Hannibal Season 1, Episode 6
"Entrée"
Original airdate: May 2, 2013
Writer: Kai Yu Wu and Bryan Fuller
Director: Michael Rymer
Cast: Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen, Laurence Fishburne, Caroline Dhavernas, Suzy Eddie Izzard
Though it's named for one of its principal characters, and spends a lot of time working from the perspective of a second principal character, Hannibal is at its best when it's an ensemble show. Despite the procedural elements of the story, this show is an intricate web of personalities, rivalries, and delicate minds, and every expansion of its cast is meant to inform another part of the web.
Which is how we come to meet Hannibal's rival serial killer.
In a scene paying direct homage to an off-camera moment from The Silence of the Lambs, "Entrée" opens with the introduction of Dr. Abel Gideon (Suzy Eddie Izzard), a psychopathic killer imprisoned in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, Hannibal's stomping ground through Thomas Harris' first two Lecter novels. Like Hannibal in those books, Gideon is kept under extremely high security, and like Hannibal in Silence, he fakes a medical incident so he can get to the infirmary, where he promptly rips apart a nurse just trying to do her job. Fans of Silence of the Lambs know that Hannibal doesn't actually kill his nurse (he does eat her tongue), so introducing Gideon as someone who not only kills the nurse, but overkills her, is a nice flip of the script.
It's important, too, because there is an ongoing debate among law enforcement and mental health professionals over whether or not Gideon is the "Chesapeake Ripper," a Baltimore-area serial killer whose last active period was two years earlier, right around the time Gideon was locked up. Even after they've examined the crime scene, which mimics the Ripper's method of turning his victims into pin cushions, Will and Jack are not convinced Gideon is the Ripper. The hospital's egotistical administrator Dr. Frederick Chilton (Raul Esparza), on the other hand, is absolutely convinced of it, and tickled pink that he has his prized monster back in the spotlight.
In a lesser show, this might amount to little more than fan service. You've got a killer who's mirroring Hannibal's most famous story, you've got the doctor who kept Hannibal locked up, and you've got a game of wits between investigators and a psychopath. It's all very Silence of the Lambs, but it's not just Easter eggs. Having Izzard and Esparza (who is especially wonderful on this show) there certainly helps to add weight to all of this, but almost immediately "Entrée" reveals that it's after something more. This episode is not just about catching the real Chesapeake Ripper. And even if it was, no matter how hard psychiatrist Alana Bloom (Caroline Dhavernas) pushes him, Gideon's not telling.
Back at Hannibal's office, the deeper meaning behind this particular case comes out as Jack wrestles with survivor's guilt over his wife's cancer diagnosis. It's wormed its way into his head to such an extent that he can't look at Bella's side of the bed without imagining her dying there. Hannibal, ever the puppet master/really good analyst, asks the important question: "Who else couldn't you save?"
The answer is Miriam Lass (Anna Chlumsky), a trainee who basically plays the Clarice Starling role in the Ripper case. In a flashback to two years earlier, Jack brings Miriam in to help him out with the Ripper case, only to have his bright new recruit vanish without a trace in the midst of her investigation. Jack really liked Miriam. She profiled the Ripper nearly perfectly the first time she was asked, and she had a feisty streak he admired. Now she's a ghost haunting his mind, and it only gets worse when someone places an untraceable call to Jack's house in the middle of the night, replaying Miriam's voice pleading for help right before she disappeared.
"I was so wrong," she says, whimpering and panicked. "I was so wrong."
It's an absolutely chilling moment which not only serves to confirm the Ripper is not Abel Gideon, but serves to heighten our empathy for Jack. He spent the first few episodes as a somewhat merciless taskmaster, but in these moments his vulnerability comes through in new, gripping ways.
We've talked before about Jack as a kind of father to a dysfunctional little family of investigators in the Behavioral Science Unit, and now we see just how true that is. He's losing his partner in Bella and he's terrified he'll lose someone else, which makes catching the Ripper that much more urgent. Will and Hannibal are still vital to the story, but "Entrée" is Jack's episode, and Laurence Fishburne makes a meal of it.
Determined to lure out the real Ripper, Jack goes so far as to make a deal with the tabloid devil in the form of Freddie Lounds. If Lounds is willing to print that Gideon has been confirmed as the Ripper, and that news is then reprinted in newspapers around the country, Crawford believes the real Ripper will come out into the open and be easier to catch. Sensing that she's essential to this chapter of the story, Lounds decides to have a little fun with Jack and Will. She notes that psychopathic tendencies tend to run not just in the medical field, where they suspect the Ripper works, but in the fields of journalism (yeah, we're all a little crazy) and law enforcement. So they're just "a bunch of psychopaths helping each other out."
The article hits and — if you haven't figured it out yet — the show gift-wraps the reveal that, of course, Hannibal is the Chesapeake Ripper. And he's furious that someone else is getting his press. It's a rare moment of weakness for a killer who's been immaculate and ahead of everyone else through five episodes, and it sets up the primary arc of the rest of the season. The episode is called "Entrée" for a reason. We've arrived at the main course.
Speaking of which, in the wake of Gideon's confession, Hannibal convenes a professional dinner at his home to pick the brains of both Chilton and Alana. He wants insight into who's been talking and about what, and to prove it he serves his guests "lamb's tongue." In a show full of wicked food jokes, it's one of the very best. Anyway, Chilton reveals that he's discussed details of the Ripper case with Gideon that the doctor might not otherwise have known. As the three psychiatrists debate the issue, they throw out theories ranging from repressed memories to deliberate obfuscation to "psychic driving," the idea that Chilton was planting ideas in Gideon's head to get a confession, and the prestige that might come from scholarly writing on the captured Ripper. Alana is, of course, appalled by the idea, but back in the kitchen, Hannibal "confides" in Chilton that he thinks it's fine to get a little unorthodox if it gets results. Chilton's ego is suitably stroked, which will naturally matter later.
Meanwhile, for the third time this episode, Jack gets the phone call playing Miriam's last desperate message. For two years he's been convinced Miriam is dead, perhaps because it's the only way he could really move forward, and now the calls are giving everyone else second thoughts. This time, though, the call is traceable, and it leads to an abandoned building where the Behavior Science Team find a phone … clutched in the hand at the end of Miriam Lass's severed arm.
It's an absolutely diabolical stroke by the Ripper, a.k.a. Hannibal, but it doesn't really convince Jack that Miriam might still be alive. Instead it convinces him to reveal even more vulnerability to Hannibal, as they meet up at the end of the day and sit by the fire. In this literal fireside chat, yet another way in which Hannibal wields the comforts of domesticity to his advantage, Jack talks about Miriam while we flash back to the day she died. She was visiting Hannibal's office, asking him about a patient he had back when he was an ER doctor who ended up becoming one of the Ripper's victims. Aware that Miriam is different, smart enough to be onto him, Hannibal excuses himself for a moment, long enough for Miriam to find a sketch of the "Wound Man," a famous medical drawing dating back centuries. It's Hannibal's riff on the concept, but it's also a direct mirror of the way the Ripper kills his victims, impaling them with as many sharp objects as he can while also carving out select organs. As this dawns on Miriam, Hannibal creeps up in socks and strangles her.
What could have been a matter of simple plot housekeeping — letting the audience know what really happened to Miriam — instead becomes an absolute gut punch. We could have guessed this is what happened, but seeing it, seeing Hannibal's face as a cold mask of decisive action as he chokes the life out of a promising young investigator, is the most monstrous glimpse we've had of him yet. It's the first time we've really been able to sit with Hannibal killing someone, to see it in a way that doesn't allow us to avert our eyes. This man, however cultured, however respectful, is a beast teeming with dark appetites, and we can no longer deny this fact, no matter how much we like him. It's the kind of thematic dissonance Hannibal thrives on.
It's also, here at the end, worth lingering on the Wound Man for a moment. It's the Chesapeake Ripper's preferred method of killing, but it's also a remarkable insight into the way Hannibal is playing his long game with Jack, with Will, with everyone else on this show. He will kill with expedience if he must, and he will break his pattern if he must, as he did with the Minnesota Shrike copycat killings. What he won't do is make it easy for anyone involved. Hannibal at his core enjoys this kind of killing, this death by a thousand cuts. In "Entrée," we see him cutting deeper into his new FBI friends, drawing more and more blood.
But he's just getting started.
Next Time: "Sorbet"
