Hannibal: The Number Of The Beast Is 666
“You owe me awe.”

By Molly Eichel@mollyeichel
Aug 22, 2015 11:00 PM


Hannibal

The Number Of The Beast Is 666

Season 3 , Episode 12

Francis Dolarhyde has spent much of his time on Hannibal discussing his transformation, his becoming. He is in a transitory state. He is not yet the Red Dragon, but that is the final goal. “Becoming” denotes he is not yet there. Anything that stands in the way of this becoming, namely the humanity that Reba imbues him with, must be discarded.

Will Graham is already there. He has already become what he so desperately does not want to be and he can’t stop that part of his being. “Maybe you wanted to put Chilton at risk,” Bedelia tells Will. Of course, he did. Putting his hand on Chilton’s shoulder may have seemed like a moment of camaraderie between colleagues, but, as we learn, it was as a calculated a move on Will’s part on making sure that the location of his hideaway could be discerned by the landmarks in the back. This smacks of a plan, Alana says, Francis Dolarhyde will figure it out. Will knew that and used it to not further the investigation, but to be what he already was. While Francis Dolarhyde pushes away what tamped down those urges of destruction, Will has lost what kept him from acting on them (“You play, you pay”).

While Francis Dolarhyde becomes, Will Graham actively works against these evil impulses. Yet, “The Number Of The Beast Is 666” proved that try as Will might, he has already become what he does not want to be.

But neither of them are in the control. “The Number Of The Beast Is 666” all comes down to what Alana tells Will and Jack: They have been under the delusion before that they are under control, but Hannibal remains the only one who is under control. He’s the one who instructs Francis to burn Chilton in the same manner that had been used to tease Hannibal out before. As Bedelia says to Will in their—let’s be honest, frankly unhealthy—therapy sessions, “Hannibal does have agency in the world. He has you.” Hannibal may be behind glass but when it comes down to it, he is always the one who holds all of the cards. Chilton offended Hannibal by reminding him of a fate without dignity, as an old man in gen pop crying over stewed apricots. But, of course, that would never happen to Hannibal. So Hannibal took care of it through his two agents. Will wanted to put him at risk, so he did. The Red Dragon wanted to bite off Chilton’s lips and burn him alive, so he did.

Ah, poor Frederick Chilton. His body has been maimed and torn apart, his face massacred (now for the second time), all in the name of infamy. But Hannibal is ultimately right, he does not have the stuff. “Chilton languished until Hannibal the Cannibal,” Will says. “He wanted the world to know his face.” “And no he doesn’t have one,” Bedelia says. The sight of the Red Dragon pulling of Chilton’s lips was the single most horrific image from three seasons of horrific images (in the novel, it is Freddie Lounds who suffers the brunt of the Red Dragon’s rage, post-article). Where Hannibal, and by extension Will, killed with art. Even many of the other killers, especially in the first season, made sure there was beauty in the death of those they killed. But Francis Dolarhyde kills with no art, his victims covered in blood, unlike Hannibal’s creations who seemed bloodless.

“The Number Of The Beast 666” was fully Richard Armitage’s episode to command, and command it he did. The voice of the Red Dragon seems to come from a place deep inside of him, rumbling up through his throat. It’s a wholly physical performance that is best embodied by his movement as the Red Dragon, slithering across to bite Chilton. The camera certainly helps him embody this creature: He towers over his prey, Chilton, who is ensnared in the chair. The camera is tilted up to make Francis the beast in complete control. Another beautifully shot image featured Chilton upright, racing Francis, who seems to be horizontal. His body is out of the frame, his head only attached to a long neck, much like the lizard he has become..

Chilton and Francis’ tête-à-tête was one of three important conversations between two people throughout this episode—none of them, importantly, between Hannibal and Will. As a Hannibal proxy, he speaks with another one of “Bluebeard’s wives,” speaking twice with Bedelia, once where he we discusses his lack of guilt surrounding Chilton’s torture, and another where his actions putting Chilton in danger are foreshadowed. In the first conversation, he asks the question at the heart of the entire series: Is Hannibal in love with him? “Could he daily feel a stab of hunger for you and feel nourishment at the very sight of you?” Bedelia says in a quite poetic fashion. “But do you ache for him?” That question is left unanswered. It’s an unspoken but obvious truth that Hannibal is a love story between these two men. Others have tried to enter their bond, but have failed (poor Abigail…). While Francis Dolarhyde wants to become, Will Graham is already there, and so Francis will never fully be.

Stray observations
Recipe of the week: Vanilla stewed apricots with crumpets
There was a ton of Biblical allusions, especially from the Book of Revelation, in this episode. Alas, I can parse some of it, but I did not feel comfortable getting into it critically considering I wouldn’t really know what I was talking about. But one of the great things about this show is that I know the lamb of god is a part of the New Testament. I don’t know much other than that. Yet I still enjoyed Jack and Hannibal’s back-and-forth.
This was really Richard Armitage’s episode but damn if I don’t love Raul Esparza. Chilton’s survival this season may have been far-fetched (a forgivable sin in world where the far-fetched is the norm) but I’m glad he came back for as long as he did.
There was some excellent editing jokes in this episode: “Are you volunteering?” Will says to Alana as they discuss their scheme. “No, I’d have to be a fool,” she replies. Immediately cut to Chilton.
This episode was crazy dark, but it was also hilarious in these odd little ways, namely because of Hannibal: He’s so giddy when he finds out about Chilton, gobbling up part of his lip.

TV Recap: Hannibal, ‘The Number of the Beast is 666’
Chilton vs. The Red Dragon in the Penultimate Episode

by Pop-Break Staff
August 23, 2015


Tonight’s episode of Hannibal recreated one of the most iconic scenes from the books and films from which it draws its inspiration. But, as we’ve come to expect from this series, Bryan Fuller put his own spin on the sequence and made it more disturbing than any previous incarnation. While it wasn’t as dramatic as one might expect a penultimate episode to be, “The Number of the Beast is 666” was a memorable hour of television with some wonderfully twisted moments.

While most episodes turn the spotlight on Mads Mikkelsen or Hugh Dancy, it was Raúl Esparza who had the chance shine, delivering a truly phenomenal performance that developed his character far more than two seasons worth of appearances had already. In his first few minutes of the episode, we’re reintroduced to Chilton as he whines to Hannibal about how the psychopath had embarrassed him by disproving his recently published book. The scenes immediately reminds the viewer of how unlikable and self-centered Chilton is, as does another moment where he cockily plans on drawing out the Red Dragon for his own personal gain. Esparza was better than ever in these opening moments, adding an almost comedic sensibility to his unbelievably greedy character.

But it’s when Chilton is put in danger that Esparza really gets the chance to show how talented he is. Unlike the original series, which finds (a male) Freddie Lounds being kidnapped and tortured by the Red Dragon, it’s Chilton who is tied to chair and forcibly given a tour of Francis Dolarhyde’s twisted mind. As a result, the episode, essentially, becomes a twenty-minute two-man-show between Esparza and Armitrage. Esparza is Emmy worthy thanks to his work during the extended sequence, simultaneously making his character pathetic and oddly sympathetic. As Chilton’s situation becomes increasingly disturbing, it becomes hard to blame him for the way he tries to scream and bargain his way to safety. But, at the same time, watching him put others in danger to save himself only makes his character more despicable. It’s a tricky balancing act that Esparza handles flawlessly.

The sequence also gives Armitrage the chance to further impress as the Red Dragon. Once again, he’s absolutely terrifying in the role and, impressively, relies largely on vocal tones and body moments to create the character. Despite having his face hidden throughout the scene, the audience is always aware of what Dolarhyde is thinking, and that can be entirely credited to Armitrage’s ability as an actor. The climax of the sequence, which finds a particularly gruesome act of violence acted out on screen, allows both actors the chance to capitalize on the absolute horror of the sequence, making a potentially over the top moment seem both believable and terrifying. In a series filled with disturbing moments, it may be the most nauseating scene so far.

Unfortunately, the episode is not without its problems. While Gillian Anderson was, previously, a highlight of the series for me, her character now seems to be completely pointless since Hannibal is behind bars. Her scenes with Will don’t feel organic to the story. Instead, they seem like brief moments that allow Anderson to fulfill her contractual obligation. She gives them her all, but they are still unnecessary moments. Other characters, specifically Jack and even the titular cannibal, also feel like they’re stuck in a narrative rut, failing to be developed in any significant way.

There is also the unavoidable fact that this was the second to last episode of the season and, possibly, the entire series, yet it didn’t feel like the stage was set for any sort of finale. While I’ve enjoyed the Red Dragon subplot thus far, having the last episode of the series serve as a showdown between Will and the Tooth Fairy will certainly be a disappointment, especially since Hannibal really hasn’t done much over the past six weeks. The relationship between Hannibal and Will was, essentially, the heart of the series. It just doesn’t seem right for the show to come to an end without further exploring that dynamic. Thankfully, Bryan Fuller is taking this storyline in a direction that is considerably different from the books and films, so there is a chance that the finale will be much different than what I’m expecting. But, as of right now, I’m a bit worried about how this terrific series will come to a close.

Still, as a showcase for Armitrage and especially Esparza, “The Number of the Beast is 666” is an undeniable success. Terrifying and absorbing in equal measure, I found it difficult to take my eyes off the screen, even when the violence got particularly gruesome. The episode took a scene I’ve seen performed in two separate films, not to mention parodied on South Park, and somehow made it feel fresh. Even with a handful of flaws, this was a pretty satisfying episode.

Number of the Beast rating: 8 out of 10.

Hannibal recap: season three, episode 12 – The Number of the Beast Is 666

As the series finale approaches, there is more concern with tying up plot lines than being profound

Spoiler alert: this blog is published after Hannibal airs on NBC in the US on Saturdays. Do not read on unless you have watched season three, episode six, which airs in the UK on Sky Living on Wednesdays at 10pm.


Brian Moylan

Sunday 23 August 2015 04.00 BST
Last modified on Sunday 23 August 2015 04.03 BST

Bryan Fuller, though not nearly as popular, is certainly more artful than American Horror Story impresario Ryan Murphy. That’s why it made me sad when there were two instances of one of Murphy’s laziest storytelling tactics in one episode.

First we see Frederick barge into Hannibal’s cell with a copy of a psychological journal. He tells the audience Hannibal has refuted all the claims in his book. Here is a deus ex machina to get the plot rolling.

Then we see Reba in the back of Francis’s van and he’s taking her someplace, probably to kill her. When did he hatch this plan and just how did he carry it out?

These are the kinds of things that happen on American Horror Story all the time: characters providing exposition or acting out of the ordinary so the story can move forward at leaps and bounds and the scares can keep coming.

Hannibal is usually much better than this and when we do see a huge jump in the story, it is usually filled in when the events are revisited episodes or seasons later, so that we finally have a full picture of what happened. The problem now is that we’re running out of time. Next week is the series finale, so we’ll never get to loop back and get more details – unless it is in the next episode.

I was sort of hoping that the whole Tooth Fairy storyline would get wrapped up in this hour so we could have the final episode devoted to Will, Hannibal, Alana, Jack, and Bedelia, putting a nice, big, wonderful bow on this gory and good series. But that doesn’t seem as likely now that we have to have Will track down Francis and confront him as well as tie up all the other loose ends.

There was something that did seem especially rushed about this episode, with the Frederick storyline coming out of the blue, but it was trying desperately to put all the pieces in place so that the show can reach a satisfying conclusion. Though there were a lot of story mechanics packed into the episode, we still got a few languorous scenes of psychological and physical torture. The best was when Francis had Frederick in his palatial estate and was drawing the truth out of him with fear and intimidation, breaking this often defeated man.

The idea was to have Frederick and Will enrage the Tooth Fairy so much that he would come out of hiding and try to strike at Will, enabling them take him down, but the plan backfired and he grabbed Frederick instead, ripping off his lips, setting him on fire, and wheeling him out in public for his charred body to be found by the police. Naturally he mailed his lips to Hannibal, to show his mentor he had done him proud and avenged the man who had publicly lied about him.

As Will said in his first scene with Bedelia – their antagonistic therapy scenes were my other highlight of the episode – Hannibal has agency in the world and though he’s locked up, he still has others do his bidding. By the end of the episode we find out that Will is actually Hannibal’s agent, playing right into his traps and behaving so predictably that Hannibal is able to use him to eradicate his targets. Bedelia feels safe because she knows that Hannibal will only kill her himself and only if he can eat her. Will says: “You have to pay to play,” and I have a feeling that Bedelia’s pound of flesh is coming, possibly literally.

What was ironic was that Bedelia, who tried to play innocent at the beginning of the season before Hannibal convinced her that her complicity was participation, is now showing Will that he is complicit as well. By striking the match, as she says, he committed the first act that lead to Frederick’s torture and Reba’s kidnapping. This episode was even full of talk of saviors, devils, lambs, lions, pilgrims, and other religious designations. I can’t help but wonder how Will sees himself – as a savior or as a fellow sinner.

Of course all of this back and forth between our favorite characters is much more interesting than the Tooth Fairy drama. The one exception was his scene with Reba, where she comes over with soup, trying to be the cure for what ails him. She tells him that she knows he’s capable of love and tries to open him up and subdue the Red Dragon, but it’s too late. Hannibal and Will have let the Dragon out of its cage and are using him in their own struggle for dominance.

Yes, I want Reba to get rescued and the Tooth Fairy arrested, but with only 60 minutes left of the series, what I really want is a resolution between Will and Hannibal. We know that Hannibal remains in prison, but is there a way for him to still win? Is it possible for Will to draw himself away and still remain psychologically intact? These are the real answers I want, and I don’t want the solutions to pop out of nowhere, as this week’s seemed to.

Cult Recap
Hannibal season 3 episode 12 recap: 'The Number of the Beast is 666'
By Emma Dibdin
Sunday, Aug 23 2015, 03:00 BST
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Season 3, episode 12
| Airs Wednesday, Aug 26 2015 at 22:00 BST on Sky Living

The homoerotic undercurrent to Will and Hannibal's relationship has never exactly gone unspoken. There have been more-than-subtextual references to more-than-friendship between them all along, but it's still startling to have it spelled out so fully in the opening moments of 'The Number of the Beast is 666', where the Brides of Hannibal get into some real talk.

"Is Hannibal in love with me?" Will asks Bedelia, in a gloriously twisted version of that rom-com moment where the main character finally picks up on the blindingly obvious – that their BFF is in love with them, and that maybe they feel the same way. It's basically When Harry Met Sally with cannibalism. Not only does Bedelia say yes, but she asks Will if he "aches for Hannibal" too. And does he?

Hugh Dancy as Will Graham in Hannibal S03E12: 'The Number of the Beast is 666'
© NBC Universal / Brooke Palmer

This episode is laced with homoerotic implication, continuing through the central plot as Chilton, enlisted by Will and Jack to help catch Francis Dolarhyde, suggests that it's the "fairy" part of the Tooth Fairy's moniker that really bothers him. This plan to draw the killer out by insulting him comes straight from Red Dragon, as do many of the specific insults about his masculinity, his sexuality, and his incestuous home – but unlike in the canon, it's not Freddie Lounds who pays the price. Though it doesn't become clear until later, it turns out that Will is setting Chilton up to be Dolarhyde's next target, by putting words in his mouth and a hand on his shoulder.

"He's ugly, and impotent. He's a vicious, perverted sexual failure. An animal." All Will's carefully chosen words, and all attributed to Chilton, whose own blustering Dr Phil-esque contributions might barely have registered with Dolarhyde. Will knew he was putting Chilton directly in harm's way, which is why he reacts so strongly to seeing him get his lips bitten off on camera (he's seen far worse in person, after all). Chilton even said Will's name when he was admitted to the ER – not asking for him, but accusing him.

Hannibal actually warns Jack, in his way, that Will is way out of control, that "the lamb is becoming a lion". But Jack doesn't want to hear it, because he's just as willing as Will is to sacrifice Chilton (Jack's pretty much willing to sacrifice anyone in the name of justice). We've seen Will on the brink of darkness too many times for this to feel especially new, but he's seeing himself as Dolarhyde killing Molly, he's imagining Alana with shards of mirror over her bleeding eyes like Dolarhyde's victims, and intentionally or not he's doing Hannibal's bidding.

Mads Mikkelsen as Hannibal Lecter in Hannibal S03E13: 'The Wrath of the Lamb'
© NBC Universal / Brooke Palmer

"Hannibal Lecter does have agency in the world. He has you," Bedelia tells Will, throwing his own words back at him. Only last week, Will was acknowledging his own lack of agency and calling himself Hannibal's fool, so this isn't exactly news to him – but now he's no longer the passive lamb being sent to the slaughter. He's the one doing the sending.

Chilton had a hand in his own fate too, taunting Hannibal about the bleak, degrading future he would face on the psychiatric ward, going into lurid detail about younger patients pushing him around and using him for sex. Even so, it's unclear in the end just how much of a role Hannibal really played in Chilton's grisly fate, since he's had no more opportunity to take phone calls from Dolarhyde.

Alana tries to suggest that Hannibal was responsible "by proxy" because he discredited Chilton, but that argument has to sound weak even to her. Hannibal's so often pulling the strings that he's an easy scapegoat, a way that Alana and Jack and Will can try to pretend they're not culpable, which of course they are.

Laurence Fishburne as Jack Crawford & Raul Esparza as Dr. Chilton in Hannibal S03E12: 'The Number of the Beast is 666'
© NBC Universal / Brooke Palmer

Since Will and Jack had already faked Freddie's death via flaming wheelchair in season two (as Hannibal pointed out), the writers couldn't go over the same old ground with her again, so instead the Red Dragon canon gets fulfilled by Chilton. Although if he survives this, he can at least console himself with the fact that he'll get one heck of a new book out of it.

Also, the plan actually worked. Thanks to Chilton's abduction the FBI now has a way to identity the Tooth Fairy as Francis Dolarhyde, presumably by tracking down Reba and asking her colleagues who she's been spending time with lately. But it might be too late for poor Reba by the time they do, because she made the fatal mistake of liking Francis, and bringing him soup when he was sick. So sad.

What's even more sad is Francis saying "I am not a man, I have become other," because he was so moved by Reba calling him a man in '…And The Beast from the Sea'. He seems to have lost the fight with the Dragon, and for the first time we see him fully as the vicious killer he is, as opposed to the glimpses and partial reconstructions we've seen before. And though Reba was literally blind to what was going on in that scene, I think she sensed that something was wrong, and presumably that's why he went after her.


Bedelia talks a lot about the significance of touch this week, which is a nice way to indirectly tie into the romance between Francis and Reba, which is so defined by physical touch because of her blindness. It's not clear exactly how Will putting his hand on Chilton's shoulder put him at risk, except that Dolarhyde would inevitably be looking to harm anybody close to Will after his failure with Molly and Walter last week, and that touch falsely suggests closeness.

Touch, or the lack of it, feels critical leading up to next week's finale. Hannibal has been behind glass throughout the second half of this season, able to touch no-one and yet steering everyone – he and Dolarhyde have never met, let alone touched. Dolarhyde makes a very tactile threat to Will via Chilton in that video message, describing the precise point at which he'll touch his back to snap his spine. And to return to Hannibal and Will, they haven't touched in years, not since Hannibal carried Will away from Muskrat Farm.

These three relationships are all overdue for some kind of consummation or confrontation, and it'll be fascinating to see how that plays out with Hannibal locked behind glass. But Will's quick, immensely creepy vision of Alana with the mirror shards over her eyes reminded me that theirs is another unconsummated relationship in the show's history. And it made me wonder – if Will is Hannibal's agency in the world, then could Hannibal somehow use Will to fulfil his promise to kill her?

Just about anything feels possible now, which is a great position for the show to be in, given that the first half of the season was all leading up to an inevitable endpoint with Hannibal being captured. And just so that we're clear, I am fully in denial about the possibility that next week could be the last ever episode of Hannibal. My brain is simply not processing that information, so apologies in advance if next week's recap makes no reference whatsoever to a "series finale". Join me in denial, guys. It's beautiful here.

Lara Jean Chorostecki as Freddie Lounds & Laurence Fishburne as Jack Crawford in Hannibal S03E12: 'The Number of the Beast is 666'
© NBC Universal / Brooke Palmer

Food for thought:
- "I have seen a lot of hostility, but this was quantifiably bitchy."
- So, I can't figure out whether I'm just too de-sensitised at this point, but I only found Dolarhyde chewing Chilton's lips off to be moderately repulsive. Like, it's not up there with Mason Verger eating his face or that poor guy tearing himself out of the human mural, but it's probably top five? The sight of Dolarhyde lunging over the furniture teeth bared was genuinely scary, though.
- Was anyone else getting a serious Batman vibe from Dolarhyde throughout the whole scene of him terrorising Chilton? If DC are ever looking to recast after Ben Affleck, Richard Armitage has got the jaw for it.
- The quick, almost subliminal cut-aways this week were a somewhat new visual tic for the show, interesting because they weren't unique to any one character's perspective. Off the top of my head, we saw Will's hallucination of Alana with the mirror, the glimpse of Hannibal nomming down on Chilton's lip right after Jack asked "Where's the other one?", and several quick cuts of matches, flames, water, filling in the gaps as to what happened to Chilton.
- "Are you a small or a medium? Small, probably." That's not what you said three episodes ago, Freddie!
- Is there any chance in hell Chilton survives this? I don't think the survival rates for 100% third-degree burns are terribly good, and that's assuming the patient has a full set of working organs. On the other hand, I think Fuller has joked before about Chilton returning each season with more and more of his body missing, like the Black Knight in Monty Python, so maybe he really will survive.


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Hannibal: You Owe Me Awe
Caralynn Lippo | August 23, 2015 | TV Reviews | No Comments

There has been no shortage of tense, nerve-wracking scenes throughout the past three seasons of Hannibal–but man, the Frederick Chilton hostage scene was brutal and borderline unbearable to watch.

The interaction between Dolarhyde, slipping fully into his Red Dragon persona, and Frederick Chilton, was obviously the highlight of this episode. Raul Esparza played Chilton’s visceral fear to an absolute T. I think we all already knew that the pompous psychiatrist was not particularly brave to begin with, but seeing him tremble before Dolarhyde was really something else.

I’ve mentioned earlier that Armitage manages to play some of the Red Dragon’s more over-the-top behavior in a way that still somehow manages to keep the horror of the listener/reader intact. It’s really a marvel to watch, and a lot of this success is owed to his total committal to the character — Armitage doesn’t hold back in the slightest, therefore the character is truly believable in his madness, and therefore he is realistically terrifying.

This was certainly the experience with this week’s attack on Chilton. Armitage’s very specific manner of speaking as the Great Red Dragon is absolutely chilling.

From his pregnant pauses and the laborious way he pronounces many of his sentences, Armitage’s Dragon is never silly. The way he loomed over Chilton with his mask half-on and half-off, the way he climbed over the couch like an actual animal, with his prosthetic dragon’s maw, to take a bite out of Chilton’s already messed up face: it was all so perfect.

Francis Dolarhyde: Man to man. You used that phrase to imply frankness. But you see, I am not a man. I have become… other. I’m more than a man. Do you think God is in attendance here? Are you praying to him now?

Again, Raul Esparaza played Chilton’s abject, pants-wetting terror so well. Despite the fact that Chilton somehow managed to survive this episode (how and to what end, I have no idea), I suspect that this will have been Esparaza’s last episode (it seems unlikely that they’ll bring him back just to cover him up in such extensive, horrific burn makeup).

And I have to give Dr. Chilton props: though he should have been much more wary of Jack, Alana and Will’s motives in asking him to participate in the Freddie Lounds interview, he did hold his own fairly well against Dolarhyde’s questioning. If Dolarhyde had been in less of a “mood” (for lack of a better word), I do believe that Chilton may have been able to talk his way out of that hostage situation. He played into the Dragon’s intense narcissism like a pro. (Takes one to know one, I guess.)

It was interesting, too, that Chilton inadvertently gave Dolarhyde the idea to burn him at the very beginning of their interaction, when Chilton asked whether he was burned and then Dolarhyde mulled over the word “burned” to himself for several long moments.

Francis Dolarhyde: Before me you are a slug in the sun. You are privy to a great becoming. You recognize nothing. It is in your nature to do one thing correctly and before me you tremble. Fear is not what you owe me. You owe me awe.

The one thing I didn’t love about this episode is the odd timing of Dolarhyde finally turning on Reba. We’ve seen him fight against his impulse to hurt her for the past several episodes. You’d think that his brutal attack on Chilton would have sufficiently whetted his appetite for violence and helped him avoid harming Reba for a while longer.

Instead, Reba wound up bound and terrified by Francis by the end of the episode. I felt that we were owed the direct build up to that, after watching Dolarhyde tiptoe around hurting Reba for weeks on end,

As usual, I loved all of Will and Bedelia’s interactions. I did not expect the show to ever go all the way there, laying out the subtext as text, regarding Hannibal’s feelings for Will– but go there they did. Bedelia unhesitatingly answered that yes, Hannibal certainly did seem to be in love with Will, and followed up that proclamation with a question of her own: does Will, too, ache for Hannibal? Notice how Will never quite answered that. Hm.

I also particularly enjoyed the way Bedelia repeatedly reads Will’s motives like a book (particularly regarding what Will had been expecting when he helped set Chilton up as bait), her bringing up Hannibal’s idea of observation vs. participation once again, and the blunt way she accused Will of being Hannibal’s means of agency in the world. The two are somehow polar opposites and yet eerily similar, all at once. The ways in which Hannibal has done a number on them both has linked them irrevocably, so it makes all the sense in the world that Will would be visiting with and discussing things with Bedelia on an ongoing basis.


Extra Nibbles:

Freddie’s jab at Will during the Chilton interview (“You small or a medium? Small, I bet.”) was a nice small moment. Freddie and Will’s antagonistic relationship is always funny.

Will’s increasingly severe, insulting, utterly made-up theories about the Red Dragon (and particularly Frederick Chilton’s surprised facial reactions every time Will added another line) were hilarious.

“I will refute his refutations in my new book, ‘Blood and Chocolate.'” I just about died laughing at that bit.

Similarly, at Chilton accusing Hannibal of bitchiness (of all things): “I have seen a lot of hostility. But this was quantifiably bitchy.” Wonderful.

Hannibal hasn’t been a major featured player recently, but I definitely chuckled at two Hannibal moments this week: the first, when he flat-out laughed at Chilton’s suggestion that Hannibal thought of Chilton as his nemesis, and the second, when we were treated to the gross/hilarious/goofy visual of Hannibal slurping up one of Chilton’s bitten-off lips. Just writing out that second one reminded me of what an, um, “unique” show Hannibal is and how much I’ll miss writing about it after next week.

I was waiting for something gory to happen throughout the entire Chilton/Dragon scene and the lips bite-off definitely did not disappoint. Burning Chilton too? That just felt like overkill (without any of the actual kill). Also, is Chilton indestructible or something? He survive a shot to the head and now being burned alive? What are the chances?

Bedelia bringing up the Bluebeared tale seemed very fitting. The tale is eerily similar to her situation with Hannibal, except that she was far more complicit with Hannibal’s wrongdoings than any of the wives in various iterations of the Bluebeard story.


What did you all think of this episode? What is the purpose of Chilton remaining alive? What do you think Dolarhyde is going to do with Reba? Sound off in the comments below!

Hannibal Recap: Season 3, Episode 12, "The Number of the Beast Is 666"
By Chuck Bowen on August 22, 2015 in TV

"The Number of the Beast Is 666" finds Will (Hugh Dancy) and Jack (Laurence Fishburne) turning desperate as Francis (Richard Armitage) remains at large, with their only pipeline to the killer embodied by an increasingly contemptuous, puckish Hannibal (Mad Mikkelsen). Said desperation is predominantly embodied by three conversations, duets as always, that serve to heavily foreshadow whatever awaits us next week in Hannibal's season, perhaps series, finale, "The Wrath of the Lamb," a title that derives from a phrase in Revelation 6:16: "And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the lamb." Hannibal evokes this phrase this week, in the first duet, likening Will to the lamb, or to a spurned savior, taking in stride Jack's comparison of his truly to "The devil himself, bound in a pit." Hannibal retorts that, in these analogies, Jack would be God, then, sending his savior to battle Satan and the Great Red Dragon, a suggestion that Jack takes with something like a fusion of fury and good humor.

Which is to say things have turned awfully heavy, even for Hannibal, but the tone and the aesthetic of this series is already so heightened as to readily accommodate Biblical symbolism, which isn't new anyway, particularly this season. The viewer might wonder if these reveries are intended as true religious inquiries or offered, to paraphrase a Pulp Fiction character, as cold-blooded things for characters to say before a literal or metaphorical cap is popped in a motherfucker's ass. As surface-level poetry, the dialogue in "The Number of the Beast Is 666" is as polished, overheated, and savory as one can routinely expect from creator Bryan Fuller, but that word "routine" is the mild rub. The characters are on the verge of talking in circles, belaboring Will's culpability as a potential agent of Hannibal's dark cabal as the ex-doctor's simultaneous lover and evil twin. The second conversation, between Will and Bedelia (Gillian Anderson), is split apart to bookend the episode and emphasizes these possibilities, explicitly in the act of highlighting "Hannibal's agency" in the world, which complements the involved Biblical framework through which Hannibal and Jack briefly workshop. (Is Will an agent of God or the Devil?) Notably, Will also directly voices, for the first time, a subtext that has long been text, asking aloud if Hannibal's in love with him. The logical follow-up question is unsaid but hanging: Is Will in love with Hannibal?

The third conversation is the most startling—a classic sequence that serves as the episode's centerpiece. Francis has captured Dr. Frederick Chilton (Raúl Esparza), after the latter agreed to disparage his intelligence and masculinity for a Tattler article that was purposefully set up by Will and Jack as a way to provoke Francis to attack Will, hopefully nabbing him the process. (The picture accompanying the article has been framed so as to purposefully "inadvertently" telegraph the location of Will's new hideout.) But Francis went after Frederick first, kidnapping him and imprisoning him in his aging, antique-festooned home. Super-glued to a wheelchair, the doctor comes to, and we see him in a close-up in the foreground, Francis's face hooded, his body clad in a kimono, sitting on a couch in the background with eerie calm and grace that borders on daintiness. Up until this point in the Francis arc, the character has largely been shown in a pitifully self-hating light that courts audience relatability and an attending sense of pathos. Here, he's terrifying. It's clear that the war between Francis and the "Dragon" has been waged and lost, and the Dragon now has the run of the premises.

Francis discusses with Frederick his transformation, which mirrors all the other transformations that have been discussed in Hannibal, both in "The Number of the Beast Is 666" and virtually every other episode that's preceded it. But Francis's transformation, potentially unlike Will's, isn't theoretical/illusory. His voice is now informed by a deep, guttural timber that suggests the transcendence of weakness that Francis has sought all along. Hulking over Frederick (in a pose that pointedly echoes the fashion in which Will stands over Frederick when they do the Tattler interview, the latter but a pet bandied about being warring parties), this Francis, a massive, featureless humanoid, is explicitly reminiscent of Tom Noonan's interpretation of the character in Manhunter, particularly in that film's equivalent of this scene. And Fuller, director Guillermo Navarro, and their collaborators devise an image that's the equal of anything in that Michael Mann film: the confrontation between Francis and Frederick is shot from somewhere near Frederick's feet, the camera tilted up, with Francis always hovering directly behind Frederick's chair. The image suggests a parody, or perversion, of the act of prayer, which is mentioned in the dialogue, and it also connotes an impression of a serpent twisting around a branch or rock—another, more oblique, Biblical symbol that syncs up with the writhing, twisting movements of the William Blake paintings that Francis emulates. It's an unnervingly vertical image—offset by the pointed negative space on both sides of the screen—that emphasizes this creature's profound power over his victim. When Francis utters one of the best, scariest lines from Thomas Harris's Red Dragon, "Fear is not what you owe me. You owe me awe," the sequence achieves operatic lunacy.

This scene offers the realization of the fears that fuel the high-blown theories that Will, Jack, and Alana (Caroline Dhavernas) bat around from behind the presumed safety of their various government institutions—a hypocrisy that Hannibal enjoys calling out, especially to Alana. No one truly cares that Frederick is destroyed, and the heroes may have barely and subconsciously set his doom in motion intentionally. Frederick is to pay the tab for the protagonists' hubris once again, as he's a reliable Hannibal whipping boy who, as demonized as he is, scans as a relative innocent considering the collusions with evil (Hannibal, Mason, and to a lesser extent Margot and others) of which everyone else is now unambiguously guilty. Comparably, Frederick is just a typically self-promoting dick.

Frederick serves as a handy embodiment of Fuller's careful revisions of the Harris novels throughout his tending of the show, particularly in regard to gender roles. For instance, Frederick was shunted unceremoniously off to the side of this season's narrative, presumably writing his upcoming books, The Dragonslayer and Blood and Chocolate, so that Alana could oversee Hannibal's incarceration, despite her laughable lack of objectivity for several dozen reasons. And the torture and humiliation that Frederick endures in this episode, having his lips bitten off and being subsequently burned alive, happened to Freddie (Lara Jean Chorostecki) in the book Red Dragon as well as in its subsequent film adaptations. (This Freddie, though, was burned alive, if only by pretend, in a sting operation in the second season that pays homage to the Harris book.)

Indeed, the torture scene between Francis and Frederick would play much differently, with considerably heavier rape connotations (which remain, however subsumed, nevertheless), if it were to involve a collision between a man and woman, which emphasizes another of Fuller's revisions: Both Freddie and Alana were men in the Harris novel and its prior adaptations, which is to say that Frederick serves as a catch-all male victim of diminishment for the sake of newly afforded female prominence. (This Frederick theory isn't even taking into consideration the fact that he was nearly killed by a woman in the second season, after she was brainwashed by Hannibal into believing him to be the Chesapeake Ripper.)

Frederick reflects a certain over-compensatory self-consciousness on the part of Hannibal toward women, who, despite their prominence in the story and the wealth of cool things they're given to say, still essentially exist as outliers to be sexually fetishized and resented. What is Hannibal most broadly? A love story between two men who feel estranged from the heteronormative domestic arrangement, i.e. from women. What are the prominent female characters, apart from intelligent and exceedingly attractive? Schemers, even including Molly, who wanted Will to go hunt the Great Red Dragon in another telling deviation from the source material that serves to empower a female character for ambiguous reasons.

The exceptions to this rule are Beverly Katz, who was killed by Hannibal to serve a larger narrative purpose, and Reba (Rutina Wesley), who's defined mostly by the contradictory human feelings she arouses in a man, Francis, who takes her prisoner at the end of this episode. I'm not suggesting that Fuller's indulging thoughtless sexism, but something much more fascinating: thoughtful sexism. Art needn't be politically correct, and these neuroses, regardless of intention, strengthen the dominating bond between Hannibal, Will, and Jack, who may not be Satan, Christ, and God, respectively, but simply two wayward lovers and a father surrogate. Frederick succinctly embodies Fuller's wrestling with the dehumanizing gender tripwires of serial-killer fiction, serving to nurture further curiosity over the show's approaching finale. The book's climax hinges on two women in jeopardy, though certain revisions (such as the chronological restructuring of Red Dragon's pivotal home-invasion sequence, which already occurred last week in "…And the Beast from the Sea"), already suggest that the climax's emphasis might be shifted to Will, the lamb.

Hannibal: The Number of the Beast is 666 Review
Review Kayti Burt 8/23/2015 at 4:30AM

Dr. Chilton pays a high price while Hannibal continues to use Dolarhyde as his proxy in the show's compelling penultimate episode.

Watch out, people. Hannibal has agency in the world. Dr. Lecter may still be behind “bars” in Season 3, Episode 12 (“The Number of the Beast is 666...”), but that doesn't stop him from getting exactly what he wants -- or at least taking steps to securing it. Last week, he went after the family he gave Will three years to build. This week, it's Dr. Chilton's turn. And, though it may be Chilton who suffers the most visceral consequences of playing the game, it is Will who continues to be changed by Hannibal.

As Bedelia points out, Will is the agent of Hannibal's change here, just as much as Dolarhyde is. And, though Hannibal might not be going after Will's family as literally in this episode, he is still making moves to destroy it. Now, Will can't even look at his wife without seeing her dead, a victim of Dolarhyde's and, consequently, Will's. Furthermore, by getting Will to play the game, Hannibal pushes him further from the relatively peaceful, grounded family man he had become in Hannibal's absence from his life. This isn't merely Dolarhyde's becoming; it is also Will's — or at least it will be, if Hannibal has anything to say about it.

And part of what makes that dilemma so compelling is that Hannibal is doing it out of love — or at least his own version of it. “Is Hannibal in love with me?” Will asks Bedelia, a question that is met with the Hannibal equivalent of a “duh.” Hannibal blurs what most other shows treat as text in favor of bringing into stark focus the subjects most other shows treat as subtext. There is no subtext to Hannibal and Will’s relationship. It is not treated as an ambiguity that they are the most affecting presences in one another’s lives. This show, and its characters, do not dance around the nature of this intense relationship that acts as a planetary body, making every other orbital aspect of this story’s plot that much more compelling.

This episode was very much about the machinations of this group of Dante's pets, and Will is not the only one who falls into that category. Much of the Red Dragon arc’s best stuff has come from the interplay between Jack, Alanna, and Hannibal. The same is true with this episode. When we see them discussing Dr. Chilton's almost-end, Hannibal is in top form, delighted by what he sees as a fitting punishment for Frederick. Here, Dolarhyde is continuing the work he started in the paper Dr. Lecter wrote refuting Chilton's diagnosis of Hannibal the Cannibal in his book. Dolarhyde does the same, spurred by the slanderous words Chilton spoke of him.

It was meant as a trap, and it worked like a charm, the situation only further complicated by the way in which Alanna, Will, and Jack let Chilton wander into the trap they themselves chose to avoid. These three may credit themselves as more moral than Hannibal, but they have not been left unchanged by Hannibal's appreciation of manipulation. Here, they are playing the same game. And, as Will explains to Bedelia, “if you play, you pay.”

These characters have all paid in different ways, but -- while they were, to different degrees, manipulated into playing before -- here, they play with a full understanding of what they risk and who will be risking it. “That's participation,” Bedelia tells Will, answering a question that was asked of her at the very onset of this season. She may not have killed any of Hannibal's victims in Florence, but, like Will, she “struck the match.” Like Will, she wasn't surprised what happened when she knowingly played a part in Hannibal's game.

The only person who is not willingly playing the game here is Reba, and it is heartbreaking to see her so entrenched in the mess. She tells Dolarhyde “I'm not so scarred by life that I'm incapable of love,” and brings him soup when she thinks he is ill, not knowing that Chilton sits bound and terrified for his life across the room. Finally, Dolarhyde reveals himself to her, and it is tragic that he seems to think it is something she will understand. To him, he didn't murder those families, but helped them to become something else. He is not a man, but a being tasked with enacting the becoming of others in the same way he has become something else. He decidedly did not choose this for himself. He, too, is a victim of this dragon, this madness inside of himself. It is a stark contrast to Hannibal, who responds to the delivery of Chilton's lips with the equivalent of a #sorrynotsorry to Jack because “the tragedy of what happened to Frederick has put me in an excellent humor.”

If Will, Alanna, Jack, and Chilton are all Dante's pets, then Hannibal is Dante. He is the author of this story. He is the devil/god to Will's sacrificial lamb and Dolarhyde's prophet. One can only hope that, in next week's season finale, we get a chance to see Hannibal's power in true effect once again because, as scarily impressive Dolarhyde is, this has always been Dr. Lecter's story. And, in what will probably be this show's final episode, we want to see the love story of Hannibal and Will played out not through proxies, but with these two men face to face, seeing each other.

In one of the more meta lines of the episode and show, Hannibal tells Chilton: “Fate has a habit of not letting us choose our own endings.” That hasn’t often been true for Hannibal, and we have a feeling it isn’t true for Hannibal, either. Here’s hoping for an ending worthy of this amazing, weird, gory, unique, and beautiful show.

4.5/5

Hannibal Review: “The Number of the Beast is 666"
(Episode 3.12)
By Mark Rozeman
August 23, 2015 | 5:37pm

“Fate has a habit of not letting us choose our own endings.” —Hannibal

I really do wonder when the Hannibal creative team become aware of their impending cancelation because this latter half of the season has been absolutely ripe with meta-references to both the show’s reception among general audiences as well as its premature conclusion (as indicated by the above quote). Indeed, Bryan Fuller might not get the chance to choose his preferred ending anytime soon. That being said, it doesn’t make “The Number of the Beast is 666” any less of a solid entry.

In a big sign that we’re probably wrapping things up, Will finally asks, in a session with Bedelia, the question that has been driving the subtext of the show (as well as countless Tumblr blogs)—“is Hannibal in love with me?” To this, Bedelia responds, in classic Hannibal-speak “Could he daily feel a stab of hunger for you and find nourishment at the very sight of you? Yes. But do you ache for him?” We cut away before Will gives an answer, but his extended silence is telling.

Perhaps as an angry reaction to this internal conflict, Will decides to step up his game in terms of locating Dolarhyde. Recruiting Freddie Lounds, he offers to grant an exclusive interview wherein he will denigrate The Red Dragon in order to draw him out. To add authenticity, Will ropes in Frederick Chilton, who is looking to improve his own profile, given that Hannibal has refuted Chilton’s insanity defense in an academic journal. While Chilton offers Freddie his clinical analysis of the man’s condition, Will provides her with great, salacious soundbytes—namely, that the Red Dragon is the impotent and ugly product of an incestuous coupling. As expected, Dolarhyde strikes, killing Chilton’s bodyguards and taking the doctor hostage.

It’s around the time of Chilton’s capture that the episode dives into one of its most experimental stretches. Not so much in aesthetic (though there are elements of that) but more in a structural sense. Specifically, the subsequent confrontation between Dolarhyde and Chilton lasts for almost 14 minutes—nearly a third of the episode. In film, this would be a notable occurrence; in TV, which is defined by getting in and out of scenes as efficiently as possible, to have a non-bottle episode feature a sequence so long is nothing short of baffling.

The scene in question is the famous “do you see?” segment from the book, wherein Hannibal captures Freddy Lounds (who is a man in Harris’ story), superglues him to a chair and makes him bear witness to his “might” before lighting him on fire and sending him careening through a public area. This particular scene has been envisioned twice before—once in Manhunter between Tom Noonan’s Dolarhyde and Stephen Lang’s Lounds and again in Red Dragon, with Ralph Fiennes and Philip Seymour Hoffman stepping into the same roles. Whereas the former uses this sequence to introduce Noonan’s phenomenally creepy and unnerving portrayal, the latter works primarily because of Hoffman’s effective performance of a man scared shitless.

Hannibal’s version, with Chilton filling the Lounds role is, in many ways, the most fully realized iteration of this classic two-hander. For one, director Guillermo Navarro drapes the scene in hellish, atmospheric lighting that, in typical Hannibal fashion, makes the entire interaction feel nightmarish and otherworldly. Second, the scene benefits from its expanded, uncut length, particularly when it comes to experiencing the full breadth of Chilton’s emotional meltdown. The tension becomes even more extreme when, in the middle of a particularly intense moment, an oblivious Reba arrives at Dolarhyde’s door to bring him soap as an attempt at reconciliation. Horrific imagery aside, there is something very comical about Reba and Dolarhyde having a fairly innocuous conversation while a silent Chilton sits immobile in the background.

Above all else, the scene provides the ultimate showcase for both Richard Armitage and Raul Esparza. Over the past five weeks, Armitage has demonstrated himself to be an actor capable of both great menace and sensitivity. Here, we get “menace” levels turned to 11. It’s a performance of such raw animalistic rage that when the scene ends with him literally biting a chunk of Chilton’s face off, it makes a certain amount of logical sense. Likewise, Esparza plays the perfect victim, his face an expressive canvas of paralyzing fear.

The remainder of the episode mainly concerns the aftermath of this incident. Further demonstrating that he’s either the luckiest or unluckiest man alive, Chilton somehow manages to survive both Dolarhyde’s bite and being burned alive. Now, the opportunistic Chilton has never been the most sympathetic of characters, but, when Will visits him and finds the charred husk of burned flesh and raw muscle that remains, his crushing guilt is understandable. When asked by Bedelia if he expected this to happen, Will can only respond that he “wasn’t surprised.” “Then you might as well have struck the match,” Bedelia responds coldly, digging the knife in further.

The episode ends with a classic “to be continued…” set-up. Dolarhyde has abducted a terrified Reba and confesses to her that he is the Great Red Dragon. If there’s one major issue I have with this episode, it is that Reba’s capture is done off-screen. Given their intimate relationship, this instance seems like something that would have been important to show. But, if this cut was made in an attempt to fit the entire Dolarhyde/Chilton scene into the hour slot, then it’s a fairly minor nitpick.

“The Number of the Beast is 666” is an episode that simmers intensely for two thirds of its running time before, quite literally, exploding into flames in its last stretch. With the guilt of Molly’s and Chilton’s fates resting heavily upon him, Will has found himself in an emotional tailspin, all the while trying to locate Dolarhyde before it’s too late. Now that all the i’s have been dotted and the t’s crossed, the creative team has set the stage for everything to come crashing together in what’s sure to be a glorious, blood-soaked extravaganza.

Hannibal: farewell to the best bloody show on TV

After three gripping and gory seasons, Bryan Fuller’s singular series has come to an end. In the lead up to the final ever episode, we take a look at the elements that made it such a beautiful, disgusting and messed-up show

Sian Cain
@siancain

Thursday 27 August 2015 20.01 BST
Last modified on Friday 28 August 2015 10.03 BST

Never has eating people looked so good as on NBC’s Hannibal, but the show had all the reasons to be a failure. When books are made into films, and films made into TV shows, people are usually sceptical. There is precedent to say that adaptations are awful ideas, let alone adaptations of successful adaptations: the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs was faithful to the 1988 Thomas Harris novel and the Oscar count alone suggests the film did pretty well, but its successors – Hannibal, Red Dragon, Hannibal Rising – weren’t received quite as warmly.

The 2015 TV Hannibal had the odds stacked against it for other reasons: the titular lead is a European cannibal played by an actor then relatively unknown to US audiences. It was also troublingly frank for US TV: homoerotic, bloody and not above showing some skin – the showrunner Bryan Fuller has talked about being asked by NBC to add more blood to hide a corpse’s butt crack. It also looked weird on the page: it’s grandly cinematic, the dialogue is wordy. In short the show really shouldn’t have worked.

Hannibal was cancelled by NBC back in June, but it has yet to be picked up by another player – Fuller has only confirmed Netflix and Amazon Prime have turned it down. But regardless of whether it is picked up by someone else, Hannibal is 39 episodes of fantastic television and a comforting example of what greatness can come from adaptations placed in the right hands.

Unpleasant, pretentious – and lots of fun: have you been watching Hannibal?

The TV show starts before the stories of The Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon, beginning with the initial relationship between pop culture’s favourite cannibal and his eventual downfall, FBI special agent Will Graham. Will – grumpy, on the spectrum – has a troubling talent for getting in the minds of serial killers, so Hannibal is assigned as his psychiatrist, an intended vessel for Will’s stress. Thus begins a cat and mouse game spanning three seasons, a predator-prey relationship between two men matched perfectly in their bloodlust and unhealthy mutual codependency.

Mads Mikkelsen’s Lecter doesn’t just better Sir Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal – he devours it. Hopkins’ Lecter teetered on camp madness; Mikkelsen is more subtle, more convincingly insidious: a devil hidden in plaid suiting. After only a few episodes, his proclivity for cannibalism starts becoming the least disturbing thing about him: this Lecter is persuasive, charismatic and likeable. Fuller and his cinematographers uses Mikkelsen’s frankly amazing face to great effect, with chiaroscuro somehow showing both his placid mask and the beast underneath. Even when he’s not doing much – cooking, staring, delivering speeches on God and amorality – he is terrifying. It’s a great performance.
A rare scene of physical confrontation: Hannibal and Jack Crawford duke it out in season two, episode one – Kaiseki.

Not all credit goes to Mikkelsen; Hugh Dancy is fantastic as the prickly and damaged Will Graham, and the rest of the cast is remarkably strong too. Most shows would kill for Gillian Anderson, Laurence Fishburne, Richard Armitage, Eddie Izzard and Zachary Quinto to be in a lead cast, let alone a supporting one, but Hannibal has just that.

As any fan of Pushing Daisies will tell you, Bryan Fuller knows how to make a visually striking show. But on Hannibal, Fuller reveals his skill for beautifying the disgusting: he is the figurative lovechild of Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch, with a knack for an eerie atmosphere. Blood doesn’t splatter in Hannibal: it oozes, often artfully across a snowy field. Maryland and Virginia look brittle in the eternally wintry light. In between the silences and meaningful stares, Brian Reitzell’s soundtrack beats out a rich cacophony of discordant, industrial percussion. All together, it makes for an uneasy night of TV.

But after the unease comes appreciation: the murders are beautiful. A man strung up into a tree with his organs replaced by flowers. Corpses splayed so their shoulder blades become angel wings. A cello neck rammed down a throat so the murderer can pluck the vocal cords.

And the food! Gone are the days of a simple liver and fava beans pairing; your eyes cannot help but eat up Hannibal’s dishes. A sacrificial baby lamb served with fruits of the underworld. Lung and loin bourguignonne. Eddie Izzard’s leg, served to him baked in clay. Of course a show like this has both a food stylist and a chef advisor – Janice Poon and José Andrés respectively – a team coming up with dishes that tightrope a line between macabre and mouth-watering. Poon’s blog Feeding Hannibal is testament of how much effort goes into presentation: ingredients like lotus roots, heritage tomatoes and pomegranates are added to trigger trypophobia; spider orchids and porcupine quills decorate plates and warn of hidden dangers.
Truly offal: a compilation of Hannibal’s dishes.

Even in the darkest moments, the plot is so tightly constructed and the characters so likeable, you can’t help but feel like you’re having a good time when watching Hannibal. In a montage in season one, Lecter stocks up for one of his fabled dinner parties, deciding what cuts of meat to source from his rolodex of business cards belonging to people who have annoyed him. It’s a scene indicative of the whole series: uniquely, hilariously, deliciously dark.

Hell, the aesthetics on this show do veer into pretentious: all the episodes in season one are named after French meal courses, the second Japanese, and Italian in the third. But like his fussy cannibal, you can’t hold it against Fuller. You will crack an eye open at the murder scenes, you will peer at Lecter’s dinner table to see what’s on it, and part of you will always want Hannibal to get away with it. It’s too damn beautiful not to.

But Fuller could only get away with all this for so long. It was reportedly on NBC’s chopping board since season one; but a passionate fanbase and cliffhanger finales saved it twice. The third time was one too many. When the cancellation was confirmed, the fans – or “fannibals” – voiced their displeasure all over social media at NBC. But how many networks would give three seasons to a psychiatrist cannibal with a penchant for nibbling on limbs and tormented FBI agents?

Maybe it was too weird, maybe it was too gruesome. But it was, all puns intended, bloody good. And so it must go into the hallowed halls of Great TV Before Its Time, with the likes of Arrested Development, Firefly and Fuller’s own Pushing Daisies. Regardless of whether it is resurrected on television, or if it turns up on the big screen, everyone who has enjoyed it – or is about to – owes Bryan Fuller a big thank you. Thanks, Bryan, for being brazen enough to make such a disgusting, beautiful, messed-up show. Yes, this course is over, but who knows what will turn up for dessert.

The finale of Hannibal airs at 9pm EDT in the US on Saturday 29 August and at 10pm GMT on Wednesday 2 September on Sky Living in the UK.

‘Hannibal’ Might Be Ending Just as It’s Reaching New Heights

If Community has taught us anything, it’s that the show’s not over until the fat lady’s contract has run out and she’s confirmed it to a minimum of three separate news outlets. Still, the prognosis for Hannibal is looking grim going into this Saturday’s season finale; two months after NBC announced its cancellation, the drama has yet to find a new home, and streaming go-tos Netflix and Amazon are already out of the running. Which is a shame, because Hannibal‘s third installment has expanded the show’s nightmare world beyond its title character, bringing the series even further outside the comfort zone of the now well-worn trope of the serial killer drama.

Hannibal has always been something of a Trojan horse, and not just because it counts among its many stomach-churning images that of a live human being inside an actual horse. The show’s initial premise read as doubly familiar to the average viewer: not only did it use Thomas Harris’ now-iconic characters as protagonists, it placed them within a setup shared with scores of other network and basic-cable procedurals, most notably Criminal Minds. Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) was the genius-but-troubled FBI profiler tasked with tracking down killers, Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne) the dedicated boss who risked pushing him too far. Hannibal himself (Mads Mikkelsen) was both the hook and the wild card, a slight deviation from the formula to separate his namesake show from the herd.

In the hands of Pushing Daisies alum Bryan Fuller, of course, Hannibal bore about as much resemblance to case-of-the-week couch fare (to which I mean no disrespect; I was raised in an “episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent a day keeps the doctor away” household) as The Sopranos did to Silvio’s favorite movie. Instead, the show revealed itself to be an exploration of the psychological bond between Will and Hannibal, his therapist/consultant/friend/arch-nemesis/tempter, communicated through philosophical dialogue, artfully shot hallucinations, and a lifetime’s worth of work for a food stylist.

Then the second season finale blew up even this tenuous status quo, allowing Hannibal to host one last elaborate dinner party before facing off with Will and Jack — and escaping to Europe with his own therapist, Bedelia DuMaurier (Gillian Anderson), at long last elevating Anderson to a series regular. At the beginning of Season 3, Hannibal discarded its previous setup entirely, relocating to Europe — Paris and Florence, to be exact — with Will and Jack in hot pursuit. And then, slightly less than halfway through this season, Hannibal reinvented itself all over again.

Which is fitting, in a way, because if the current story arc has one theme, it’s reinvention. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves: at the conclusion of “Dolce,” Hannibal Lecter is finally captured, not because Will Graham finds him, but because Lecter wants to ensure he remains on the periphery of Will’s life, giving himself up immediately after Will swears he wants nothing to do with him. It’s a gesture of loyalty, affection, and cruelty all at once, and the perfect crescendo to a singular relationship.

Then Hannibal jumps forward a few years and abruptly pivots to another villain entirely. Fuller signals the shift not just with chronology, but with episode titles, which change from the traditional culinary terms (French in the first season, Japanese in the second, Italian in the third) to William Blake allusions. That’s because Will and Jack — and Hannibal — have a new target: Francis Dolarhyde (Richard Armitage), a killer motivated by his identification with the poet’s Biblical watercolor painting, The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun.

Because Hannibal is an adaptation, the decision to focus on Dolarhyde isn’t entirely Fuller’s own. Hannibal would have to enter FBI custody eventually; the show’s timeline would, at some point, intersect with that of Harris’ first novel, Red Dragon. Yet in Fuller’s hands, the Red Dragon plot has become an illustration of Hannibal‘s versatility even as it faces the possibility of never exploring that versatility beyond Saturday night’s finale.

Francis Dolarhyde is a very different sort of killer than Hannibal Lecter, though he looks up to Lecter and seeks his counsel in phone calls shot like therapy sessions. Hannibal values control and precision in all things; he sees taste and mastery as what separates him from the rest of humanity, and gives him the right to take lives and consume bodies as he sees fit. Dolarhyde sees his “becoming” as a loss of control, ceding ownership of his body to Blake’s dragon every full moon. That’s when he slaughters families and lays mirror shards over their eyes, the better to witness his transformation with.

Because Hannibal is a primarily visual show, Dolarhyde’s departures from and parallels to Hannibal Lecter are best communicated in how they’re shot. If Hannibal has a calling card, it’s the grisly, yet gorgeous tableaux of bodies Lecter and the killers he helped catch left in their wake. There was the totem pole of body parts, and the woman sliced into lab samples, and the mural made of human beings hidden in a grain silo. But Dolarhyde’s crime scenes are messy, scattered with blood and viscera. And Dolarhyde himself may be in near-perfect physical shape, but Armitage plays him with a brutality and barely repressed violence that’s miles away from Mikkelsen’s permanent mask of mild amusement. Yet just as Will has spent three seasons hallucinating Hannibal as a black stag, Dolarhyde is frequently shown as the terrifying beast he’s spent years attempting to channel.

Hannibal has never spent this amount of time and attention on a killer whose name isn’t in the title sequence. As the Red Dragon arc, and possibly the show itself, draws to a close this weekend, it ends an application of Hannibal‘s toolbox to an entirely new set of players — Dolarhyde, but also a welcome post-True Blood role for Rutina Wesley as his love interest Reba McClane — and themes. Still, some constants remain: if Hannibal is the devil, it’s only fitting that his show is ending with a character who takes his inspiration from the Book of Revelation.

Saturday, August 29, 2015

THE FIVE REASONS THE NBC TV SHOW "HANNIBAL" HAS RUN ITS (GOURMET) COURSE

The NBC series HANNIBAL finished its third season on August 29 with its two main characters, serial killer Hannibal Lecter and FBI profiler Will Graham, clinging to each other as they tumbled off a cliff. That may very well have been the perfect symbolic end for a show that this season was tossed away by its network. The way NBC abandoned the show was shocking, especially one that just last year New York magazine called “the best drama on network TV.”

Why was a show that never had good ratings but had critical hosannas discarded so? And why were there no other takers? Netflix, Amazon, and other outlets passed on picking it up. Even the Kickstarter rumors that showrunner Bryan Fuller suggested might save the show thus far have not come through. All the actors have been released from their contracts too so it looks like the show is as dried up as Dr. Chilton’s chances for an Aveda endorsement. So what happened? How did this show die such an unfortunate death?

NBC REDUCED ITS VIABILITY

Fuller admitted going into this season that NBC informed him that it would be its last at the network. Perhaps as a shot at a stay of execution, the network moved the show from a spring premiere to June, hoping that the summer season would give it less competition. But its premiere ratings numbers were dismal, and the second week it sunk even further. Then NBC announced it was cancelling it with 11 episodes yet to air. How they’d expect the ratings to hold with such an announcement defies credulity. Soon afterwards, they weren’t even showing previews of coming shows. They further turned their backs on HANNIBAL by moving it from its Friday night slot to the wasteland that is Saturday evening. There, it struggled to maintain an audience of a million viewers. Such shoddy behavior made the show all the less viable on paper to potential buyers.

LECTER WAS IMPRISONED TOO EARLY

Those viewers still remaining with the series likely started to see some aesthetic reasons that may have led NBC to turn a cold shoulder to the program as well. In the firs two seasons, Fuller’s vision fascinated viewers with his fresh take on the backstory of “Hannibal the Cannibal.” The show presented Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) as a free man, living the life of a bon vivant, and consulting with the FBI on various cases. Special agent Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) and his boss Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne) did not yet know of the mad man in their midst. It was fun for viewers to witness this bad doctor helping them profile a killer who turned out to be Lecter himself. But by the end of the second season, the jig was up, and Lecter fled the States. At the start of season three he was on the lam in Europe. Then midway through this season, he was captured. With Lecter in jail the show started to resemble all the movies done about him already. Incarcerated the character became inert, and suddenly the show started to feel that way too.

TOO MANY STORIES WERE REHASHED

Not helping this season was revisiting old storylines like those from “HANNIBAL the movie, HANNIBAL RISING and the very first Lecter story, that of the Red Dragon. That’s where Lecter and Graham first appeared on the pages of author Thomas Harris, and that crackling thriller had already been done twice by Hollywood. First, Michael Mann made the great MANHUNTER in 1986, and then Brett Ratnor rendered a so-so remake in 2002. In the first two seasons Fuller took great leeway with Lecter lore, but this season he was too loyal with the source material. Was the over-familiarity of the storyline to blame for a lot of viewers giving up on the show? Perhaps. There was a lot of grumbling about it online, and it seemed with such tropes that HANNIBAL was starting to rehash the tried and true from before.

BRYAN FULLER MOVED ONTO ANOTHER SHOW

One can imagine that NBC couldn’t conjure up the same enthusiasm for HANNIBAL with Fuller starting to develop a new series for Starz based on Neil Gaiman’s novel “American Gods.” And indeed, at times during the third season, Fuller’s crackling wit and dialogue seemed to be absent. The extended torture of Dr. Chilton by serial killer Francis Dolarhyde, AKA the Red Dragon, (Richard Armitage) was rather gratuitous for a show that kept most of its violence off screen. Yet, starting with the season finale last year, HANNIBAL started to become positively bathed in brutality. Fuller’s show originally was more about criminal psychology than crimson. Did too many commitments force him to let others take the reins and let it run red with blood?

THE LEADS WERE TOO OFTEN SUPPORTING PLAYERS

The two leads, Mikkelson and Dancy, were almost relegated to supporting roles once the Red Dragon story took over. In particular, the reduced screen time for Dancy throughout this season was shocking. There was one episode where he was completely absent, and others where he barely showed up. And throughout this season, he spent more time chatting with Gillian Anderson as Lecter’s psychiatrist/lover Bedelia Du Maurier than he did bantering with Mads’ mad doctor. Fishburne’s presence seemed reduced to a cameo at times too. Granted, he was busy starring in BLACK-ISH all season long as well, but the third season suffered from not having enough of him in it either. And as good an actor as Richard Armitage is, he never made Dolarhyde particularly interesting. His grunting and monotone delivery rendered him a rather dull villain. His outsized back tattoo seemed to have more breadth than the killer’s personality.

Other elements may have contributed to the downfall of HANNIBAL as well. The show’s macabre visual scheme was always exquisite, but it started to dominate the hours in ways it hadn’t in the past. The obsessive slow motion of gushing gore not only felt too garish, it felt like fetish. And there were logic problems too. Dr. Bloom (Caroline Dhavernas) was thrown out of a second story window in the climax of the second season, but she was walking around without a cane by the middle of this season. Du Maurier remained a free woman this season even though she certainly would’ve been incarcerated as Lecter’s European accomplice. And the dialogue started to play too on the nose even through the last episode. “The bluff is eroding”, Lecter coyly told Will at their hideaway on the aforementioned cliff after their ruse to catch Dolarhyde backfired.


Maybe HANNIBAL will get another shot. Fuller has teased the possibility of a big screen effort, but that seems unlikely all things considered. Finding investors for a vehicle that had such ratings problems will be a tough pitch. And some of the other issues the show had in its third season may frighten away more. In the final analysis, the autopsy may show that HANNIBAL was a once truly wonderful feast for horror fans whose third helping was just too hard to swallow.

Posted by Jeff York at 11:47 PM

'The Wrath of the Lamb'

Hannibal, Will, and Francis Dolarhyde march resolutely toward their fates.

by Keith Staskiewicz • @Staskijiwczejcz


Season 3, Ep. 13 | Aired Aug 29

Posted August 29 2015 — 11:00 PM EDT


Hannibal has always abided by that existential maxim to live every season as if it were the last. As it turned out, a third season of artistically hyper-ambitious but scarcely watched cine-television was where NBC finally drew the line, and while it’s entirely possible we might see a few more courses at some point in the future, Fannibals also have to be willing to accept that the check has come and this extravagant, lovingly curated omakase meal is over. And in terms of an ending that could serve as a capital “E” Ending, Saturday’s finale went for broke.

If this is indeed it — if Hannibal and Will sailing over the bluffs in an eternal embrace like Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty tumbling down Reichenbach Falls is the last image we’ll have of them — then I still find myself oddly satisfied. Could their struggle really have ended any other way? Was it ever possible for the Will that we knew to settle down with a family and be truly happy? Wouldn’t there always be that dark, soothing, goading voice in the back of his mind, and could he ever be sure that voice was Hannibal’s and not his own?

I don’t really think it’s worth pondering who might have survived the fall, or even how. After all, so many have died literal and metaphorical deaths on this show only to continue living as a dead-eyed, narratively driven revenant. Hannibal dream logic envelops the proceedings in questions more pressing and grander than just life and death. If we end up with more Hannibal, it’s likely that one or both of them will have survived; if not, then they’ll exist in a Schrodinger’s limbo in our own minds. But honestly, it’s really the same either way.

If I was glued to a wheelchair and forced at teeth-point to identify a problem with the back half of this final(?) season it would be the fact that the Red Dragon saga adhered to Thomas Harris’ source material more obviously and linearly than previous storylines. I re-read the novel less than a year ago so much of the story was fresh in my mind as I watched, and certain episodes lacked the “What in God’s and the Devil’s name is going to happen?” spontaneity that I usually associated with the show. But in making a clean break from the book’s denouement, the finale had my heart shoved two-thirds of the way up my esophagus.

It begins where last week’s episode left off, with Reba in the scaled clutches of the Dragon. Actually, no, not the Dragon — it’s Francis, but a Francis who has become strong enough to overcome himself. He lets her feel the key around his neck and then lets loose the dragonfire, but not before shooting himself. Poor Reba even ends up putting her hand in the pile of mush that used to be his head.

Or at least, she assumed it was his head. In reality, Dolarhyde’s plans aren’t quite done yet. He ambushes Will in his motel room and the endgame starts in earnest. For both Will and Hannibal it’s hard to tell how much each one knows. It’s entirely possible that both were aware they were walking straight into the abattoir in going through with their respective plans, but they felt they had no other choice. The dialogue between the two felt more like lovers’ words than ever before: “It’s not the same,” Hannibal tells him early in the episode, like a scorned partner. “You’ll see it’s not the same.” Then, at the end, “See, this is all I ever wanted for you, Will. For both of us.” Their “death” is tragic in the traditional way, like Tristan and Isolde or Romeo and Juliet. That is to say, inevitable.

Jack and Alana are so eager to see the end of Hannibal — something they should have thought of three years ago when they helped him avoid a needle in his arm — that they don’t see the danger in the game they’re playing. Alana signed along the dotted line of a contract with the Devil, well aware of the terms, and Bedelia similarly is furious and scared at the prospect of Hannibal’s freedom. She refers to this as Will’s becoming, and indeed he’s starting to look more psychopathic than ever: His hair is slicked, his suit well-fitted, and his demeanor more terrifyingly calm and collected than ever before. Even if he had survived this endgame, I would have feared for Molly.

Of course things go wrong. Dolarhyde can’t be controlled, nor his actions predicted, in such a way. He attacks the convoy, leaving only Hannibal and Will for a brief road trip to Hannibal’s cliff-side dacha, where he previously kept Miriam Lass and Abigail. The setting is like that of the Bronte novel Will and Hannibal were always secretly enacting. But just as they’re about to enjoy a nice glass of wine, Dolarhyde swoops in and it turns into a Mexican standoff between the good, the bad, and the ugly. It takes the combined efforts of the newly anointed couple to take down the Dragon.

They’ve survived, but for what? Their love is an impossible one, a thesis and an antithesis that can only be synthesized in the crucible of death. And so, they finally embrace the answer that was there all along and toss themselves — battling and embracing — into the void and, in the words of Will, “It’s beautiful.”