Hannibal: Buffet Froid Recap

Thank you Bryan Fuller. We needed this episode. We really did. As much as I love Fannibals and find Hannigram shippers and their gif sets and images on Tumblr to be freakin’ adorable they do lose sight of one very important fact – Hannibal would murder and eat pretty much all of us. Canonically he will attempt to murder and eat Will. And it’s not cute and fluffy and out of love.

It’s because the guy is insane. And dangerous. And legit terrifying.

This episode reminds us of that.

Of course they sort of try to hide the stick at first by sending us one creepy ass ‘killer of the week.’ You guys have all seen the gif, right? Yeah. Nope. That’s all I could think the whole opening sequence which was hella long and basically just had this creepy stalking montage and then a chick getting dragged under the bed. As if I needed nightmares to pile on to my budding insomnia.

The opening pretty much threw every little horror movie cliche about someone laying in wait in your house at us complete with terrifying music and ended with the above scene.  Yeah. Terrifying. I just… nope. Granted, the stuff that’s going on with our boy Will is a bit terryfing, too. Not really so much in a shit-some-creepy-hand-just-dragged-that-girl-under-her-bed-omg-nope sort of way but more in a omg-will-let-me-coddle-you-as-you-slowly-lose-your-mind sort of way. While the girl above is living out all of our nightmares about monsters under the bed Will is with Hannibal in his office in Baltimore talking about how he’s having a hard time reconciling what Abigail did. Also about how he’s starting to drift and lose himself. He still has hallucinations, he still loses time. Basically when Will said “I feel like I’m fading” the water works and #feels were ready to go. Then Hannibal asked him to draw a clock face and recite the time, his name, and where he was as a sort of reminder of who he is and that he’s alive and conscious.

It doesn’t go well.

Neither do his attempts to help Jack and the rest of the FBI crew on the next case. One minute he is at home gutting a fish he had just caught and the next moment he was at a crime scene holding a knife and watching the girl from the opening scene gasping and drowning in her own blood. Plenty unfolded between those two scenes but Will has absolutely memory of any of it. He just goes from fish to girl to running out of the room covered in blood and pretty much shocking Beverley, Price and Zeller who haven’t seen Will that terrified at a crime scene before.

You’d think that maybe Jack finally would finally realize something is actually going on but other than trying to get him to talk about what he’s feeling and asking if he’s broken him he sort of just lets Will awkwardly smile it all off. He says he’s “officially” concerned about Will but c’mon. If he was really concerned he’d maybe stop bringing him in on all these cases. Instead he just lets Will amble back up to the bedroom and into the crime scene he contaminated.

Since Jack is no use Will goes back to Hannibal and tries to talk to him about what happened. He knows something is going on and that something is wrong with him. Of course, he doesn’t believe it’s mental – he thinks it’s something else. “I know what kind of crazy I am and this isn’t that kind of crazy.” He’s holding out for a brain tumor diagnosis. So Hannibal takes him to an old buddy of his who is a neurologist and they do a brain scan. Turns out Will was right – there is something wrong with him and it’s not just that he’s crazy. I mean, he is crazy. But he’s also got encephalitis and half of his brain is swelling up. And Hannibal has known all along because, you know, he smelled it.

Instead of telling Will, though, Hannibal gets his old med school buddy go along with his plan to study the psychological deterioration of his mind as the disease rages on. Because apparently Hannibal’s friends are just as screwed up as him. So they tell Will he’s perfectly fine and leave him to believe that he’s just legit going crazy. Later, when Hannibal’s friend Dr. Sutcliffe asks him just how far he’s going to let this go Hannibal says that he will eventually help Will. After all, Will is his friend.

And this, everyone, is the reminder that we needed. Hannibal is not really Will’s friend. Not in the way any of us would imagine. He is manipulative and willing to screw with pretty much everyone’s lives – even of those who are closest to him. This is not a relationship that is going to end well for Will. Though we do already know that. It’s just… I don’t know. They try to make Hannibal likeable a lot and that makes these moments of seeing Hannibal’s true colors way more impactful than they probably would be if he was just constantly being the bad guy.

Will is still reeling from the diagnosis and trying to piece things together so he goes back to the crime scene he was at earlier. He knows he didn’t kill the girl even though some part of his mind very much believes he did. Unfortunately the killer also came back and Will sees her hiding under the bed before she rushes him and he reaches out to grab her… only to have her skin come off in his hands. Gross. He blacks out and follows her into the woods and is shouting to her that she’s alive and what not. Then he called Beverly to come help him because even though he knows what he saw he’s not sure it was real. Oh, Will. Thanks for coming out to take care of him, Beverly. Though telling him that everyone back at the bureau thinks he’s going off the deep end? Eh, maybe not that helpful.

But whatever. After that scene comes one that is literally like… I don’t even know exactly how to read it. Will and Hannibal are back in his office talking and Will is sitting in Hannibal’s chair at his desk which immediately struck me as, “Whoa, that seems like a very personal gesture.” Hannibal is this uber controlling, manipulative dude but here Will is sitting at his desk. But then Hannibal is also lying through his teeth about him being mentally ill and not physically ill and everything. Then Will sort of asks out of the blue if Hannibal would ever publish anything about him and then requests that he do it posthumously – after whichever of their deaths comes first. I just had a lot of feelings during this scene.

Then they talk some more about the girl under the bed and how she has some disease that makes her think that she’s dead and that she killed the girl who lived in the house because she had trusted her to help. Unfortunately, the victim couldn’t help her and the girl under the bed got upset and probably killed her unintentionally. After which we seen Will at home struggling to sleep while the girl from under the bed stands outside of his house. Creepy. However, realizing what was wrong with the girl and that she knew the victim (also typing her DNA from the crime scene) helped them figure out who she was. She was a very troubled girl who had been mentally ill since she was nine named Georgia. And while Will and Jack listen to Georgia’s mother talk about her, Will and Jack start seeing parallels in Will’s insanity and Jacks’ responsibilities towards Will which ultimately leads to them having a heart-to-heart after. Jack apparently is feeling responsible for Will’s state of being and feels like he’s failing Will and getting him into trouble the same way he did Marion Lasse. And then he talks about them working together and Will trusting Jack to be there for him and blah blah blah. Jack, you’re an asshat no matter what you say. Just go away.

Still not entirely convinced that there isn’t something physically wrong with him, Will goes back to see Dr. Sutcliffe for another MRI after hours. When it’s over, though, no one is around so Will gets dressed nd goes to try and find the doctor. When he gets to the office, though, the door handle is covered in blood and inside Dr. Sutcliffe is sporting the same Glasgow smile as the victim earlier in the show. The FBI lab team comes and clear him of the murder because all the tell-tale signs are that Georgia followed him to the office and killed the doctor. She doesn’t see faces – it’s part of her psychological problem. Will thinks that his trying to reach out to her that night he went back to the house might have gotten her to imprint on him in some way.

Which apparently it did because Will that bitch is under your bed. Right now. And your dogs? They are shitty security alarms because the only one growling or even attempting to go near the bed is the tiny ass little pug mutt. At least she doesn’t seem to still want to kill him because Will sees her under his bed, freaks out, and then reaches out to her. And then she gets taken to the hospital where hopefully she’s not going to die of the infection that made ALL THE SKIN ON HER ARM FALL OFF.

Oh, also. BTW. She didn’t kill the doctor. Hannibal did. In a suit if plastic so no one would know. And then he just handed off the murder weapon to her. So the real question becomes: what will she remember!? I mean, even if she remembers someone else killing the doctor before she got there who is going to believe her? And even if they do it’s not like she saw a face. Her saying it as someone else could implicate Will moreso than Hannibal. Also, Will. Stop. No more strays. You can’t just keep coming around her hospital room. Stop. (He doesn’t stop.)

Ugh. I’m not ready for these last three episodes to air.

Especially not next week’s episode. (Or the finale after NBC released the spoiler-tastic images from that episode that literally have my brain unable to comprehend what’s going on.)

Bryan Fuller, I swear if you hurt Alana… though it would open things up for Beverly to go after Will because I feel like she definitely wouldn’t mind tapping that. Also I am so stoked to see Eddie Izzard coming back. He was hilarious. Just like I don’t even know. I loved that character. I’m really looking forward to seeing what they do. And I’m assuming that Alana will be fine because usually the trailers for this show are so misleading that literally the exact opposite of what you think is going to happen happens.

But maybe they are on to that and now they really are showing us what’s going to happen… I don’t even know. Because none of the spoiler-tastic images from any of the last three episodes have shown her. Ellen Muth will be back, though. As will Gillian Anderson and whatever the chick’s name is that plays Freddie! (And Jack because Jack can never die. He needs to always be around so he can screw up other people’s lives. Like Clarice Starling’s.)