Hannibal Season 1, Episode 12
"Relevés"
Original airdate: June 13, 2013
Writers: Chris Brancato and Bryan Fuller
Director: Michael Rymer
Cast: Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen, Laurence Fishburne, Kacey Rohl, Lara Jean Chorostecki
We may have started watching this show for a version of the title character that already existed in our heads, but Mads Mikkelsen's Hannibal Lecter is a different beast entirely. It's not just that we get to see him do and say things that never appeared in previous versions of his story, it's that he is performing the most genuinely emotional dance we've ever seen a character like him perform, and it all comes to a head in this week's episode.
For 11 hours of TV, we've watched Hannibal move pieces into place, treating his enemies, his colleagues, even his friends like pawns on a giant chess board. What's been somewhat less clear through all of that is exactly what his endgame might be, and that's not just because the show is keeping us in the dark. It's because, thanks to his deep admiration and even love for Will Graham, we know that even Hannibal himself isn't sure what he will do next. It's all about opportunities, and seizing them when they emerge.
This time, Hannibal's opportunism begins in the hyperbaric chamber which houses the recovering Georgia Madchen (Ellen Muth), the woman who believed she was a walking corpse until Will reached out and got her to seek help. She's recovering well physically, but in Will's visits to her hospital room while he recovers from his own delusion-inducing fever, we see that her mental health isn't there. She warns Will that, no matter what's wrong with him, the medical community will keep prodding him, never quite giving him the answers he really needs. She might not be curable, but that doesn't mean she's slipped completely back into her illness. She seems genuinely close to some kind of peace, at least until Hannibal slips a plastic comb into the chamber's pure oxygen environment. A quick static spark as she runs that combo through her hair, and that's all for Georgia Madchen.
In one of the most beautifully choreographed pieces of visual gallows humor the show's ever given us, the death happens just moments after Hannibal arrives in Will's hotel room with chicken soup made from black-skinned and boned Silkie chicken. Over their meal, which is just adorable (he made his work wife chicken soup!), Will starts talking out Georgia's state of mind, and he's particularly intent to stew on one little observation she offered: She "dreamed" she saw Will kill Dr. Sutcliffe last week, though her faceblindness meant she couldn't see his face. She actually saw Hannibal, and for the moment, only Hannibal knows that. Just in case, though, it was time to set her on fire, because you can never be too careful.
Which is good for Hannibal, because Will is firmly on his tail now, even if he doesn't yet realize it. While Jack is certain Georgia's death was a suicide, Will claims it was murder, and finds evidence when a fragment of the comb is recovered from the scene. In studying the bodies of both Georgia and Sutcliffe, he sees the faintest methodological link between these killings and the copycat killings of the Minnesota Shrike, aka Garret Jacob Hobbs. Some of his old instincts are creeping back in after his brain nearly boiled right out of his head!
Meanwhile, Abigail Hobbs and Freddie Lounds are at it again, working on their book project, which Freddie confides that she wanted to call The Last Victim. Unfortunately there was already a book with that title, so they can't use it, but the phrase jumps out to Abigail. She realizes that she's actually not her father's last victim, because the copycat killings would not have happened without her father's influence as a killer. We already know the immense psychological burden Abigail carries over her role in these murders, and it only gets worse when Freddie Lounds explains that the person she thought was the killer, Nicholas Boyle, was actually "an innocent man." And since Abigail murdered Nicholas Boyle and ditched his body with Hannibal's help, that puts her in a very precarious emotional position. There are a lot of those going around on Hannibal right now.
After dreaming of Georgia in a way that thematically links her death with the Minnesota Shrike's crimes in his head, Will heads into the lab and makes a startling connection. These two bodies, and the two girls killed by the Shrike copycat, are the work of the same person. They're all killings designed to call to mind the original killer they're copying, but not exactly, not down to the last detail. They're echoes more than copies, and when Will realizes this, he's energized in a way we haven't seen in weeks.
Given that, y'know, Will just goes away for extended periods of time and doesn't remember it the next day, Jack is concerned, and not just that Will isn't telling him everything. He starts to suspect that Will, now manic with ideas over the copycat killer, is not as healthy as he seems, and if that's true, then Hannibal hasn't told him everything. Instead of going to Hannibal, though, he goes to Hannibal's own therapist, the hypnotic Bedelia Du Maurier (Gillian Anderson). Oh — and he also tells the lab crew to dig into every trip Garret Jacob Hobbs ever took, every hotel he ever stayed at, to try and track every move of his hunts as the Shrike.
At Bedelia's house, Jack tries to press her for information on Hannibal's relationship with Will. He even twists the knife by revealing he knows about the time a patient attacked her, then adding on the connection to Lecter's own fight for his life in his office. Bedelia, chilly as the wine she's sipping, tells him just enough to get him to go away, and reveals that Hannibal seems to think of Will more like a friend than a patient.
Meanwhile, Will pays Abigail a visit, and starts to lay out his understanding of the copycat killer case, while Abigail herself ponders the nature of killing, now that she knows it's something she can share with Will. They're both willing to admit to each other that they felt powerful, even if the deaths were ugly and frightening. It's the first real father-daughter moment they've had together in quite some time, but it's short-lived. As Will promises to catch the copycat killer, Abigail ponders if that killer could be Hannibal. After all, he was the man on the phone the day her dad died, and Will always theorized the man on the phone was the copycat.
When Hannibal shows up for his next appointment with Bedelia (bearing an astonishing charcuterie spread), she spills on Jack, while also dropping an interesting tidbit: Hannibal was, in some form, a participant in the attack that almost got Bedelia killed. She claims to everyone else that the patient who attacked her swallowed his own tongue, but apparently she and Hannibal both know better. She has dirt on him in the same way that Abigail Hobbs does, and she warns Hannibal to back away from Will.
And this is where Hannibal makes another admission, a key one to understanding the direction he hopes to push things next. He pushes back against Bedelia's warnings, and says his goal is simple: "I'm trying to help him understand." All this time, the narrative has been focused on Hannibal's admiration of Will's empathy, and the sense that he was seeking to partner with someone who could actually understand what it's like in his head. But it's more than that. Hannibal doesn't just want Will to understand him. He wants Will to understand what Hannibal has come to view as Will's true self, a killer in waiting, a partner in crime. He wants to set Will free in the worst possible way.
And the episode's therapist appointment count goes up yet again when Will drops by Hannibal's to tell him that, basically, he feels great. And he looks it. He's energized, he's not covered in flop sweat, and more importantly, he's working in a way that he thinks will genuinely grant a resolution. The copycat means, for Will and Abigail, that they can never truly move on from the specter of Garret Jacob Hobbs. Unless they catch him, and Will's finally starting to see how.
Hannibal knows he's good at what he does, but he also knows that Will at full power might be too brilliant for even him to handle. Between this conversation and the one he had with Bedelia, he's starting to feel a little off-balance. He pushes Will to calm down, even throwing out the word "paranoid," but Will's too driven now. He can finally work again. He can maybe, finally, find peace and put Hobbs in the grave for good.
Back at the lab, there's a breakthrough. Hobbs did, in fact, travel regularly with another person, buying two train tickets and even separate hotel rooms for his companion. When that information links up with all of the colleges Abigail and Garret visited together, which were also colleges from which Shrike victims disappeared, they've got what they need. Jack always suspected Abigail was involved, and now he's got evidence. He's even starting to think she's still an active killer because "she's got a taste for it now."
But Abigail is nowhere to be found. Will's already signed her out of the mental hospital, and they're on a plane to Minnesota, where Will believes he can reconnect with the whole case at the root. Jack, absolutely furious at this point, confronts Hannibal about Will's behavior, and Hannibal reluctantly discloses that there were other symptoms of Will's illness that he never told Jack. It seems, at first, like another small defeat for Hannibal, the latest in a series of blows backing him into a corner. Then Hannibal, face strained with concern, plays a recording from one of his sessions with Will, the one in which Will says that he "felt like I killed" one of the copycat's victims. It's the exact right nudge at the exact right moment, and Jack immediately thinks Will is about to kill Abigail, to do what Hobbs never could.
It's another remarkable performance from Mads Mikkelsen, who's had to spend most of this episode playing a man who is both genuinely concerned for his own wellbeing and also straining his face to express false concern for others. Hannibal is, at least in his face, a more animated form of himself here, and we get to see a glimpse at what kind of person he might be when he's truly cornered.
In Minnesota, Will and Abigail arrive in the antler room at the Hobbs hunting cabin, and they have a discussion about hunting and fishing. As Will talks about lures and stalkers and killers, he seems to admit that he knows something about Abigail, and perhaps inadvertently tricks her into admitting "I was the lure." She's confused, just for a moment, because she thinks that Hannibal already told Will everything, but this is entirely new to Will, and it breaks him. His facade of improved health instantly deteriorates, he hallucinates throwing Abigail into a set of antlers, and of course she freaks out. As Will says "Jack Crawford was right about you," heartbroken and terrified all at once, his mind starts to come apart again. He dissociates, he freaks out, and then…he wakes up on a plane. In Washington D.C. He hurries off the plane, but Abigail is still in Minnesota, and she's not alone.
Hannibal meets his surrogate daughter to which he's now a single parent – that bond was severed when Will learned the truth – at the Hobbs family home. She left Will at the cabin and came home, terrified because now Will knows the truth about her, and Hannibal reveals that Jack knows as well. She's a suspect in at least two murders, and she won't be arrested alone. Hannibal believes that there is enough evidence to arrest Will, too, or at least that's what he's willing to tell her. Slowly, in a truly heartbreaking performance from Kacey Rohl, she puts everything he's saying together.
The feds know that she helped her father, and that she murdered at least one person.
Will knows that she got Hannibal's help to hide a body.
If she goes down, Hannibal will also go down, one way or another.
Hannibal will not let that happen.
As she draws this conclusion, Abigail also gets Hannibal to tell her the truth. He called to warn her father the feds were coming because he "was curious what would happen." He has killed "many" more people than her father, including one of her best friends. He is not her protector. He is the greatest monster she has ever known, and she realizes her days are numbered. It's here that we cut to black, capping off a stellar episode by leaving all the key reveals on the table. We know exactly what information each major player has, and exactly what the stakes are. Next week, the season finale arrives.
Next Time: "Savoureaux"
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