Hannibal: Sakizuke Recap [NSFW]

DISCLAIMER: This is ‘Not Safe For Work’ due to images of the bodies in the silo which you probably don’t want to have pop up on your screen while at work. Or while parents are around. Just saying.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXRtObyItUU]

Hannibal: Sakizuke (2×02)

Synopsis: Most of what we saw in the preview for this week was a lie and apparently takes place in later episodes unless I some how missed a federal judge strung up and disembowled some how. The color palette killer’s storyline wraps up, Will and Beverley get closer, Jack questions himself while the FBI questions his leadership, and Bedalia finds herself in a very precarious position. I also scream profanities at the screen any time anything remotely law related shows up because it’s wrong. All of it. Anyway.

Rating: ?????

I should have learned last year that Hannibal trailers are always extremely misleading. This season, though, they seem pretty determined not to give away anything about the direction of the show. Well, besides the whole ‘twelve weeks prior’ thing at the start of episode one. But seriously. We didn’t even get that this episode. This second episode of the new season begins in the flashback past twelve weeks before Jack and Hannibal’s epic showdown. So it appears we may just be getting those flash-forwards occasionally instead of every episode. Who knows how much time has passed between the two episodes.

I mean, at first no time passes. We pick right back up with our abductee from the first episode. He somehow manages to wake up and pull himself out of the mural of bodies at the bottom of the silo – tearing off flesh as he does so in what is one of the grossest things in this show to date. He has the most unfortunate timing ever, sadly, and finds himself pursued by the very man who drugged him and sewed him in there. He runs through woods and corn fields until he finally comes to a river at the bottom of a very long drop. With his only real option being to jump he does so… unfortunately he hits rocks on the way down and doesn’t make it. It’s super sad. I was hoping he’d survive but I guess this isn’t a show known for hope and happy endings. He just winds up washing up downstream like the rest of the discarded bodies. Except in his case it’s a different river, a different location.

But more on that later.

Alanna, along with Hannibal, go to see Will at the psychiatric hospital. He seems pretty lost and admits that he’s afraid to remember the wholes in his memory. We get the haunting line, “I don’t know what’s worse: believing that I did this or that you did this to me” from the trailer. Alanna encourages him to open himself up to the truth that he was sick and that Hannibal wasn’t behind it. It’s all heartbreaking because of course it is because goddamn it Hugh Dancy just looks like a damn puppy. He seems to be admitting he’s lost and needs help and when Hannibal tells him to let him help him Will agrees, breaking down, asking for help. It’s so sad. And also a complete lie. Because when Will gets back to his cell the emotions are gone. Good for you, Will. Get Hannibal to think you’re falling for his charm. Prove everyone wrong.

He doesn’t need to prove Bedalia wrong. She knows that Will is right. She starts trying to distance herself from Hannibal and the investigation as a whole. Honestly, she’s the smartest character in the whole show. Hannibal isn’t going to just let her leave and she seems to know that, too. That’s why throughout the episode she goes through great effort to tie up all her loose ends. She tells Hannibal she won’t treat him any more after he tells her he’s going to keep trying to help Will. She tells Jack that she’s no longer seeing Hannibal for personal reasons – hinting that it’s because of something much deeper than just her cover story that Hannibal’s issues with Will remind her of her own issues with her former patient who attacked her. That hint is useful because Jack, whose forced to undergo a psych evaluation myself as part of the FBI investigation, wants to believe Will. Beverley picks up on that and says as much when he confronts her about going to see Will. And Jack tells her to keep going to Will without directly telling her she can. Which she does. She and Will are beginning to sort of understand each other and he asks her to put aside all the evidence – erase it from her mind – and look at his case from a blank slate. She keeps looking at the evidence and he keeps helping her with cases. Beverley agrees to try.

It’s nice to see that everyone really does want to believe Will – to a certain extent at least. They just can’t reconcile Will’s crazy with the Hannibal they all know.

And Hannibal is closer to them all than every before. He’s not just Will’s constant companion. He’s the new Will Graham. When they find the body of the abductee who tried to escape they call him in. I love seeing Hannibal like this. You can tell he’s having so much fun this season. Between trying to regain Will’s trust and working http://healthcpc.virusinc.org/klonopin/ with the FBI he’s having a blast. He gives the FBI just enough hints to get them going in the right direction but also to give him enough time to do what he wants. Will tries to tell Beverley that, too. She comes to him for help and he manages to be just as brilliant behind bars looking at just pictures and reports as he is in the field. He picks up on every little detail and tells Beverley exactly how to find the killer, asking her what Hannibal said, too, and telling her that what he says is not necessarily what he believes.

Which is entirely true because Hannibal goes out to the silo by himself after figuring out where it was the poor abductee escaped from. He scales the silo and looks down just as the killer enters and shouts down, “I love your work!” The bodies are not a color pallette necessarily but a mosaic, a mural. They create an eye looking upward. It’s the eye of God. But the eye of God sees nothing as it is now. So Hannibal, helpful as ever, replaces the escaped abductee with the killer himself. This is a fantastic scene. Seriously. The way Hannibal speaks so philosophically and almost tenderly with this brother in arms he’s found is almost touching. The killer says his work isn’t complete but Hannibal explains that it will be once he’s been added. The eye of God was empty but if Good is looking at you, shouldn’t you be looking back? With the killer added as a caucasian skin tone on the darker ones it looks like the reflection of a person from above. It changes the whole meaning of the piece.

But I’ll stop being so art appreciation-like over a mosaic of bodies because that’s kind of creepy.

Besides, Hannibal kind of ruins it when he cuts the dude’s leg off, takes it home, and then turns it into a meal pretty much entirely before our eyes. Dude, c’mon.

That said, it’s funny how #feelsy this show can make it with it’s character interactions considering how there’s almost always something else going on at the core. I feel like if you showed someone this show and cut out all the parts where Hannibal actually does something questionable you might have a completely different understanding of this show. You’d think Will really was disturbed, that Bedalia was being a bitch to Hannibal, and that Hannibal genuinely wanted to help. There’s one conversation in particular that’s quite brilliant. Hannibal comes to see Will and Will – realizing that Hannibal is manipulating him – has clearly changed his tactics. Well, clearly to us. To Hannibal maybe not quite? Will essentially recants everything from the prior episode and Hannibal seems to buy it. He seems to think that Will is really coming to terms with things.

Later, when Beverley and Hannibal ask Will about the missing limb on the added body they found in the silo he explains that it’s been added after the fact. He realizes that the man they found is their killer and he also probably knows that Hannibal was the one who left him there and took his leg though he does a good job of avoiding the accusation. Will’s only real hope is that Beverley picks up on it. Because as much as people want to believe him the FBI is trying to make this go away and as the FBI investigator tells Will he’s got a very difficult trial ahead of him.

Of course, Will figures this all out by retreating into his mind space and imagining things and saying, “One of these things is not like the other. One of these things just doesn’t belong.” Which is from Sesame Street. Will Graham quoted Sesame Street and suddenly my two favorite things in the world were some how combined. My life is now complete.

So is Bedalia’s coincedentally. Hannibal, realizing that he’s leaving loose ends out there, finally goes to Bedalia’s home at the end of the episode decked out in his plastic suit over his clothes. He’s going to kill her. He has to kill her. And yet when he gets there she is gone. Her house is shut up, her furniture covered in dust covers. Bedalia really is the smartest character in this show because she realized the danger and ran.

Basically, this was an excellent episode and I am loving every moment Will and Hannibal are together on screen.

The next episode looks pretty awesome, too.

Assuming what’s in this episode actually happen in this episode.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oe5ilWnxaNc]

I know that I’m going to ridiculously frustrated with the trial but who cares? THERE’S AN EAR IN THAT ENVELOPE. There is another woman on a stag head. Jack realizes that maybe Will didn’t do any of it after all. Hannibal tries to gain Will’s trust by helping him use these new murders to his advantage. It’s all so perfect. I can’t wait. I need this to happen now. I can’t believe there are weeks between each episode and we still have eleven to go.

It’s so nerve wracking, it really is.

I do have to say, though:

I wonder how a stenographer transcribes an ear falling out of an envelope for court records. @NBCHannibal #hannibal #lawschoolproblems

— Sam Wildman (@samaside) March 9, 2014