Hannibal Season 1, Episode 9
"Trou Normand"
Original airdate: May 23, 2013
Writer: Steve Lightfoot
Director: Guillermo Navarro
Cast: Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen, Laurence Fishburne, Caroline Dhavernas, Kacey Rohl
Something you might have noticed about Hannibal over the last few weeks is just how dramatic the crime scenes have become. Growing mushrooms on slowly dying humans was dramatic enough, but in the last few weeks alone we've gotten Wound Man recreations, a human cello, and now, an entire totem pole of bodies.
To make things even flashier, "Trou Normand" reveals this totem pole mere seconds into its runtime. We don't get time to catch up with characters, or a slow, dreamy sequence. We get Jack and Will standing on a beach, confronting the horror of bodies, some of them dead for a very long time, mashed and strung together in some kind of grand monument to a killer's life's work. It's the most striking image the show has given us yet, but it pales into comparison to the delicate dramatic structures our characters are building together.
And speaking of that, we don't get a lot of time with this grisly scene because we teleport almost immediately to Hannibal's office in Baltimore. It's jarring, but that's the point, because when Will walks into Hannibal's place, he has absolutely no idea how he got there. He was at the crime scene in West Virginia, and now he's here. The only possible explanation is that he did his job, got in his car, and then drove several hours in some kind of dissociative state. It's the most time he's lost since he started having these spells, and he's understandably freaked out.
Fortunately, his good friend Hannibal is there to help. Will wants to get a brain scan, but Hannibal pushes that thought aside, insisting instead that the problem is psychological, not neurological. Jack pushes Will too far, so Will dissociates, hides from the pain, and loses time. It's that simple (it's not), and Hannibal will help Will (will he?) get through this. "I don't want you to see a totem of your own making," Hannibal tells his friend, but with Dr. Lecter, we can never be sure. Whatever his play is, it works, and Will is back at the office the next day telling Jack that he's fine with what can only be described as deeply unnerving enthusiasm.
Speaking of Will's pain, Abigail Hobbs is back! And she's, against all advice from anyone, talking to Freddie Lounds again! A bad situation gets worse when Freddie, still angling for a book deal, lets Abigail know that the families of her father's victims are filing wrongful death lawsuits that will strip the family estate completely bare. She's broke, but the great news is that she's got a tabloid journalist offering her a book deal. What could possibly go wrong?
Back at the lab, the crew have laid out 17 different bodies from the totem pole, most of them in pieces, all of them mangled in one way or another. Their deaths go back decades, and while the final victim at the top of the pole was killed fresh with a single stab wound, all of the other deaths were made to look like accidents. "They're all murders," Will says, then goes back to his lecture hall to lecture on the evidence.
Only he doesn't. He believes that's what he's doing, but in processing the crime in his head he has once again lost time and hallucinated. He's talking to an empty room until Alana shows up to talk about their, um, Entanglement the other night. This is one of those delicate situations I was talking about, and Dancy and Dhavernas play it extremely well. After the other night, they're skittish around each other in ways they weren't before they kissed. Alana admits that she regretted leaving after their kiss, but she also makes it quite clear that she feels something on an emotional level for Will, who is, as we all know by now, "unstable."
That instability means she can't really be with him, and so she doesn't want to risk some kind of shallow roll in the sheets either. Is this arguably the most mature thing anyone has done on this show? Yes! But remember that Alana's caught in Hannibal's tractor beam now, too. This show is a delicate but dense weave made of many, many strands, and it's easy to forget that one is working its way through the pattern. What started as a very thin line between these two characters has now become a cord snaking through all of this, and it's worth spotlighting here not just for the acting craft, but for the developments to come.
When a visit from his would-be spouse falls apart, Will turns to his surrogate daughter instead, and pays a visit, with Hannibal in tow, to Abigail. She's back at the psychiatric hospital and still having horrible dreams from that time she, y'know, killed a dude (in self-defense, but still), they try to warn her off the book project yet again. This time, though, Hannibal has another reason to warn her to stay away from Freddie Lounds: The more people look into her life, the closer they'll be to finding out that, y'know, she killed a dude. And more importantly for Hannibal, they might find out that he played a role in getting rid of the body. Hannibal's entire lifestyle rests on Abigail's decision, which probably has nothing to do with the mysterious figure in the snow digging up the guy Abigail killed so someone can find it, right?
Back at the lab, Jack reveals that Nicholas Boyle (aka That Guy Abigail Killed) has turned up, frozen solid from the Minnesota cold but thawing out quick and ready for him to force Abigail to look. That's right, he's still on the theory that Abigail is a suspect, and to drive his point home he wants to put Abigail in front of the corpse to see how she reacts. Alana is, predictably, quite furious, and demands to go with Abigail. But there's nothing she can do to stop Jack from grilling the girl, and they're both a little taken aback when Abigail stiffens up and gives Jack a little sass. One person she can't sass, though? Hannibal, who does that dramatic looming thing he does while giving Abigail a little lecture about trust. The FBI can ruin her life, sure, but Hannibal just might ruin it and much, much worse.
Hannibal episodes are often not about the killer of the week, but rather about how the killer of the week presents a jumping off point for metaphor and character development, and that's never been clearer than in "Trou Normand." They barely have to work to catch Lawrence Wells (Lance Henriksen, who crushes his lone scene in the episode), because a DNA test of one of the victims pointed to him, and he figured out he'd be caught, so when Will and Jack find him he's sitting in the living room with the door ajar, all his belongings packed neatly into boxes. After killing in the shadows for years, making everything look like an accident, he came into the light because he's aging and he believes prison will be more comfortable than the cheap retirement homes he can afford. He's "securing his legacy" by putting his crimes out in the open, but he did everything in secret in the first place because he loved the thrill of knowing, even while standing at a victim's funeral, that no one had any idea that these people were even murdered.
Of course, he didn't quite have everything figured out. The bottom and the top of the pole were arranged that way because Wells' first victim was a man he killed while having an affair with that man's wife. The last victim, the only one he killed outright, was that man's son. Only he wasn't, because the DNA test revealed he was actually Wells' son.
"Your one act as a father was to destroy your son," Will says, before leaving Wells to arrest and, of course, the prison he thought he'd look forward to. This is a neat way to catch a killer, sure, and a wonderful metaphorical point about the messes we make as we buy into our own ego (Hannibal has quite an ego on him), but it's also a wonderful entry point into the episode's finale, which is all about fatherhood, even if it's surrogate fatherhood.
At the lab, studying Nicholas Boyle's body, Will does his little trip into the mind of the killer and realizes that Abigail killed Nicholas. His surrogate daughter is a murderer. His world is coming down around his ears, so rather than telling Jack that his theory was right the whole time, he goes to Hannibal, who calmly admits that he's not only aware, but he helped hide the body. Now, his back to the wall, he has to convince Will to trust him and keep Abigail's secret. But is his back to the wall?
There is perhaps no other actor alive who can play these little delicate, high-risk dances better than Mads Mikkelsen. Throughout this scene, he has to convince Will not only that he's caught off guard, but that he didn't entirely rig this up himself. If Abigail believes she'll be outed because the body's been found, then she won't write the book, or she'll at least write a heavily sanitized version. If she knows that Will knows, well, perhaps she'll be shamed into shutting up for the rest of her life.
And here, because he's eating out of Hannibal's hand and because Hannibal's been sowing distrust between Will and Jack literally all season, Will agrees to keep quiet. He wants his surrogate daughter to have a future, and after all, he's killed people for a good reason too.
Hannibal celebrates his latest feat of human puppeteering by, of course, throwing a little dinner party, inviting Freddie Lounds over to eat with Will and Abigail. Unfortunately for Hannibal, Freddie's a vegetarian, but he does make her a salad so pretty you could put it in the Louvre, because he is, above all else, polite. It's an otherwise tense dinner, and it doesn't really resolve anything, but it isn't meant to.
It's just meant to soften Abigail up so that, while doing the dishes later, she'll admit to Hannibal the one thing she's never admitted to anyone. Jack Crawford was right all along. Abigail Hobbs acted as bait for her father's victims, letting him kill them so he wouldn't kill her instead. She knew the entire time, and she was so terrified of her father that she did nothing, and now she feels like a monster. Hannibal, in perfectly choreographed Dad Mode, hugs her to him and says "I know what monsters are. You're a victim."
Again, this is Mikkelsen in MVP mode for the show, because even after we've seen all of his pieces fall into place on the board, even as the show makes it extremely clear that he's manipulating everyone at all times, Hannibal still seems to genuinely feel something for Abigail in this moment. If only, he seems to think, he'd had a parental figure like himself growing up, a guide for what he'd become. He can be that for Abigail. He can be her Favorite Dad, while Will not only plays second fiddle, but submits entirely to Daddy Hannibal's dominance. Yes, the sexual metaphor is both deliberate and apt here. We're playing house at the Lecter place, and the freezer is stacked with red meat. Hannibal's building his totem. The only question left is who will end up at the top.
Next Time: "Buffet Froid"
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