hannibal
Permalink: It's dark on the other side, and madness is waiting
However, there's no avoiding the madness for Will. My favorite scene was Will's walkthrough of the murder scene, and this is where Hugh Dancy shone. At first he was just walking through, observing, but then he got to the bedroom, and saw the blood spatter everywhere.

You could see the horror of it register on his face, along with the realization that this was the mind in which he was going to have to immerse himself. You could see him steeling himself for what he was about to do, what he was about to experience. You could see how hard it was for him to do. Hugh Dancy was amazing. I've missed that version of him.

Hannibal, in the meantime, was locked up at Frederick Chilton's prison. Frederick and Alana lied to the courts, having Hannibal declared insane just so that he could spend the rest of his life institutionalized. It seemed that Frederick had enjoyed a bit of celebrity status as the psychiatrist who watched over Hannibal Lecter, and wasn't quite ready to give that up.

I suppose it's easy for me, as a viewer, to see what a ridiculous idea that was. I suppose that from their point of view, they don't see the potential havoc that can still be wrought by a living, breathing Hannibal Lecter.

Hannibal's incarceration is fascinating. He turns his cell into his memory palace, and greets visitors as guests in different rooms, presenting them with meals and drinks that are suited for them. He's created a way to survive being stuck in a cell and still have his freedom.

Frederick Chilton brought up an interesting comparison of Hannibal and the Tooth Fairy. Hannibal's murders were all fancy and aesthetically pleasing, catering to a very specific interest group. "Niche" was the word Chilton used. By contrast, the Tooth Fairy's murders were non-selective, simple and just plain brutal. The Tooth Fairy had a wider appeal.

Now, does that sound like a show we know? Do we know a show with a niche appeal using cinematography and art direction to portray murder in some of the most beautifully grotesque ways possible? Compared to other shows about killers with no such application of aesthetics, that own the ratings every week? Heh.

Will unfortunately realized to be able to find the Tooth Fairy, he had to go back into the madness. By the end of the episode, he realized he had to become that person that he had put aside three years ago. He had to get that mindset back. He had to go see Hannibal.

Other notes:

The relocation to Baltimore brought back two characters I'd been missing dearly: Brian Zeller and Jimmy Price. I have missed their wit and their banter!
The pendulum is back. The forensic team is back. The dogs are back. This episode has brought back all the little things that make me happy.
My favorite visual would be Will's flashlight at the murder scene. I loved how it revealed the victims as he shone the light over where they had been.
And of course, the cannibalism joke of the week. It's a good one, courtesy of Hannibal Lecter:
Chilton: You've made this dessert for me before.
Hannibal: One of my favourite desserts. Traditionally made with pig's blood, in this case, a local cow.
Chilton: And when you last made it for me?
Hannibal: The blood was from a cow, only in a derogatory sense.

Permalink: Hannibal: The blood was from a cow, only in a derogatory sense.
What did you think? Were you happy with Francis Dolarhyde? How do you feel about Will back in the game, and having a family? Also remember that you can always watch Hannibal online.

Hannibal, Ep. 3.08, “The Great Red Dragon”: Armitage is gripping, physical as Dolarhyde

Hannibal S03E08Hannibal, Season 3, Episode 8, “The Great Red Dragon”
Written by Nick Antosca and Steve Lightfoot & Bryan Fuller
Directed by Neil Marshall
Airs Saturdays at 10pm (ET) on NBC

The first half of Hannibal season three has drawn criticism from some (though not this critic) for its artistic, avant-garde approach to exploring the psychology and relationship between Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham. With “The Great Red Dragon”, the series opens a new chapter, returning to its stylistic roots and introducing a new key figure: Francis Dolarhyde. Fans of Thomas Harris’ work have been eagerly anticipating Dolarhyde’s debut and the start of the show’s Red Dragon arc/adaptation, and after this episode, it’s easy to see why. Being unfamiliar with Hannibal’s source material, this critic can’t speak to the faithfulness of showrunner Bryan Fuller and co.’s take on the character, but the glimpses shown here are certainly compelling. Without any dialog, Richard Armitage conveys uncertainty, confusion, compulsion, fear, and power, his animalistic physicality telling viewers all they need to know—for now—about the battle raging within Francis Dolarhyde. Armitage’s intense performance is complemented by fantastic work from composer and music supervisor Brian Reitzell (more on this in Kate’s Classical Corner) and the patient, scrutinizing eye of director Neil Marshall. The episode opens with a closeup on Dolarhyde’s fingers, his skin taking on the texture of scales and, as the camera pulls back, his hand the shape of a claw. As Armitage writhes, Dolarhyde exploring his musculature and connecting to something decidedly less human within, Marshall scans his body, sweeping up and down and displaying the strength and flexibility that allow these contortions. If Hannibal is defined by his mind and Will by his heart, Dolarhyde would appear to be a primarily physical being and seeing how he responds to overtures from both should be intriguing.

While much of the episode is spent establishing Dolarhyde and the crimes of the Tooth Fairy, just as interesting is where viewers find Will, Jack, Alana, and the rest of the Hannibal gang three years after the capture of Hannibal in “Digestivo”. Hannibal’s cell at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane is spacious, to say the least, and one can’t help wondering just how he managed such luxurious accommodations. Who in their right mind gives an incarcerated Hannibal Lecter sharpened sketching pencils? Even more puzzling is his apparent access to a kitchen (how else would he know the provenance of the cow’s blood in his sanguinaccio dolce?), though as Chilton spends the scene attempting to butter up Hannibal to get his thoughts on the Tooth Fairy, this may be a rare exception to Hannibal’s confinement in his cell. Three years on, Hannibal is still Hannibal and Chilton is still very much Chilton—Raul Esparza is once again delightful in the role as Chilton taunts Hannibal with his “niche appeal”—but Alana feels decidedly different. The detachment of her earlier season three appearances remains and there’s a hint of her season one inflection when she speaks with Hannibal, but she’s a long way from the warm figure desperate to guide Will out of his darkness in season two. Alana clearly still fears reprisal from Hannibal, and writers Nick Antosca, Steve Lightfoot, and Fuller make sure to have Hannibal solidify his promise to kill her, but it’s reassuring that this fear seems to inform, rather than define her. With yet another fascinating, larger-than-life figure added to the already crowded field of characters, hopefully the writers will still make time this half season to explore this new Alana.

Hannibal S03E08A breezy breath of fresh air, Jimmy and Z make their return in a mostly successful scene (Jimmy’s opening, “I was told you were told…”, which feels like a strained nod to Albert on Twin Peaks, doesn’t quite land), one of many indications that the Dolarhyde arc will be much more in keeping with season one and two than the first half of season three. It’s nice to be in the lab again, to hear Scott Thompson and Aaron Abrams banter and appreciate the smaller things. It’s also nice to see a focused, steady Jack, undoubtedly still mourning Bella, but with enough distance to have processed his loss. Laurence Fishburne is strong as ever, giving weight to Jack’s visit to Will. The contrast between the Jack of season one, who unconcernedly pressed Will into service, and the Jack of the present is stark: he fully understands what he’s asking of Will this time. Will, on the other hand, seems well suited to retirement; he’s content with Molly, Walter, and their dogs (yay! The dogs are alright!). It’s wonderful to see a well-adjusted Will for once—it makes his decision to return to the FBI infinitely more potent. The audience knows Will won’t stay out of the fray, so the writers immediately make the question whether he will be able to return to the waiting and supportive Molly (the warm Nina Arianda, who we will hopefully see more of soon).

The scene that most signals a return to form for this final portion of the season is Will’s examination of the Tooth Fairy crime scene. Unlike in “Primavera”, Will’s processing of the scene is intentional; he seeks out the Tooth Fairy, rather than having his consciousness invaded by Hannibal’s Broken Hart. The scene is strikingly reminiscent of the opening sequence of the pilot—that crime scene was intended to eventually be attributed to Dolarhyde, a thread the creatives have since dropped—and this tie to the beginning of the series feels appropriate for what may be Hannibal’s final arc. There are a few neat new touches, such as the beam of Will’s flashlight conjuring the bodies of the Tooth Fairy’s victims, but on the whole, this is familiar territory, and that familiarity is exactly what Will struggles against. His begrudging submission to his process is simultaneously a defeat and a victory and the visual of Will standing with the blood spatter threads forming the Dragon’s wings feels like a long-awaited return. It’s unlikely Will can ever be what he was before Hannibal’s influence, but this is the closest we’ve seen him come, dissecting a crime scene and helping to catch a killer. Whether his willingness to go to Hannibal so quickly is a red flag or a sign of maturity remains to be seen.

Worthy of special note is the handling of the crime itself by Antosca, Lightfoot, Fuller, and Marshall, which is incredibly thoughtful and respectful of the audience. Fuller has gone on record as saying he will not tell rape stories on Hannibal out of deference to the Fannibals and this presented a challenge when the series caught up with Red Dragon. The Tooth Fairy’s crimes do not stop at murder, to put it lightly, and the writing and direction of this episode manage to hold true to Fuller’s promise while not erasing or sanitizing Dolarhyde’s compulsions. By cutting away from Will’s recreation when it does and presenting but not lingering in Jimmy, Z, and Will’s descriptions of the crime or the characters’ reactions to it, this episode threads the needle between deference to the source material and acknowledgement of the horrible reality of many serial killers’ actions, and using sexual violence for cheap scares or titillation. Many series could learn from the restraint and awareness shown here by all involved, which should put to rest most fears viewers may have had for how this material would be adapted.

Between its careful handling of the Tooth Fairy’s crimes, its memorable character debuts and reintroductions, and its gentle resetting of so many pieces on the Hannibal chessboard to their pre-“Mizumono” positions, “The Great Red Dragon” is a strong and exciting midseason premiere that promises a confident, more accessible end to a previously divisive season.

Hannibal S03E08Other notes:

—Poor Alana! Hannibal having a private reserve of beer just for her seemed so thoughtful back in season one.

—Speaking of Alana, I absolutely love her red suit and styling here. It combines the strength of her earlier season three costuming with her shorter hair, making the look feel slightly lower maintenance, which fits with her personality.

—Esparza and Mads Mikkelsen’s performances as Chilton discusses dessert and colons are great. Chilton’s super-meta talk about “four quadrant” killers should be too much, but it’s in character enough to work and the annoyance that flicks across Mikkelsen’s face as Chilton dismisses Hannibal’s crimes in favor of the Tooth Fairy’s keeps the conversation relevant.

—A few sequences highlighting Marshall’s direction and the episode’s excellent editing are the sumptuous preparation of Hannibal’s dessert (excellent work as always by food stylist Janice Poon, who always creates such beautiful dishes for the series), the eerie image of light streaming from a film-wrapped Dolarhyde’s eyes and mouth, and Will’s suspension in a spiral of family photos as he tries to rest at the motel. It’s nice to see such different approaches to horrific or psychological imagery on Hannibal from director to director.

—After only one scene together, Molly and Will’s relationship feels lived-in and real. That’s impressive.

—Hannibal’s reverse psychology on Will may be simplistic, but it’s apparently effective.

—The meta moment with Chilton may near the edge, but Jack’s, “Please don’t worry about the dog” is more welcome and feels like a playful shout out from Fuller to the Fannibals. Of course we’re gonna worry about the dogs! Thanks for putting our minds to rest by showing them safely off with Molly and Walter.

Kate’s Classical Corner: Click on for my in-depth look at the score and soundtrack for “The Great Red Dragon”, which highlight the differences between Hannibal and Dolarhyde and see composer Brian Reitzell stretching himself and the series’ sound in new, exciting ways.

KCC: Reitzell expands series’ sound in Hannibal, Ep. 3.08, “The Great Red Dragon”

As a classical musician, I can’t help but be influenced in my interpretation of Hannibal by its amazing score and soundtrack, composed and compiled by music supervisor Brian Reitzell. This is not intended to be a definitive reading of Reitzell or showrunner Bryan Fuller’s intentions in regards to the music, but rather an exploration of how these choices affect my appreciation of the given episode. Read my review of “The Great Red Dragon” here.

Classical pieces featured:



Alleluia from Exsultate, jubilate, K. 165, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1773): Hannibal experiences his arrest from his mind palace

This famous movement from Mozart’s solo motet, beautifully performed here by boy soprano Aiden Glenn (the piece was originally composed for a castrato), is a fitting choice to represent how Hannibal elects to experience his arrest and incarceration at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. The clear lines and elegance of Mozart require meticulous attention to detail and precise execution by the performer, traits Hannibal values. It follows that upon his decision to turn himself in, Hannibal would occupy himself with a performance such as this, rather than an elaborate opera or other large work, finding comfort in the intimacy and purity of Classical solo voice with piano. He’d also enjoy the opportunity to feel superior—the performance is sparsely attended, a small moment rather than a populist experience. Choosing a sacred work also ties this scene naturally to the Norman Chapel, where Hannibal sets it, and Will. What’s more, the Alleluia serves as a distinct counterpoint to the scoring of the scene immediately preceding this one, the chaotic, densely textured percussion and strings of Francis Dolarhyde. Hannibal and Dolarhyde are very different beasts and Reitzell demonstrates this clearly with his scoring and soundtrack choices.



Notturno in E-flat major, Op. 148 by Franz Schubert (1827): Chilton eats dessert with Hannibal

One of only a few classical pieces to be featured twice in the series (the other being Chopin’s Raindrop Prelude and the Pie Jesu from Fauré’s Requiem), Schubert’s Notturno makes for a lush, sensuous, and inviting accompaniment to the preparation of Hannibal’s dessert. The same piece was used in “Dolce” to score Cordell’s presentation of his Hannibal-inspired menu to Mason. Whereas Cordell’s meal prompts Mason to gag and complain about textures, Hannibal’s dessert is lovingly shot by director Neil Marshall and enjoyed thoroughly by Chilton, who undoubtedly inspected the ingredients personally. In case there was any doubt, this soundtrack choice confirms it: Mason and Cordell were at best pale imitations of Hannibal. As with the Mozart, this piece counterpoints Dolarhyde and Hannibal, immediately following the growling percussion and sliding strings of the Dolarhyde mirror scene scoring with this warm piano trio.

Hannibal S03E08Other scoring notes:

—From the opening scene, Reitzell stretches himself with the scoring for Francis Dolarhyde. While the thread of heavy, layered percussion for killers connects the Dolarhyde scoring to the rest of the series’ approach, Reitzell thickens the texture with not only winds, but strings. The scoring as Dolarhyde discovers and externalizes the Dragon is split into two sections. As he observes his hands and stretches, familiarizing himself with the beast within, Reitzell uses layered percussion with low, animalistic bass as well as electronic scoring, and throughout, rising and falling in prominence, is a sustained pitch—the call of the Dragon. When Dolarhyde finishes training, his heartbeat and breathing sync up and are represented in the score. As he heads with purpose to get his tattoo and teeth, a strong, focused beat enters in a clear four pattern, the percussion driving forward. The thrum of the tattoo gun takes over—a sound and rhythm that recurs throughout the episode—and its different components provide syncopation, with five-note electronic-sounding (perhaps keyboard?) scales running up and down, providing some melodic motion. Dolarhyde’s scenes in this episode center on the struggle within him and the line between the man and the beast. Reitzell’s scoring in these wordless scenes contributes immensely.

— Two fun evocative touches from the opening sequence: Given the context, the use of tambourine-like percussion as Dolarhyde looks at the painting conjures the image of a dragon counting his gold. Also, the reverb-like effect Reitzell uses in this scene, as Dolarhyde stretches, calls to mind panels from comics featuring characters capable of mind control, waves of psychic energy emitting from a character’s forehead as they possess or control one weaker in will than they, just as the Dragon controls Dolarhyde.

— After building in subdivision and intensity, as Dolarhyde bows before the Dragon, the percussion fades away, leaving a simple chord on what sounds like an organ, conflict and strife receding as a believer genuflects at the altar of his god.

Hannibal S03E08— After the strong, major end to the Mozart, Reitzell immediately goes to a minor second in his scoring for Alana and Hannibal’s conversation; from the clarity of Hannibal’s imprisonment to the uncertain wash of sound for Alana’s much murkier position. Here is where the strings first come in prominently, as the camera breaks and we transition back to…

— Dolarhyde! Again, Reitzell uses percussion to show Dolarhyde’s state of mind. The scene starts off chaotic as Dolarhyde looks in the mirror, attempting to speak before reducing himself to sounds and eventually, a low growl. As he hits his head, trying to quiet the voices inside, this confusion is shown to the audience as competing rhythms and percussion instruments. When Dolarhyde starts growling, when the Dragon comes out a bit—a low, undulating sound mimicking the breathing of the Dragon—the combative percussion recedes and Dolarhyde becomes focused, the strings guiding him towards whatever is hiding behind the broken mirror, sliding downwards until meeting on G.

— The scoring for the episode’s dialog scenes is understandably sparse, with conversations between Alana and Chilton, Jack and Will, Jack and Molly, and Jimmy and Z featuring toned down, but distinct instrumentation. Reitzell’s favoring of the piano for Alana comes through in her scenes with Hannibal and Chilton, as does Chilton’s connection to the clarinet, and Will and Molly’s discussion of whether Will should help catch the Tooth Fairy is scored to minor, mournful strings—helping will mean sacrificing Will’s peaceful life with Molly and Walter—while Jimmy and Z have a more active and light-hearted drum-based sound.

— The scene of Dolarhyde with the film projector begins with a neat effect. The scoring combines with the vocal of the song featured in the film to imply the sound of a religious intonation. This dissipates once the backing percussion for the song enters, but it’s a nice touch, however brief, for the transition into the scene. By the end of the scene, not only has Reitzell’s percussion-as-indication-of-mental-state returned, but the strings come in as well, whining up and down as Dolarhyde is enveloped by the film, and the Dragon.

— Along with the soundtrack choices, the contrast in the scoring for Hannibal and Dolarhyde can be seen in the scrapbook sequence. Dolarhyde gets bass Bartok pizz, Hannibal gets a few notes of refined solo woodwind.

Hannibal S03E08— One of my favorite touches to the episode’s score is that it doesn’t particularly change as Will reads Hannibal’s letter: Hannibal isn’t telling him anything he doesn’t already know.

— The scoring for Will’s experience of the crime scene is striking. Not only does Reitzell feature piano prominently—an instrument he ties to Will even more than he does Alana—he uses percussion and repetitive motifs in the harp, along with a number of evocative touches (ghostly woo-ing in the children’s room, rising line resembling screaming in the violins as Will approaches the parents’ room, tinkling percussion to correspond with the broken mirror), to show the cumulative effect the crime scene is having on Will. He tries to maintain his composure, but not unlike Dolarhyde, he can’t shut out the information assaulting his senses without channeling something he may not wish to. Will tries to observe, but that proves too overwhelming and he must instead sweep the sounds away with his pendulum and participate in the violence.

— When Will does use his pendulum and takes Dolarhyde’s place, the score introduces an approximately quarter equals 120 metronomic beat. However unlike in “Mizumono”, which also heavily features quarter equals 120 percussion, here the aggressive whir of the tattoo gun replaces the delicate ticking of Hannibal’s timer. Breaking the mirrors jars Will from this propulsive need to kill, the tattoo gun replaced by tinkling percussion, harp, and bending pitches in the electric guitar. The drive to kill is one need. What comes next—which the viewer is thankfully spared—is something else entirely.

— The final scene, Will’s return to Hannibal after three years, features much thicker orchestration than Reitzell usually uses (outside of the percussion section). The score is minor, with an air of inevitability. After three years apart—for viewers, an episode—here we go again.

Review: 'Hannibal' - 'The Great Red Dragon': Meet the Tooth Fairy

RICHARD ARMITAGE STEPS IN AS OUR NEW BIG BAD IN AN ADATPTATION OF THE FIRST THOMAS HARRIS STORY

A review of tonight's "Hannibal" coming up just as soon as the blood is from a cow, but only in the derogatory sense...

"If I go... I'll be different when I get back." -Will

Bryan Fuller has said that the plan was originally to devote the bulk of this season to Hannibal's fugitive adventures before he realized they couldn't sustain it that long. As it was, there was a definite strain just in the seven episodes we got of it, in part because the show grew even more abstract and philosophical than ever before, but more because the structure of the story — Hannibal free until almost the end, no Monster of the Week stories in between — reduced Will Graham into an incredibly passive figure. The show has two leads, and if anything, Hannibal was a supporting character for much of season 1, but the scales tipped way too much in favor of Hannibal, rendering his arch-nemesis completely impotent, to the point where the only thing Will has to do with Hannibal's capture is that it's a thing Hannibal is doing to him.

With "The Great Red Dragon," we have a clean break from the Euro trip. Not only has the show, for now, abandoned the practice of naming episodes after courses of meals, but three years have passed for the characters, Will has acquired a family, Hannibal has settled into a routine with Drs. Chilton and Bloom at the psychiatric hospital, Jack is back with the FBI (and we get our first glimpses of the season of Zeller and Price), and there's a hot new serial killer on the loose.

At one point, Chilton taunts his favorite patient with the suggestion that this new killer (played by British actor Richard Armitage) — whom the media have dubbed the Tooth Fairy, but whom we already know thinks of himself as the Red Dragon — will interest a much wider demographic than Hannibal the Cannibal: "You, with your fancy allusions and your fussy aesthetics, you will always have niche appeal."

It's an amusing meta-comment on "Hannibal" itself, where Fuller and company have taken an almost defiantly anti-commercial approach to one of the most popular movie villains of all time. But it's not a signal that the series is suddenly — at a date likely far too late to ensure its future — going to start pandering for a bigger audience. Parts of "The Great Red Dragon" — particularly anything to do with Will — are far more straightforward than what we got for most of the season's first half, but the presentation of the episode's title character is deliberately challenging and opaque, at least to any viewers who haven't already read the first Hannibal novel, or seen either of the previous film adaptations.

Armitage barely speaks at all in the episode — really only enough to establish that the character has a bad speech impediment — and is alone in the majority of his scenes, putting in all the prep work (exercise, mirror work, securing the proper set of teeth with which to leave his signature) necessary for his particular ritual, and struggling with whatever psychological problems require him to do all of this. Having read "Red Dragon" (and watched "Manhunter") several times, I could follow all of what was going on in his head, and recognize all the visual signatures the episode was playing with (the scar on his lip, the William Blake painting from which the killer draws his new name), but I wonder how much of it was comprehensible(*) to whichever viewers are left who haven't already immersed themselves in all things Hannibal. But Armitage is an arresting enough screen presence, and was placed in enough visually fascinating contexts (the creepy and animalistic yoga poses, or his face appearing to be trapped inside a mask of celluloid, with the light of the film projector bursting through) to carry us through this week, at least. And though the character's fascination with Hannibal Lecter also comes from the source material, it's nonetheless amusing to think of him as yet another Fannibal.

(*) One area that was tricky for Lecter layman and expert alike: the Red Dragon's reactions to sudden sounds that only he could hear, which were so close to the show's usual creepy sound design that it was hard to tell where the score ended and his aural hallucinations began.

Charismatic as Armitage is, and as pretty as the various rooms of Hannibal's mind palace look, the most exciting part of the episode was watching Will Graham get his groove back.

Again, the imbalance between Hannibal and Will was perhaps the biggest issue with the first half of the season. The time jump allows us to return to a Will who has healed physically, and on some level emotionally, to all that Hannibal did to him. He's not eager to return to profiling, and is happy with his life taking in strays just as Molly and her son took him in. Molly, of course, has no idea just how bad things got between Will and Hannibal — even if he told her every detail, she still couldn't properly appreciate it without having been there — but she's also wise enough to recognize that the moment Jack showed up, Will had to go with him or risk ruining everything they've built together.

And in having Will visit the second of the Red Dragon's crime scenes, we got the return of the active Will, and the original core idea of the character on the page, the previous screen adaptations, and the way he was written for most of the first two seasons. Remember way back in the spring of 2013, when the big set piece of the week tended to be Will imagining himself committing the crimes of his latest quarry? I hadn't realized quite how much I missed that structure until I saw the pendulum swing effect and Will began taking the Red Dragon's place in this horror show. (The image of the red ballistic strings forming a pair of dragon's wings behind Will was a particularly stunning image.)

And after the show gave us an inversion of Will and Hannibal's first "Red Dragon" encounter at the end of season 1, we got the proper arrangement of it here, with the promise of all kinds of new mind games between these two.

A very promising start to this new arc.

Some other thoughts:

* Welcome back, Jimmy and Zeller! It's good to have Scott Thompson and Aaron Abrams back not just for a bit of comic relief (the show was funny without them, but usually in extremely disgusting ways), but to once again provide a relatively sane and human perspective on all the borderline supernatural madness that everyone else is wrapped up in. Jimmy's been promoted to special agent, but I gather his "assistant" has not?

* Gillian Anderson remains listed in the opening credits, but sometimes shows don't tweak those in-season. I wouldn't be surprised to see Bedelia pop up again at some point, but nor would I be surprised if the show is done with her for now.

* That's Tony winner Nina Arianda as Will's wife Molly, a role played in previous films by Kim Greist and Mary-Louise Parker. (And the Red Dragon himself has, of course, been previously played by Tom Noonan and Ralph Fiennes.)

* We have yet to see Freddie Lounds this season, but I laughed at the headline on her website about Hannibal's capture: "Kitchen Nightmare."

* Fuller has talked about his aversion to adding to the long list of TV dramatizations of rape, and said that he had to be very delicate with how he portrayed the Red Dragon's crimes, given that women are among his victims and that he does more than just kill the women. So as Jimmy and Zeller are explaining what they found at the Leeds crime scene, there's a quick mention of a mirror shard being wedged in Mrs. Leeds' labia, and we also see a shot of Mrs. Leeds lying on the bed while the bodies of her husband and children are propped up to watch what happens to her, but the show doesn't really dwell on it here.

* I understand that Chilton has a blind spot when it comes to Hannibal — and to the prestige and money that come with being his keeper and chronicler — but even given that, it's hard to fathom him allowing Dr. Lecter access to any level of food preparation, even with a watchful eye on him, the ingredients, and the utensils.

Hannibal season 3, episode 8: These 9 moments capture the show at its most beautiful
Updated by Todd VanDerWerff on July 26, 2015, 9:00 a.m. ET @tvoti


Richard Armitage joins the show as Francis Dolarhyde, the man who kills people as the Red Dragon. NBC
Just in time for the show to play out the string of what might be its final run of episodes ever, Hannibal is on one hell of a hot streak.

Its latest episode, "The Great Red Dragon," kicks off the very first Hannibal Lecter story. The novel from which it takes its basis, Thomas Harris's Red Dragon, was the very first book to feature the character, and though Hannibal, the TV series, has delved into the back-story Harris only hints at, the episode's greatest success is in approaching the story almost as another pilot.

Indeed, if you had friends who were curious about the show and looking for a place to jump in, this would be a good one, if the show's end weren't imminent.

RelatedRead our complete coverage of Hannibal season 3
"Great Red Dragon" takes place three years after the last episode, and though only a week in time has passed between their airdates, the episode's script (credited to Nick Antosca, Steve Lightfoot, and Bryan Fuller) does a great job at suggesting that things have changed.

Will Graham has left behind criminal profiling in favor of a quiet life with his new wife and stepson. Hannibal is wasting away in prison. And in the shadows, a new killer arises.

DIRECTOR NEIL MARSHALL'S SHOTS FIT PERFECTLY WITHIN THE GORGEOUSLY ORNATE WORLD OF HANNIBAL

But another reason this episode works so beautifully as the start of a new chapter in this story is because of director Neil Marshall. The Brit has directed episodes of Game of Thrones in the past, but his primary qualification for directing Hannibal is likely his work on The Descent, an absolutely terrific horror film about cavers who encounter something horrible while on an expedition. (I wrote a little more about the film here.) Marshall's shots are exquisitely composed, something that fits perfectly within the gorgeously ornate world of Hannibal.

If last week's episode was the show reasserting itself as TV's most messed up, "The Great Red Dragon" reminds us it's one of the most beautiful, too. Here are nine moments where Marshall found the beautiful in the horrific.

1) The Red Dragon awakens

Francis Dolarhyde on Hannibal.
NBC
Francis Dolarhyde (Richard Armitage) struggles with the awakening horrors within himself.
The villain of Red Dragon is a man named Francis Dolarhyde, who carries himself more or less normally much of the time, except for the fact that some dark side of himself is awakening inside his brain. Imagining himself the "red dragon" depicted in William Blake's paintings (and dubbed the "Tooth Fairy" by the media), Francis assaults and kills whole families at a time, working out his own horrible psychological issues.

What's key, then, to any portrayal of the character is the divide between his "normal" self and that darker side. Some of that is helped by the voices in his head (manifesting here mostly as unearthly growls), but the temptation might be to, say, portray an actual dragon or something. On a TV budget, Hannibal can never give in to that idea.

Instead, Marshall focuses on Francis's hands as the dragon awakens, the way that he contorts them into rigid claws, his imagination trying to create the beast he feels within himself. Fuller has frequently talked about the element of transformation that underlies essentially all of Harris's villains, and Francis's attempts to turn himself into a literal dragon are expressed perfectly here, in a long, artful montage that captures how his day to day life is being snapped in two by these growing feelings, or the process that results in his massive dragon tattoo sprawling across his back.


2) Hannibal opens up the memory palace

NBC
Hannibal's cell is replaced by an elegant dining room.
While enclosed in a cell, Hannibal Lecter imagines a kind of freedom by retreating to what he calls his "memory palace," a place where he can experience some of the wonderful places he visited while he was not imprisoned.

Marshall portrays this via an elegant dissolve, as the space behind Hannibal at first stands as a barren, mostly functional cell, before being replaced by the decorations of Hannibal's old dining room. Marshall will play around with perspective throughout the episode, occasionally showing us events as they appear inside Hannibal's brain and then showing as they actually are, in reality. It's a nifty trick, and it sets up what comes later perfectly.

3) Will has a whole new life, too

Will is married to Molly.
NBC
Will is now married to Molly (Nina Arianda).
In some ways, the character of Molly (the woman Will marries in between the arrest of Hannibal and the beginning of Red Dragon) is a thankless one. She and her son exist mostly to give Will something other than his work, and in places she mostly seems to be around solely to fulfill the role of "light in the darkness" that women have so often occupied in crime fiction. Yes, as one of the first serial killer novels, Red Dragon invented how this trope would be used going forward, but it's still become a trope.

Still, the character is played by Nina Arianda in the series, and Arianda's a good enough actress that she might pull this off. Similarly, notice how Marshall often films the character as if she's the stable tether to reality Will has been searching for so long. Marshall presents her not as something Will can lose (as previous versions of the story sometimes have), but, instead, as his strength.

4) The stark reality of Hannibal's new life is apparent

Hannibal and Chilton have dinner.
NBC
Hannibal and Chilton have a lovely dinner inside the former's cell.
This scene, in which Hannibal dines with Frederick Chilton (who is the head of the psychiatric hospital where Hannibal is held) is one of the episode's best, even if it's slightly unbelievable that Chilton would allow Hannibal to prepare food in prison.

Chilton ribs Hannibal about how much more popular the Tooth Fairy is now (in terms that seem to grouse about the low ratings of the show itself), while Hannibal's mind keeps switching between the stark reality of his surroundings and the more opulent world he used to occupy. It's a sly, funny sequence, and it's a great reminder of how much light Chilton brings to the Hannibal universe.

5) The return of the pendulum

NBC
Will imagines himself committing the crimes of the Tooth Fairy.
One of the reasons "Great Red Dragon" feels like it takes place three years after the last episode is because it subtly tricks the audience into feeling like the show's been away for a while. It does this by returning to the case of the week format the series employed in its first season (and fitfully in its second).

I opined a few weeks ago that the abandonment of the cases of the week was hurting season three, and I still think that had a tendency to make Will feel like somebody people offered exposition to, rather than an active character. But at the same time, that long pause in his narrative made the weight of this moment, when he closes his eyes and imagines himself at the Tooth Fairy's crime scene (as he did back in season one), so much more powerful and potent.

Or, put another way, the listlessness of the early portions of the season has made these last few episodes feel all the more powerful. That doesn't forgive what came before, but it does paint it in a more sympathetic light.

6) All of that blood

The Tooth Fairy's crime scene
NBC
The horrific crime scene grounds the episode in grim reality.
It's tempting to forget, sometimes, that Hannibal is about murder, because the murders are presented as almost supernatural in nature, as events that happen because normal people met the wrong sort of demon at the wrong time. "Great Red Dragon" uses the Tooth Fairy's crime scene to remind us that these deaths might be over-the-top, but they're real. A family died in horrible fashion, here, and nothing will restore their lives.

7) Will sees himself in the shards of mirror

Will sees himself in the mirror.
NBC
Will sees his face in the broken shards of the mirror, as he imagines the Tooth Fairy must have.
The sequence where Will examines the Tooth Fairy crime scene is filled with tremendous shots, in which Marshall shows off his visual gifts. Here's one of them, as Will sees himself reflected in the tiny shards of mirror the Tooth Fairy uses to cover his victims' faces.

It's all in Will's head, admittedly, but it's still an especially potent image, especially when we factor in the ways that Francis Dolarhyde feels like he's transforming into something more than human.

The strings marking blood spatter become Will's own dragon wings

Will seems to have red dragon wings on Hannibal.
NBC
Will seems to have red dragon wings.
This shot is almost too cool to exist on television. In particular, take note of Marshall's use of light, which slowly rises to accent the red in the strings that make up Will's "wings."

9) "Hello, Will."

NBC
Hannibal and Will meet again for the first time in years.
We know Hannibal and Will are going to meet and talk again. Even if we haven't read Red Dragon (where this happens frequently), we know how television works, and we know the series is going to return to this dynamic again and again.

But the choice to end the episode on their first meeting in three years (and Marshall's choice to shoot it via shots that hold both characters in frame at the same time, but only have one in focus at any given moment) gives everything a gravity that almost leaps off the screen.

Something went terribly wrong between these two men, but if they're going to have a prayer of putting the Tooth Fairy in prison, they're going to have to find a way to put at least some of it right again. That's the dynamic Harris exploited in his novel, and it's a dynamic that has gained so much more power on this series for knowing the back-story. The pages of Red Dragon are in good hands.

Previous episode

Hannibal Recap: Season 3, Episode 8, "The Great Red Dragon"
BY CHUCK BOWEN ON JULY 25, 2015 IN TV GO TO COMMENTS (1)
Hannibal
When we first see Francis Dolarhyde (Richard Armitage), he's sitting in what appears to be a cafeteria, having coffee, looking over a Time magazine with rapt fascination. On the cover is a reprint of William Blake's The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun, one of several paintings the poet and artist produced depicting images of a seven-headed, 10-horned monster from the Book of Revelation. Francis turns the magazine's pages and finds within them an even more striking image in the series, a reprint of the nearly identically titled The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun. The paintings cumulatively dramatize both sides of a single image: In the first, we see the front of a woman as she's descended on by the dragon, and in the second, we're behind them, looking predominantly on the dragon's powerful, startlingly sexualized back, which is rippled with muscle, supporting great sprouting wings and a coiled tail that suggests a phallus. In the first painting the woman is accorded dramatic agency, and our empathy is drawn to her; in the second, she's seen cowering between the dragon's legs, our senses primarily taken with its power over her. It's this power that transfixes Francis.
"The Great Red Dragon" opens on a close-up of Francis's hand, as he's contorting it, stretching it, striving to render it larger beyond the limitations of its corporeal form. Something about the tone and tenor of this sequence recalls the first time we see the Joker, his back to us on the streets of Gotham City, in The Dark Knight. Both scenes connote the tension of a certainly catastrophic Beginning, the image of Francis's hand segueing into a phenomenal, wordless pre-credits montage in which we see him becoming the Red Dragon. We see Francis in an attic, clad only in tight, rump-hugging black underwear, bending his considerable back, legs, and arms in wavy, undulating, yoga-esque fashions that mirror his prior movements with his hand. Frustrated, or ashamed of his cleft lip and palate, Francis smashes a mirror, looking into its shards, over which we hear subtle sounds of stirring. Francis is looking for the Dragon in these shards, and we're looking too (most notably when the stirring sound later intensifies over suggestive images of film flickering in and out over the light of a projector). Then, we're in a Chinese tattoo parlor, as an artist goes to work on Francis in close-ups that emphasize his skin as merely fabric for a needle, as material necessary for a Becoming. Then, a pawn shop that appears to have sprung straight from the realm of noir-tinged nightmares, as the world beyond its windows, which we should be able to see from inside, are shrouded in fog, red light, and darkness. Francis buys a pair of snaggle-toothed dentures, then unveils himself back in his attic: a strong, frightening man with Blake's dragon now on his back. Of course, it's clear that something's been on this person's figurative back for a great long while.
In just five minutes, Hannibal creator Bryan Fuller and his many collaborators, including this episode's director, Neil Marshall, capture an element of Thomas Harris's novel Red Dragon that has mostly eluded its two prior film adaptations: Francis's pitifulness and operatic self-loathing. Audience members who've read the book will admittedly have a head start over everyone else, reading into this montage facets of the antagonist's personality that have yet to be parceled out by the showrunners. But Francis's torment comes through in these scenes either way, particularly when he smashes the mirror in his attic with a close-up tying that action to his cleft lip. Immediately, this episode establishes a pull between objective and subjective reality that's always been important to Hannibal and that will particularly serve the Red Dragon arc. Francis clearly sees himself as hideous, while we look upon him and see a man with a remarkable body and commanding gait. The notion of Francis as a hunk came as a quiet but pivotal shock in the book, when he began a relationship with a blind woman who told him how their co-workers saw him; until that point, via words, we only had Francis's horribly unflattering view of himself. This surprise can't be maintained in a visual medium, but the loss of this perspectival rift—as a twist, at least— reaps other, richer resonances.
Francis is estranged from society, destined to regard it from the outside, because he's imprisoned like most of us (hopefully in considerably less dramatic contexts) within a version of life produced by his mind. Fuller and Marshall point this irony up whenever given the opportunity. The papers reporting the Tooth Fairy's murders (an inadvertent nickname that only affirms Francis's hopelessness and righteousness) mention that the victims were "perfect families." The two families that Francis murders each had an assuring nuclear arrangement that he feels a freak like him can never enjoy, and so a ledger-settling reckoning must occur. The Red Dragon's rise suggestively parallels Will Graham's (Hugh Dancy) own feelings of uncertainty. Early in the series, Will said that he barely knew what a family was, but now, three years after the events of the prior episode, "Digestivo," he's married to a beautiful woman, Molly (Nina Arianda), living a rustic, romantic cabin life. Though one senses, especially in an awkward line about the height of Molly's son from a previous marriage, that Will doesn't feel he deserves this arrangement. Or, perhaps more exactingly, he feels as if he's inadequately playing a role that wasn't written for him.
In Harris's book, and in Michael Mann's film Manhunter, Will was tormented in a conventionally macho, man-of-few-words fashion. But Dancy has always played the character with a more compelling degree of vulnerability. Will's power to "empathize" with killers, which occasionally resembles astral projection, is likened to the behavior of a sensitive, gifted, often frightened child. Which is to say that we're actually afraid for Will when he's inevitably recruited by Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne), who's somehow magically the director of the FBI again, to hunt the Red Dragon down. Will is being forced, in the manner of a recovering addict, to do battle with the demons of his past in a showdown that threatens the stability he's finally managed to achieve. Francis and Will are simpatico, and that was always underscored by the book and the movies, but, for once, this similarity is imbued with real emotional undertow. Will's new endangerment only exacerbates the disillusionment and self-pity that drive both him and Francis: They know they are never meant to have what the squares accept as a given.
Another telling deviation from Red Dragon: Here, as Molly wants Will to go after the serial killer, she's essentially on Jack's side, while she was a standard-issue disapproving wife in the book. Superficially, this change registers as a progressive unwillingness to paint Molly in a reductive corner, but, textually deeper down, it echoes a gifted person's fear that their gifts are the only reason anyone might be attracted to them, which is a roundabout way of acknowledging one of the reasons that men often come to greatly resent women: because they feel the latter are only after what they can quantifiably offer (a sentiment Francis understands all too well). This alteration informs Will's search for Francis with that much more urgency, particularly when the former explores the house where the latter murdered the Leeds family, having to relive, in essence, his own prior life as a suggestive outsider.
This longing intensifies the dread of a terrific set piece in which Will shines his flashlight over the empty Leeds bedrooms. Briefly, within the strand of his light, are the ghosts of the Leeds corpses, which disappear to show the room as it presently is—bloody, with an elaborate sculpture of string to illustrate splatter patterns—as soon it shines elsewhere. It's a brief, chilling effect that primes the aesthetic well for Will's total projection into Francis's psyche. When we finally see the telltale image of a golden pendulum swinging, it suggests a transformation of Will that mirrors the early scenes where Francis contorted his body. Both men are trying to will transcendence out of emotional desolation. When Will looks upon the Leeds corpses, with shards of mirror placed on their facial orifices, he senses the humbling appreciation that Francis sought. (We're also allowed to see an image to which Will isn't yet privy: of Francis immediately in the wake of one of the murders, outside the victims' house, shivering from the coldness of the weather and from a sense of orgasmic completion, bathed in blood in a manner befitting Countess Báthory.)
"The Great Red Dragon" underscores a basic, rarely acknowledged truth of serial-killer stories, fiction and nonfiction alike: that they're about class. There's a reason some people on the fringe of society have unconscionably embraced Charles Manson as a hero, for instance: He went to the house of rich, good-looking people and destroyed them, acquainting them with a pain that brought them down to size. This is why serial killers are often portrayed, even in Hannibal, as über-brilliant rock stars, though this embittered, morally unjustifiable tendency is slyly subverted in the portion of this episode that pertains directly to Hannibal (Mads Mikkelsen). Officially ruled insane and un-executable, our titular prince of darkness is now housed in the Baltimore State Hospital in quarters that surpass the living conditions of most people in the world. Hannibal's cell isn't the dungeon seen in Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs, but a large, chic study with a drafting table, books, and artwork. Furthermore, Hannibal uses his own gifts for actively controlling perspectival rifts to imagine the cell as a great Florence flat with a wide, walk-in fireplace. This is how we usually see the cell, as an apparition of Hannibal's memory palace, which allows Fuller and company to stage Hannibal's scenes as if he's barely been imprisoned at all, preserving the balance of his power relationships with the other characters.
As a prisoner, Hannibal still manages to upstage Dr. Frederick Chilton (Raúl Esparza), who was once his rival and colleague and is now his captor. Chilton wrote a book about Hannibal that no one respects, while Hannibal publishes greatly anticipated articles in The American Journal of Psychiatry. Chilton, ever envious, does land one good punchline at Hannibal's expense, telling him that he's yesterday's news in the wake of the Tooth Fairy: "He does have a much wider demographic than you do. You, with your fancy allusions, your fussy aesthetic, you will always have niche appeal." Chilton is also obviously talking about the series we're watching, now cancelled and potentially finishing its final season, in a meta wink that offers a dark gallows reprieve from the despairing Will/Francis storyline, which burns at a slow, obsessive pace that contrasts pointedly with the quasi-comic excess of "Digestivo." Though Hannibal, as always, gets the best line, telling Chilton that the dessert he's now eating (yes, Hannibal's even allowed to cook in this one-percenter pleasure cruise that Chilton calls institutionalization), was once served to him with the blood of a cow that was only a cow "in a derogatory sense." Now that Hannibal has become the ultimate celebrity leach, will Francis reawaken his artistic instincts?
For more Hannibal recaps, click here.

Hannibal Recap: Madness Is Waiting

Hannibal - Season 3
HANNIBAL -- "The Great Red Dragon" Episode 308 -- Pictured: Mads Mikkelsen as Hannibal Lecter -- (Photo by: Brooke Palmer/NBC) Photo: Brooke Palmer/NBC
Hannibal
Hannibal
The Great Red Dragon
Season 3
Episode 8
EDITOR’S RATING: *****


We are privy to a great Becoming:

In a room of sallow lighting, a man named Francis Dolarhyde (Richard Armitage) reads Time magazine. Embellishing the cover is William Blake’s The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun, an awe-inspiring, violently sexual painting of a muscle-threaded monster seen from behind, its wings protruding majestically, its tail wrapping around a young woman. Dolarhyde is inspired. The music pounds, percussive clattering that suggests a migraine slowly swelling. He trains his body, carves his muscles, arches his back while emitting an anguished groan, as if expecting wings to tear through his skin. A tattoo needle punctures his flesh, over and over, like a dragon’s tongue dripping blood. Dolarhyde visits an antique shop, daubed in neon red, where he buys a full set of crooked teeth. In his apartment, we see Dolarhyde, gleaming off the splinters of broken mirror, transforming.

In less than five minutes, veteran horror director Neil Marshall has established the character, tone, and motifs that will make up the next (and final) six episodes of Hannibal. It’s a spectacular bit of filmmaking, a dialogue-free introduction to a character before whom we will inevitably tremble.

Thomas Harris’ novel Red Dragon has been twice tapped for the cinematic treatment, once by Michael Mann (who crafted the cult-favorite Manhunter), and two decades later by Brett Ratner (for the utterly forgettable bore Red Dragon). Manhunter has amassed a fervid legion of followers in recent years. Ratner’s film possibly has its apologists – I’ve never met any, but I’m sure they exist, somewhere. But Hannibal approaches the story differently. It seems to be weaving a Tragedy instead of just a horror tale.

After the commercials (which really ruin Marshall’s clever transitions, ugh capitalism), we cut to a young boy singing in a church. But it’s not a fancy church, like in Palermo. Folding chairs replace the pews. Marshall intercuts between the church and Hannibal’s arrest and the subsequent fallout, as the once-lauded M.D. is carted away and graphics of Freddie Lounds’ byline at the Tattler appear behind him. The high pitched singing harkens back to the castrati, a gleefully sick metaphor for Hannibal’s emasculation behind bars. Hannibal has fallen from grace; he is, as Frederic Chilton says, the monster of monsters. Marshall, director of Dog Soldiers and The Descent, has a playful touch with the lurid material; he really gets the humor, and his sense of pacing is impeccable, with the long, slow conversations interrupted by Dolarhyde’s violent lapses with reality.

Alana Bloom visits Hannibal. They face the camera head-on, ala Jonathan Demme. Hannibal’s cell, more of a largely vacant office, looks like a conflation of the antiseptic white bricks and metal bars of Manhunter and The Silence of the Lambs’s gothic, Hammer Horror dungeon of red brick, shrouded in shadows, with a wide glass wall perforated by breathing holes. Hannibal “The Cannibal” has been denied his freedom, as well as his once-glorious hair, yet he still maintains an air of dignity.

“Congratulations,” Alana tells him. “You’re officially insane.”

He refutes this.

“For convenience," she goes on, "we categorize you as a monster.”

In Manhunter, Brian Cox inhabits Hannibal as a virile, yet passive aggressive man who spits out dialogue officiously; in Lambs, Anthony Hopkins’s effete, erudite Lecter has perfect posture and impeccable manners, his articulation as exact and exacting as any knife. He’s still the scariest Lecter, since we never seen him vulnerable or emotionally open – you can’t trust him. Mikkelsen’s Hannibal has opened up in slight, subtle ways, mostly to Will. There’s an almost Tilda Swinton-esque quality about him, a mix of masculine and feminine features, his face a flesh mask hiding some unutterable identity. He’s the first Lecter for whom we can actually feel… bad? Can you feel bad for a cannibalistic mass murderer?

Before she leaves, Alana reminds Hannibal that he made her a promise – “I always keep my promises,” he tells her for the second time.

In the shards of broken mirror, Dolarhyde broods. He steeples his hands above his head, looking like he wants to rip off his skin and crack open his skull. The moon hangs in the sky, a cold and bloated orb; Dolarhyde is drawn to it. His face contorts, as if there’s a disconnect between brain and body. Armitage is doing a lot of character building without any dialogue here: the operatic self-loathing, the estrangement, the difficulty with identity and reality – as good as Tom Noonan is in Manhunter, he only hints at these deep, percolating anxieties. (Ralph Fiennes was totally miscast in Red Dragon.) In the cold dark night, Dolarhyde rises up, glazed in blood as black as tar.

Hannibal eats dessert with Chilton – cow’s blood and chocolate, Hannibal tells Chilton. “What about the last time you made this for me?” Chilton asks.

“The blood was from a cow, only in a derogatory sense.”

“Blood and chocolate,” Chilton says. “That’s what I was going to name my book. But I said I wouldn’t use a colon in the title. Colons lose their novelty when overused.”

Chilton is writing a book about the Tooth Fairy, who murders families on a lunar cycle. The Tooth Fairy, Chilton opines, has mainstream appeal – he’s a four-quadrant killer, whereas Hannibal, with his “fancy illusions and fussy aesthetics, will always have niche appeal.” No other show comments on its own esoterica as well as Hannibal, and “The Great Red Dragon” has some of the spriest, sharpest writing so far, courtesy of Steve Lightfoot and Bryan Fuller, with co-writer Nick Antosca, whose adept repurposing of influences (see his novels Midnight Panic and The Hangman’s Ritual) fits the show naturally. The show has lifted entire pages of dialogue from Harris for three seasons, which only shows how great Harris’ dialogue is, but Fuller, Lightfoot, and Antosca add flair and wit and distribute Harris’ words carefully. It’s stellar writing.

Venting to Alana Bloom, Chilton complains that Hannibal Lecter writes about problems he doesn’t have, after Alana tells him Hannibal’s brilliant article on the Tooth Fairy will trounce Chilton’s book. In Red Dragon, Chilton is a snide, sniveling creep, perfectly captured by Anthony Heald in Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs. Here, Raúl Esparza plays Chilton as exasperated, envious but self-aware. Even Harris’ pettiest characters have depth in Fuller’s show.

Back in Wolftrap, Virginia, Will is with his dog. Jack Crawford rolls up in his SUV. Will doesn’t look thrilled to see Jack, whose beard is now mottled with gray. They sit on the porch, their breath escaping their mouths in plumes. “You don’t want to talk about it inside?” Jack asks.

“I don’t want to talk about it anywhere,” Will responds. “Don’t take the pictures out. Molly and Walter will be back soon.”

“You ever think about giving me a call?” Jack asks.

“No. I never called because… I didn’t want to. I can’t help you.”

Will is now happily married to Molly (Nina Arianda), and has an adopted son named Walter, who is 11. But Will has been following the Tooth Fairy slayings, and Molly knows that if he stays in the house and reads about another killing during the next full moon, it will sour his tranquil life with her and Walter. Will, she says, needs to do the right thing, a jarring departure from the novel and previous films, in which Molly tries to convince Will to stay home.

“If I go,” he tells her, “I’ll be different when I get back.”

Molly says, “I won’t.”

Hannibal has retained a lot of the plot points and dialogue from Harris’ novels, with nods to the books and subsequent adaptations strewn about like Easter eggs for perceptive fans. But the most significant difference between the novels and Bryan Fuller’s show is the relationship between Will and Hannibal. In Red Dragon, Will loathes Lecter so much, the last thing in the world he wants to do is see him again; when he receives a Christmas card from the psychiatrist, he burns it in his back yard and washes his hands. And yet Will knows that in order to catch the Tooth Fairy, he has to see Lecter. (He decides that on page 74.) The way Lecter picks at Will’s brain, his dexterous fingers digging through Will’s thoughts, is utterly devoid of the love and care that Mads Mikkelsen and Hugh Dancy have fostered on the show. Here, amidst the cackle of a fire in a darkened room, Will pulls out of a trunk an unopened envelope adorned with that distinctive cursive; it predicts that Jack will come calling soon, and asks Will not to go back to the other side, into the darkness: “Madness is waiting.”

Will investigates the most recent victims’ home. The house is pervaded by selenian imagery: reflections, the halation of the flashlight, a half-eaten wheel of cheese. As Will’s flashlight passes over the blood-spattered carpet, the Leeds’ bodies appear. Will closes his eyes and delves into the crime scene, that Monster-of-the-Week aesthetics slowly returning: “This is my design.”

Special Agents Jimmy Price (Scott Thompson) and Brian Zeller (Aaron Abrams) make welcome returns, showing Jack a replica of the Tooth Fairy’s crooked teeth. “Snaggle tooth son of a bitch,” Jack says.

Will comes to a realization. He can’t solve this case on his own. He needs to probe his old mind, the one Molly helped him forget. He needs to go back into the darkness. He goes to Jack’s office:

“I have to see Hannibal.”

HANNIBAL Season 3 Recap: “The Great Red Dragon”
by Chris Cabin

In a 42-odd-minute episode, “The Great Red Dragon” immediately outdoes the enjoyable but shallow Red Dragon and, in a few key sequences, is a far more thoughtful and visually daring work than Michael Mann‘s excellent Manhunter. So firstly, hats off to Neil Marshall, the filmmaker behind the new-horror classic The Descent, for creating such a emotionally stirring, hypnotic entrance for Francis Dolarhyde (Richard Armitage of The Hobbit), known in the media as The Tooth Fairy, a serial killer who executes then maims “perfect families” by wedging shards of mirror into their orifices. And although Hannibal now must live life in a cell, and Will has retired to the wintry country with his wife, Molly (Nina Arianda), and his stepson, the series hasn’t skipped a beat and certainly is no less dazzling in its red-tinted, shadowy expressionism than it was when it was just the two lovebirds chasing each other across Italy.
hannibal-season-3-richard-armitage-red-dragon

Image via NBC

Perhaps the most dynamic element of the episode is the treatment of Dolarhyde, previously played exquisitely by both Tom Noonan and Ralph Fiennes in the aforementioned films. Armitage doesn’t utter a word as Dolarhyde, and Marshall, working from a script by Bryan Fuller, Nick Antosca, and Steve Lightfoot, smartly accentuates his physicality, his hands being manipulated into a claw-like form or his back muscles flexing, shifting in the hopes of dragon wings sprouting out suddenly. Even in an episode that saw the giddy return of the inimitable Scott Thompson as Special Agent Price and Aaron Abrams as Zeller, Armitage’s instantly unnerving performance dominated the episode, as the introduction of such a major character should, but never overwhelmed the palette.

A great deal of the rest of the episode dealt with the backstory that we missed in the 3-year time jump, but there was never any sense of these characters just pushing out as much story as possible. The action of the episode continued to stress concepts of belief (in humanity and the divine), the hardships and indulgences of craftsmanship, and the great psychological hemorrhages that these characters, with the notable exception of the titular inmate, have suffered. The early discussions between Hannibal, Alana, and the sniveling Dr. Chilton, played by Raúl Esparza, circle around the book that Chilton wrote about Hannibal and is planning to write about The Tooth Fairy, but the more personal undercurrent of these exchanges deals with matters of adaptation, both in terms of the arts and as humans. Indeed, one can nearly feel Fuller sneering at NBC, a network who has yet to adapt to the post-ratings era, when Chilton pontificates about how Hannibal is too “fussy” with his aesthetic and how The Tooth Fairy, in contrast, is a “four-quadrant” killer, utilizing a well-known marketing term to speak of dark, intimate matters of the heart and the brain.
hannibal-season-3-hugh-dancy-red-dragon

Image via NBC

The episode ends with Will and Hannibal reuniting on opposite sides of a cell wall, preparing for another tete-a-tete over a pile of dead bodies and a distinctly gifted murderer. Especially in the scenes involving Will, Fuller, Marshall, and the crew orchestrated a recognizable but purposefully unsteady return to the procedures of the first season and at least part of Season 2, complete with his light-metronome swipe that allows him to envision the Tooth Fairy’s last grisly crime. Life with a wife and son has changed Will, and returning to his dark zone of empathy to relate to these killers is no longer as familiar a process as it was when he was romancing Alana or sleeping with a member of the Verger clan. There’s a great scene where Will is suspended amongst a scattered plethora of crime scene photos, drifting amongst them without any sense of how to connect them to one another and find a path to Dolarhyde’s persona. In contrast, “The Great Red Dragon” seamlessly leads us into the final movement of what might very well be the last season of one of the boldest, most resonant and hugely inventive series to ever grace network television, and the best adaptation of Thomas Harris’ work outside of The Silence of the Lambs.

★★★★★ Excellent — Awards material

Richard Armitage Is Outstanding As ‘The Great Red Dragon’ In His ‘Hannibal’ Debut
JULY 26, 2015 LEAVE A COMMENT
Richard Armitage transforms into The Great Red Dragon
The much awaited debut of Richard Armitage as “The Great Red Dragon” in Hannibal happened on Saturday night and it was outstanding. But we already knew it would be.

Showrunner Bryan Fuller and executive producer Martha De Laurentii have been singing Armitage’s praises on Twitter and at the San Diego Comic Con. Fuller even went as far as saying he and his editing team had been brought to tears as they watched the British actor’s footage of his portrayal of the serial killer Francis Dolarhyde, a.k.a The Red Dragon/The Tooth Fairy.

Francis Dolarhyde is a disturbed man, who has a cleft palate, and was abandoned by his mother after his birth because she was too disgusted by his deformity. The serial killer has murdered entire families, the aftermath of which we witness when Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) visits one of the homes. Bloody doesn’t even begin to describe what he sees at the crime scene.

a big fan of Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen), who three years later from the events we saw in Season 3’s previews episode, is imprisoned in a mental institution. Will, very reluctantly, reaches out to Hannibal for his help in finding the serial killer.

If you didn’t know Richard Armitage before Saturday night, you were most certainly wondering who this man is and why you haven’t heard of him before this. Despite his 43-years of age, Armitage is still mostly unknown in the U.S., not so in the U.K. and has legions of adoring fans who were all aflutter last night watching their man blow everyone away.

The transformation was nothing short of brilliant and if Richard Armitage doesn’t get an Emmy nod, we will hear about it. The interesting thing is that he didn’t even speak. Not one word in the entire episode, but the display of physical strength in his yoga moves was stunning and the result of the renowned dedication to his craft.

We also got a glimpse at the horrible aftermath of his latest crime, against the Leeds family, in which he murders the parents and two young kids in cold blood. If you have read the book, you know that we will hear more about what Dolarhyde actually did at this particular crime scene.

In sum, Richard Armitage’s performance was stunningly beautiful considering the character he portrays, which is in tune with the incredible cinematography Fuller brings to Hannibal. The showrunner and De Laurentiis promise even more greatness to come as the season moves on to its end. Sadly NBC has chosen to cancel the show — which received second place in Saturday night’s ratings — and Fuller hasn’t found a home for it yet. A movie focused on the Red Dragon is one possibility being discussed at this time.


[Image via NBC]