Hannibal Season 1, Episode 5
"Coquilles"
Original airdate: April 25, 2013
Writer: Scott Nimerfro and Bryan Fuller
Director: Guillermo Navarro
Cast: Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen, Laurence Fishburne, Gina Torres
The dawn of shows like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation around the turn of the millennium gave TV viewers a fresh perspective on just how graphic their favorite shows could get under the guise of investigative accuracy. Suddenly, your friend's mom was an expert on blood splatter analysis and obsessed with things like camera positions tracking inside a person's bullet wounds. Network television grew more graphic than ever before, but even by those standards, Hannibal constantly pushed the envelope.
We've certainly seen graphic moments on the show before, but "Coquilles," the fifth episode of the series, is still remembered fondly among us Fannibals for going above and beyond in that realm. Hannibal was always a show that reveled in its ability to rearrange the human form in creative ways, and with the "angel-maker" of this episode, the series hit another gear for the first time. It would not be the last.
But first, it's time to talk about Will Graham's problems!
The stress of his new work-life balance, which sent him packing back to Virginia at the end of last week's devastating episode, has left Will Graham even more disturbed than usual. No longer simply plagued by troubling dreams, he's now sleepwalking on a truly champion level, walking what looks like miles down rural roads near his home without any awareness of getting out of bed in the first place. In what's perhaps a sign of growth in the mental health department, Will's first call is to Hannibal, who greets him in his immaculate morning robe, makes him coffee, and cautions him to be mindful of the "devil's bargain" he struck with Jack. The past four episodes have been an exercise in winding Will up to see how far he can go without breaking, and it seems a breaking point is near.
But serial killers don't care about that, and while Will's trying to get his sleep hygiene under control, another one strikes with a very specific, skin-crawlingly beautiful MO. Will and Jack head to a random motel room, where a couple has been stripped naked and posed at the foot of the bed, seemingly in prayer. The skin of their backs has been flayed and turned upward toward the ceiling, suspended there with hooks and fishing line to give the appearance of wings. This killer is making "angels," seemingly to pray over him while he sleeps. In his effort to get into the killer's mind, laying on the bed with the angels at his feet, Will draws the conclusion that his killer sees the angel-making process as a "gift" to his victims, transforming them into something beyond mortal flesh. Like the mushroom killer before him, it's an act of transcendence, of elevating a human soul to a higher level of consciousness they wouldn't otherwise reach.
Back at the lab, Will explains further: The angels were kneeling at the bed in prayer not to the killer, but for the killer. Analysis of the killer's vomit, found at the scene, reveals a drug cocktail common in cancer patients, specifically patients with brain tumors. This is a man terrified of dying in his sleep, and he's making guardian angels to watch over him. We see in very brief flashes of the killer's (Seann Gallagher) life that he chooses his victim because he sees each of them as a walking human shape with a tongue of flame for a head. Just minutes in, and it's arguably the most striking imagery Hannibal has given us so far. But we're not done yet.
While Will and the rest of the team are busy trying to bore down into this killer's whereabouts and psychology, Jack and his wife Bella (Gina Torres) are finally having a couple's dinner with Hannibal, who's pulled out all the stops for Mrs. Crawford. Last episode, we got to see Hannibal in surrogate father mode, shaping both Abigail Hobbs and Alana Bloom to suit his needs. Now we get to see him play couples therapist. Something is rotten at the heart of the Crawford marriage, a blight that seems to be spreading despite Jack's best efforts to tame in. The issue, Hannibal surmises, is with Bella.
In a private session with Hannibal sometime after their dinner, Bella reveals that she has terminal cancer, and while she's known for some time, she has not told Jack. Her reasons are complex, but she sums it up by saying, "I resent that Jack has too much to worry about to worry about me." To prove her point, moments later we're at a new crime scene with a new angel, this one castrated as well as granted a set of flesh wings. Again, as with the Minnesota Shrike, Will is puzzled, unable to nail down the killer's psychology in a way that satisfies Jack. When Jack snaps at Will, this time Will snaps back. The rift is widening, which means that Hannibal's plan, whatever it is, is working. And to make things more complicated for Will, he sleepwalks again, this time waking up on the roof of his porch, with his dogs going crazy back in the bedroom, begging him to come inside.
Here's another one of those instances where Hannibal's delicate storytelling sensibilities and attention to detail pay off in a big way. At this dinner with the Crawfords, Hannibal shows off his extraordinary sense of smell, something borrowed from the books (as is a later joke about Will's aftershave), and explains that he once detected a colleague had stomach cancer before said colleague was even diagnosed. A couple of scenes later, we learn that he wasn't just smelling Bella Crawford's perfume, but the tumor in her lung, growing larger even as Bella herself is, in her words, shrinking. When Will visits after his latest sleepwalking incident, Hannibal creeps up behind him and, in one of the sexiest moments of the show so far, takes a deep breath from the nape of Will's neck.
Will's response – "Did you just smell me?" – is both hilarious and in keeping with the intellectual dance that's so defined his time with Hannibal. He doesn't always understand what the good doctor's extraordinary lens is trained on, but he trusts Hannibal at this point well enough to leave it be. Meanwhile, Hannibal smells something more than Will's aftershave. Will's headaches are getting worse, and Hannibal suspects an intriguing development somewhere beyond the obvious issues his new friend is having.
Meanwhile, the team has tracked down and identified the angel-maker, and arranged to interview his estranged wife, who explains that she left him "because of his cancer," not because she couldn't handle it, but because his brain tumor made him increasingly unstable and isolated. He clearly wanted isolation, a remove from his family to pursue whatever twisted mission he believes he has to complete before his death. As she talks, Jack has a horrible realization about Bella, and Laurence Fishburne does some of his finest acting in the entire show, wordlessly absorbing the blow of his wife's cancer with a vulnerability that, in an instant, reveals a new side of Jack Crawford.
And here's where "Coquilles" proves its particular brilliance, shifts perspectives to create something new, and send the series in yet another promising direction. The killer's wife reveals that he had a near-death experience as a child at his family's farm, leading Will and Jack there to try and find their man. They find him, but he's already made an angel of himself, rigged his own body to hang from the rafters of the barn.
The investigation is over, no SWAT team, no gunfire, just a man with terminal cancer going out on his own terms after murdering several other people. It's such an anticlimactic end that it gives Will an opening to, essentially, try to emancipate himself from Crime Daddy Jack Crawford.
"It's getting harder and harder to make myself look," Will says, remembering his sleepwalking, his nightmares, his guilt over deaths that weren't even his fault because he can still imagine himself committing the crimes. Jack, ever the pragmatist, tries to leverage Will's guilt against him, noting that Will's entire teaching career will be tainted if murders he could be solving are happening while he does nothing. Jack cannot control his wife, cannot save her, but damn it, he can still control Will. Maybe.
Back at Hannibal's office, Jack ambushes Bella and forces her to talk about her cancer diagnosis. In one of the show's most heartbreaking moments, Bella Crawford reveals just how well she knows her husband when she says that she knows Jack wants to care for her, wants to feel needed, and she can't give him that. Instead of pushing back on this, Jack shows an almost shocking level of emotional maturity, perhaps because he's already taken his frustrations out on Will. "It's your fight, baby, but I'm in your corner," he says, staring down the abyss from over Bella's shoulder.
The episode ends with a remarkable flip of the script, as it's finally Will's turn to be Jack's source of stability, no longer just his work son but his work wife. Just as Jack did with Will in the series premiere, Will tells Jack that he doesn't have to say anything, but he'll be there all the same. Both men have transformed in the process of this investigation, and for a moment, however brief it might turn out to be, they've become each others' guardian angels.
What neither of them know, of course, is that Hannibal is watching over all, aware of everything each man is going through, wondering how to use every last drop of their suffering and distraction to his advantage. During dinner with Bella earlier in the episode, Hannibal mused that "Cruelty is a gift humanity has given itself." He was talking about "ethical" butchery, the idea of giving an animal a good life before slaughtering it for food, but he's also talking about all the little flies in his expanding web. He doesn't need to be cruel to them to move them into place, doesn't need to inflict unnecessary torture. Cancer does that. Mortality does that. No, Hannibal will save his cruelty for exactly the right moment.
And that moment is coming.
Next Time: "Entree"
