Hannibal Season 1, Episode 3
"Potage"
Original airdate: April 18, 2013
Writer: David Fury, Chris Brancato, Bryan Fuller
Director: David Slade
Cast: Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen, Laurence Fishburne, Caroline Dhavernas, Kacey Rohl
It takes Abigail Hobbs' dead father to wake her up. In a coma after Garret Jacob Hobbs cut her throat, Abigail jolts back to life through a half-dream, half-memory sequence in which her father guides her through her first kill. It's a deer, not a human, but dear old Dad is still clearly feeling out how his daughter feels about taking life under his philosophy, which includes a promise to "honor every part" of the deer, from the hide to the bones to, of course, the meat.
Upon hearing the news that the surrogate daughter he's now clinging to is alert for the first time in weeks, Will Graham of course wants to see her immediately. It takes Alana Bloom to wave him off, who visits his house for a cup of coffee that's not entirely unromantic, and breaks the news to him gently. Believing that the first person Abigail talks to about her father's death shouldn't be someone, you know, actively involved in said death, Alana decides that she'll be the one to take the leap first. After a bedside conversation about gift cards and clothes (and, well, her murderous father), Alana comes away feeling like Abigail is hiding something, only showing enough emotion to prove that she can feel anything. For one reason or another, she's manipulative, and immediately declares her intent to sell her parents' house.
Back at Quantico, Jack Crawford is still very much on the warpath over the theory that Abigail was her father's collaborator – the bait, if nothing else – and wants to arrange a field trip for Abigail, Will, Alana, and Hannibal to visit the family home in Minnesota. Alana's not sure it's the best idea, but Hannibal waves these concerns away, to Jack's delight. Later, Hannibal watches Will giving a lecture in which he reveals his theory that the Minnesota Shrike's copycat killer was the one who placed the still-untraceable call to warn Garret Jacob Hobbs that the feds were coming. He doesn't know the copycat is Hannibal, but he knows everything else, and the smile which crosses Mads Mikkelsen's face in this scene is pure romance.
And what comes after romance? Co-parenting, of course! Freddie Lounds is snooping around Abigail's hospital room, trying to get the rights to her story, when Will and Hannibal show up and chase her off. Episode 2 really drove home the "My Two Dads" subtext of how Will and Hannibal see Abigail, but now it's just plain text.
They are her protectors, her guides, the people there to listen to her when no one else will, and when Abigail confides in them that she's worried she'll have nightmares every time she goes to sleep, Hannibal promises to help. Meanwhile Will shares how horrible it feels to kill someone, calling it "the ugliest thing in the world," and wins Abigail over through sheer candor. She asks him what it feels like to be inside the head of someone like her Dad, and Will replies that it's like "Talking to a shadow suspended on dust." The field trip is on.
But not without a little more interference from Freddie Lounds. Furious that she's been embarrassed and that she had to hear Will's threat that "It's not very smart to piss off a guy who thinks about killing people for a living," Freddie reaches out to Nicholas Boyle (Mark Rendall), brother of murder victim Cassie Boyle. Cassie was not actually a Minnesota Shrike victim – she's the one Hannibal killed – but Nicholas doesn't need to know that, especially for Freddie's purposes. What he needs is a little more information, and Freddie's prepared to give it to him.
Meanwhile, it is field trip time. Alana, Will, Hannibal, and Abigail head out to the Minnesota Shrike's former home. Someone has helpfully spraypainted "Cannibals" across the garage door and the front door, to really drive the point home, but it's not really about the house. "Potage" is the first time we see Hannibal break with the procedural format that will serve some of its best episodes. Even on rewatch it's a little jarring and disconcerting at first, because you wonder how this will advance the story if it's just talking about crimes that already happened with a sense of restraint this show didn't really reveal in its first two outings. But as everyone converges on the house, we realize this isn't a mystery episode. It's a battle for Abigail Hobbs on two fronts: One for her body, one for her soul.
The body part comes under threat as Abigail meets up with an old friend, only to find Nicholas Boyle waiting in the woods behind her house. Her friend scares him off by hitting him square in the forehead with a rock, which Hannibal cleverly covers up for later use. Now there's a material threat on Abigail's life.
Meanwhile, Will, Alana, and Hannibal are all trying to pull Abigail in their own directions, and it's here that Kacey Rohl really earns her place as one of the best actors on this show. She has to play Abigail not just as a grieving girl who'll nurse scars both physical and psychological for the rest of her life, but as a young woman who senses an opportunity for connection, for sympathy, with someone who can understand her. The real acting trick, of course, is that we still don't know what there is about Abigail to understand. That Rohl is able to play this unknowability while also drawing so much sympathy from us is testament to her talent, and to great writing.
Abigail's effort to draw closer to her caretakers leads her to reveal her own theory about her father: He would have used every part of his victims, be they game or human. Garret Jacob Hobbs was so committed to this nose-to-tail approach that he apparently made plumbing adhesive with powdered elk bones, so whatever is left of those girls is "probably holding pipes together." The more horrifying revelation for Abigail, though, is the understanding that her father's philosophy also meant that he was likely feeding his victims to his family. He might have been doing it the very day he died and almost took his daughter down with him.
In an effort to get more information, the crew decides to move to Hobbs' antler-filled cabin in the hope that Abigail will spill more details. When they walk into the attic, though, they find the body of Abigail's friend from before, impaled on antlers.
And wouldn't you know it, right there in her mouth, after struggling with her killer, is the DNA of Nicholas Boyle. We know that Hannibal pulled that DNA off the rock he found, but no one else does.
This is a thrilling dance of plotting, the kind of thing that will only get more complex as the series wears on, but while the first two episodes are front-loaded with thrills, "Potage" does the inverse. Everything is staid, careful, calm, right up until that body is found in the attic of the cabin. From there we are on a rollercoaster, and the battle for Abigail's soul speeds up.
While Will stays and argues with Jack over who really killed Abigail's friend – Crawford has his money on Nicholas Boyle, but Will knows better – Alana and Hannibal take Abigail back to the family home so she can pack some bags and get the hell out of Minnesota. While she's unattended, Abigail discovers two awful things at the exact same time: Her father stuffed the throw pillows he made for the family with the hair of his victims, and oh yeah, Nicholas Boyle is back, and he doesn't look happy.
The young man swears he's not going to hurt Abigail, but when he moves toward her, Abigail snatches one of her father's knives from an evidence box and stabs him. No, not stabs. Guts. She goes in and up his torso, just like her father taught her to do with a deer, and it's clear in this moment that this is the first time Abigail's killed another human being. However much she might have known about her father, she never went this far, and there is only one person in the world who will understand this.
Sensing trouble, Hannibal stops Alana from walking in on Abigail by grabbing her from behind and bashing her head against a stone wall. Then, in a scene that beautifully mirrors Abigail and her father with the deer at the top of the episode, Hannibal sits with the cooling corpse and his new surrogate daughter, explaining calmly that, self-defense or not, she will be vilified forever if she's caught having killed Nicholas Boyle.
They have to hide the body, and in this moment, unmoored from all reason and sense of grounding after her first human kill, Abigail takes Hannibal's side. Hannibal makes it all go away, then stages everything from his own injury to Alana's to make it look like Nicholas Boyle ran roughshod over all three of them before slipping away. Everyone believes him, because how could you not trust the smartest man in the room? Hannibal has won the battle for Abigail Hobbs.
This is a remarkable sequence of events, not just because it shows how dangerously intellectually nimble Hannibal truly is, but because it completes an entire character arc that might have taken another show a full season to unspool. Abigail Hobbs wakes up as a cipher, and by the end of the episode we understand her in a way we never could have dreamed when she was introduced. The cherry on top of it all is her arrival, having escaped her hospital, on Hannibal's doorstep one night. She goes there because she knows where to find him, sure, but also to reveal something: She knows that he's the man who called her father, though she doesn't know why. Hannibal lies and says he was calling to "interview" her father, but confides in Abigail that word getting out about the call could ruin his life. She tests him, asking if he kills people like her father, and he simply responds "I'm nothing like your Dad."
Of course not. He's better, and the pair seal their new bond by promising to keep each other's secrets.
Even more than the first two episodes, which pull off amazing feats of storytelling efficiency and impact, "Potage" feels like a defining episode for Hannibal. It's so featherlight and yet so laced with meaning, able to pivot seamlessly between at least four subplots at once, and setting the stakes for the rest of the season in ways we hadn't seen before. This is a show about catching killers, yes, but it's also a show about living with them, and what that can do to you whether you really know who's in the next room or not.
Next Time: "Oeuf"
