Hannibal Season 1, Episode 10
"Buffet Froid"
Original airdate: May 30, 2013
Writer: Andy Black, Chris Brancato, Bryan Fuller
Director: John Dahl
Cast: Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen, Laurence Fishburne, Hettienne Park, Ellen Muth
Will Graham is losing it.
If you've been following along over the last nine episodes, this is probably not news to you, but "Buffet Froid" opens up this realization in ways that we've never seen before. Something beyond his usual darkness is troubling Will, backing him into a corner from which he may never be able to escape alone, and to make matters worse, the people he trusts are pulling him in different directions. Sometimes those directions lead to hope, and sometimes they lead to…something else entirely.
"Buffet Froid" is, in culinary terms, a cold buffet, and cold is a particular preoccupation of this episode. There's snow, but there's also an unwavering sense that death is stalking every member of the regular Hannibal crew, and Will in particular. And it all begins with a murder in Delaware.
In the show's opening scene, arguably the most outwardly horrific sequence in terms of pure creep factor that we've seen so far, a woman named Beth LeBeau (Hillary Jardine) drowns in her own blood after an intruder comes in and carves her face up with a "Glasgow smile" (think The Joker in The Dark Knight, but way deeper and wider). While that's going on, Will is back in Hannibal's office, sharing the ever-thickening darkness around him. Will explains it this way: "I can feel my nerves clicking like roller coaster cogs pulling up to the inevitable long plunge."
Why does he feel this way? Well, partly because he just found out that his surrogate daughter murdered someone and Hannibal helped dispose of the body, but partly because he's still losing time, hallucinating, and slipping away from objective reality. Hannibal, still pleading his case that Will's issues are a mental health problem and not something more physiological, offers a simple "awareness" exercise. He asks Will to draw a clock, noting the present time, and state his name and where he is. It's meant to be an exercise in being present, but it's also meant to test Will's spatial awareness. The clock that comes back to Hannibal's hand is mangled and barely recognizable. Will's perceptions are so skewed that he doesn't even notice.
And believe it or not, it gets worse. At the LeBeau crime scene, Will hallucinates again and, instead of simply imagining killing the victim, he gets down on his hands and knees and actually touches her, contaminating the crime scene. Once again Will Graham has blood on his hands, and because the thing he seems to fear most in the entire world is becoming one of the killers he studies, that's terrifying, but not just for him. Jack Crawford, furious that Will has contaminated a crime scene for the first time in his career, sees something very wrong with his best profiler.
But remember, Jack has been supremely cold and manipulative with Will in the past, and so he'd rather confide in Hannibal. No matter how much Hannibal pushes the mental health diagnosis, though, Will protests. "I know what kind of crazy I am and this isn't that kind of crazy," he says, and makes it clear he'd like to see a medical doctor. Hannibal refers him to a neurologist who just happens to be his old friend from Johns Hopkins, and while they discover serious encephalitic inflammation in Will's brain, they agree not to tell their patient. Will, Hannibal insists, is the perfect research case for them, and his colleague Dr. Sutcliffe (John Benjamin Hickey) agrees. For weeks now, we've seen traces of Hannibal manipulating Will, sometimes in a way that feels sincere, and sometimes in a way that feels entirely self-interested. This is the most brazen form of the latter that we've seen yet, and it leaves us with questions. Hannibal isn't really interested in a neurological study, so what does he want, and what will it do to Will Graham?
Will is shaken by the idea that there's nothing wrong with his brain, but it doesn't stop him from trying to do his job. Desperate to make things right, he goes to the crime scene in Delaware on a secret solo mission to pick apart what he missed the first time around. What he finds instead is a ghostly looking woman hiding under the bed. There is a literal monster under the bed, and when you are as freaked out as Will Graham is already, that does something to you. And to make it all worse, the woman tries to run away, and Will reaches out to take her hand and instead comes back with a wad of dead skin. An impromptu glove of human flesh just dangling from his fingers. It is ghastly in a way nothing else on this show so far has been, but Will has the presence of mind to call out to this filthy, pale woman two important words: "You're alive!"
This woman, it turns out, is Gloria Madchen (Ellen Muth, in a wonderful little wink to Bryan Fuller's Dead Like Me), an old friend of the victim who is suffering from Cotard's syndrome, which means she's faceblind and, crucially, she suffers from the crippling delusion that she is actually dead. Will's theories start to come together. He realized earlier that the Glasgow smile may have been an attempt by the killer to peel off the face like a mask, perhaps because the killer thought the victim actually was wearing a mask, an imposter of someone she'd once known.
But Will can't tell anyone that just yet, because he wasn't supposed to be at the crime scene alone in the first place. In an unexpected move which shows he's finally starting to side-eye Lecter just a little bit, his first call isn't to Hannibal or Jack, but to Beverly Katz (Hettienne Park). She's always been the member of the FBI team who's shown him the most warmth and sympathy, and so he chooses to confide in her. Unsurprisingly, she's got his back. It's a welcome insight into who Beverly is, and how she's set apart from Jack Crawford, and it's something that will be more important later.
Beverly's care for Will turns out to be a portal to the episode's true theme, which is the mistreatment of the mentally ill in this country. When Will and Jack seek out Gloria's mother, she goes so far as to say she would have been relieved if she'd learned her long-suffering daughter was dead. Gloria's been on the run for some time, hasn't had proper hygiene or nourishment, and is clearly caught in the delusion that she is literally a walking corpse. When Will presses Mrs. Madchen on the care her daughter received, she laments that mental health treatment is often more about "guessing" than she'd like, and offers the sad reality that much of it is about "managing expectations" when a true cure isn't really there. This is, it turns out, exactly what Jack needed to hear.
In one of the most satisfying emotional moments in the entire show, Jack corners Will and explains himself. He lost Miriam Lass, and he doesn't want to lose Will too. He feels Will pushing away, and he wants to let him know that he'll always be there for him, and that he'll help in whatever way he can. "I'm not sand. I am bedrock," Jack says. "When you doubt yourself, you don't have to doubt me too."
In a season packed with moments that sees Jack as Will's grouchy surrogate stepdad, we finally have a moment when Jack feels like Will's father. For Will, it's a lifeline, as someone more powerful than he is, more stable, more capable of leading, is finally stepping up in his life.
Meanwhile, Hannibal is having Dr. Sutcliffe over for dinner (not as the meal, to be clear) so they can discuss Will's potential as a research subject. While they discuss Will, Dr. Sutcliffe dares to talk about Will like he's a lab rat and not a person, and you can see Hannibal's face darken. Rudeness above all else rankles him, and no matter how gamely he participates in the rest of the evening, you can just feel that Sutcliffe's days are numbered.
Back at his office, Sutcliffe sets Will up for an MRI, but when Will wakes up, no one's in the room to monitor him. This is a brilliant sequence, because it's been drilled into us by this point that Will frequently hallucinates, and an empty MRI room is exactly the kind of thing that feels like a dream world already. He gets dressed, heads out into the hall, and finds blood on a doorknob. On the other side of the door is Sutcliffe slumped in his chair, his face cut into a Glasgow smile so deep that his head has a hinge in the back. For a heartbeat, we are still convinced this isn't real, giving us a welcome trip inside Will's ever-present, terrifying state of mind.
Unfortunately, it's very real, and when the techs find Georgia Madchen's DNA on the murder weapon, they wonder how it's all connected to Will. His only theory is that, because Georgia's faceblind, she may have just killed the first male form she saw and thought it was Will. That night, asleep in his bed, Will wakes up and realizes…something is under his bed. We know where this is heading, but once again we're back in Will's agitated state. Is this real? Is he dreaming? We've seen him get up from this bed completely unconsciously multiple times now. But no, not this time. Will is clearheaded, sane, and aware enough to look under the bed and find Georgia Madchen.
And this is where "Buffet Froid" becomes one of the most beautiful episodes of Hannibal we ever got, because instead of shrinking away, or calling Jack, or reaching for his weapon, Will Graham leans in. He pauses, deeply aware not just of Georgia's fragile state, but of his own. That "pure empathy" that so drives Will's ability to get into the heads of killers means he can also reach out to someone who's struggling just like he is. If anything, it only strengthens his empathy, and so he puts out his hand.
"I see you, Georgia," he says. "Think of who you are."
Will Graham will not quit his job, an obviously draining pursuit that's affected his mental and physical health and even denied him a romantic relationship, because he believes he can save people. For all the dark things he imagines doing, he believes he can counter them with calculable, real-life harm reduction in the world. He's losing it, and he's terrified that he'll lose it forever, but for this one moment, when Georgia takes his hand and steps back into reality, Will Graham is back. He can still fight. He can still save someone.
But Will has a new opponent in his desperate push to get better no matter what, he just doesn't know it yet. Hannibal is pushing him, and while Georgia Madchen recovers in an antibacterial chamber at the hospital, we see yet another way he's pushed. Georgia didn't kill Dr. Sutcliffe. Hannibal killed him and, when Georgia arrived, handed her the murder weapon to contaminate it. He did all of this in plain view, but because Georgia is face blind, she doesn't recognize any of his features.
Mental health and empathy may have been the driving force of the episode, as Will's own looming feeling of death clashed with a woman who believed she was already dead, but it wasn't the only major concern. Masks also have a big role to play in "Buffet Froid," and ending the episode with a shot of Hannibal masked not by cloth or vinyl but by the illness of the person standing across from him is an amazing closing note. Hannibal is the king of masks, not because he wears them literally, but because his face blinds others. It's the ultimate mask, but the thing about masks is that sooner or later you have to take them off.
Next Time: "Roti"
If you haven't already, consider supporting worker-owned media by subscribing to Pop Heist. We are ad-free and operating outside the algorithm, so all dollars go directly to paying the staff members and writers who make articles like this one possible.
