Hannibal Season 1, Episode 13
"Savoureux"
Original airdate: June 20, 2013
Writers: Steve Lightfoot, Bryan Fuller, Scott Nimerfro
Director: David Slade
Cast: Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen, Laurence Fishburne, Caroline Dhavernas, Gillian Anderson
"Savoureux" means, broadly speaking, "tasty." It is an expression of the enjoyment that comes after you spend hours painstakingly preparing a meal, relishing each detail, each course, each garnish on an elegantly presented plate. For 12 episodes, Hannibal has been preparing a meal. Now, it's time for the title character to savor it.
The Season 1 finale wastes no time in getting to the good stuff, as we open on Will in the forest, stalking a stag with a hunting rifle, just like Garrett Jacob Hobbs would have when he was alive. But of course, Will's a fisherman, not a hunter, our first clue that we're in some kind of vision or dream world. Will is stalking a stag, and even gets off a shot that wings the animal, but as he gets closer we realize it's not just a stag, but the Stag, the avatar of his nightmares following him ever since he shot Hobbs dead in the series premiere.
This time, though, it's not simply a stag. It has a human face, a familiar face.
Will wakes up in bed with mud on his feet, a too-common occurrence for him lately, and rushes to the sink to guzzle water from the tap. But something's not right. This is more than a nightmare. As he drinks, he starts to gag, and within moments, he regurgitates a complete human ear into the sink. So, who does someone like Will Graham call when he thinks he's eaten a person and then barfed up their ear? Hannibal Lecter, of course.
But after all their dances with death, all their confiding in one another, all of the trust Will's placed in his friend and doctor, Hannibal finally seems to break when Will tells him that he doesn't remember what happened to Abigail. We know, of course, that she left Will in Minnesota, where Hannibal found her. We know that whatever's up with that ear, Abigail's ear, is Hannibal's doing. But Will, so lost in a sickness he doesn't understand that he can't trust himself anymore, has no idea about any of that, and Hannibal's not helping him. For the first time, Hannibal recommends calling Jack. Within minutes, Will's led away for processing as a murder suspect.
Right away, heartbreak sets in. Beverly, who thought she'd found a friend in Will, is devastated as she scrapes dried blood from beneath his fingernails. Jack is furious with Will, with himself, with every part of the process, but he's nowhere near as furious as Alana, who blames Jack for letting Will do the very thing he promised he'd never allow: Get too close to the killers. The way she sees it, this is not Will's doing. This is a product of collective neglect, the terrifying consequence of everyone looking the other way while Will spiraled, defending their actions by declaring how many lives they were saving by letting Will catch killer after killer. Now, everyone has blood on their hands, and Will and Abigail are, in Alana's eyes, sacrificial lambs, innocents twisted by fate into a violent end.
In the episode's most heartbreaking moment, it falls to Alana to visit Will in custody and administer some basic psychological tests. She admits she spent some time screaming in her car before coming inside, which prompts Will to respond "I could use a good scream." But he can't scream, because he fears he'd never stop, like it would break the dam of madness once and for all. It's here that the deepest emotional trauma of the episode falls into place, not just because Alana is the last of the crew to really confront the evidence against Will, but because both of these people clearly see what they could have been if Will had been able to get help. This could have been snuggling together on cold winter nights with half a dozen dogs, and instead it's this, a suspected murderer and a doctor who loves him tearing herself apart for not acting sooner. It's remarkable, and both Dancy and Dhavernas play it beautifully, but it also offers up a key piece of the puzzle to Alana. When the tests began, Will asks if he'll have to draw a clock again, since Hannibal made him do that so many times. It piques Alana's interest, and she asks him to draw a clock.
Meanwhile, Hannibal is shedding tears of his own in Bedelia's office, weeping not just for Abigail but for his failure to help Will. This is perhaps the apex of Mikkelsen's ability to establish this character as a guy who can play multiple emotions at once. This might be an amped-up performance, a show of emotion to prove his humanity to Bedelia, but at the same time Hannibal genuinely is sad about what's happened. He saw a life forming for himself, a life where he could have a partner and even a daughter, and they could all find their way through the world together. He saw a chance to be less alone, and for the sake of self-preservation he had to drop that opportunity and forge ahead by himself. It's some of Mikkelsen's best work of the season.
And Hannibal's contingency planning just keeps paying off as the crime scene crew goes through Will's belongings. After Beverly spots what looks like human hair in one Will's fly-fishing lures (remember, Hannibal was playing around with those when dogsitting for Will earlier in the season), they take all of the lures apart and find, surprise, tissue of some kind from every one of the copycat killer's victims. From Cassie Boyle, the girl impaled on antlers in a field, to the poor woman who burned alive in the oxygen chamber. They're all here, looped into Will's fishing gear like trophies. Jack can't fathom the idea that the guy who worked so closely with was operating as a trophy-taking serial killer all this time, and while Alana insists it's all some kind of psychic episode and not something Will is doing intentionally, the evidence does not lie.
Back in the interrogation room, where the Stag stalks Will just outside the glass, Jack confronts Will with the evidence. Will, of course, has no idea what he's talking about, but Jack pushes ahead with the evidence-backed theory that Will killed all of these people, even if he was never conscious of it. He personally reads his friend and colleague his rights. The nightmare, the one Alana feared, the one Jack pushed away, the one Freddie Lounds wrote, is coming true. Will Graham could catch these killers because he's one of them, or at least that's what everyone will believe.
But Will does not go quietly. He warns Jack about "Whoever's doing this to me," lays out a clear profile of the person who might be framing him for these crimes as he grows more clear-headed, more like the old Will. Jack, of course, doesn't believe him, but it doesn't matter. When the FBI tries to transport Will to another facility, he breaks his own thumb to slip his cuffs, fights off the guards, and disappears.
Looking for answers as to what Will does and doesn't remember, Alana and Jack head over to Hannibal's place to ask him about Will's past clock test results. Hannibal, of course, has anticipated this, and shows them a perfect clock that "Will" drew just recently. His theory, his lie, is that Will's new symptoms must have only recently manifested, so when Alana suggests encephalitis, he agrees. It's a convenient escape hatch for him, even as Jack is still trying to figure out Will's state of mind across the entire crime spree.
When Hannibal is finally alone again, he looks up and sees someone lurking on his library balcony, but this time it's not Abigail. It's Will, still half in prison clothes, crouched and wounded yet, in his words, "self-aware." Unfazed, Hannibal invites him down, and they decide to have a discussion about who Will "really" is by going through the copycat crime scenes. For the first time, Will enters into his dreamy profiler brain with a companion, and with Hannibal along for the ride, everything is distorted. The bodies, the crimes, they're all blackened, dusted with ash, darkened by the very presence of Hannibal, and at last Will starts to realize something. He has a request: He wants to see where Abigail died, in Minnesota. A quick visit to Bedelia's later, and Jack and Alana are on the same trail.
Back at the Hobbs house, where this all began, Hannibal shows Will a puddle of blood on the kitchen floor, in the same spot where Abigail almost died at the beginning of the series. It's fresh blood, still red, and there's evidence of arterial spray. Someone's throat was cut here, but there's no body to go with it. It's Abigail's blood, but the killer, in his desire to "honor every part of her," has left no other evidence (except, you know, that ear).
The tension in this moment is absolutely delicious, because we can see Will coming around. We can feel how close he is to understanding, and how close Hannibal is to getting him to understand. Hannibal makes overtures, tries to push Will toward becoming some other version of himself, a version that could be Hannibal's partner in life as well as in crime.
"You are alone because you are unique," Hannibal says.
"I'm as alone as you are," Will replies.
It's a seduction. It's all part of some greater plan, a greater plan we've seen building up for weeks, but Will resists it. In a moment when he could dare all and run off into the wider world with Hannibal in exchange for a little more freedom, he instead turns his gun on his friend, because he finally gets it. This was all, from the phone call to Hobbs to the ear in Will's throat, Hannibal's doing.
"You have no traceable motive, which is why you were so hard to see," Will says. "You were just curious what I would do."
Hannibal stands stock still, daring Will to shoot him, to become a killer. Even after all of this, he still just wants to see what will happen, and what happens, in the end, is Jack Crawford. He slips into the house and puts a bullet in Will, who falls right where Hobbs did. In one final touch to this grotesque mirror image, Will, panting and bleeding on the floor, asks Jack: "See?" Will sees Hannibal in stag form, a towering avatar of Death incarnate, but Jack just sees a mess, and Will is arrested all over again.
His infection healed by a stint in the hospital, Will heads off to prison, while Jack and Hannibal share their regrets over not being able to see Will's issues sooner. The narrative belongs to Hannibal now, perhaps more than it ever belonged to Will, and in the season's final moments, we see him having dinner with Bedelia, pondering his "farewell" to Will. It's here that the show gives us one final nugget to chew over, to savor, before Season 2.
"You have to be careful, Hannibal," Bedelia says. "They're starting to see your pattern."
They don't address his murders directly, but this, taken with the hints that Hannibal knows exactly what happened to the patient that almost killed Bedelia, is enough to suggest that she knows at least some part of what her only patient is. Perhaps she's his steward, making sure he doesn't go too far, keeping him fed. Then again, maybe she's just keeping him close to preserve herself.
The season ends in a moment that plays wonderfully with the imagery of our first encounter with Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. Hannibal, with an opera playing in his head to calm himself, walks into the jail like an art dealer preparing to view a new collection. He turns to Will's cell, greets him, and smiles. He is viewing his masterpiece, the greatest dish he has ever or perhaps will ever prepare. Here, in the season's final seconds, the meal is complete. All that's left is to savor it.
Join us February 3 for the first recap of Hannibal Season 2!
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