Hannibal Season 2, Episode 2
"Sakizuke"
Original airdate: March 7, 2014
Writers: Jeff Vlaming, Bryan Fuller
Director: Tim Hunter
Cast: Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen, Laurence Fishburne, Caroline Dhavernas, Gillian Anderson
"Sakizuke" opens immediately after the last episode ended, with a lone victim trying to make a brutal escape. This young man, chosen by a killer to be coated in resin and stitched into a mural of corpses, has somehow survived his fatal heroin overdose, and now, with no idea where he is or how he got there, he has to rip his own flesh free of his neighbors, run outside, and hope he can find someone to help him. What he finds instead is the killer, coming back to work on his masterpiece. And moments later he's chased to the edge of a cliff where he jumps to his death into a river.
Season 2 is not holding back when it comes to absolutely brutal cold opens, but it's more than that. As we'll soon see, this is an episode about what happens when the shoe is on the other foot. The dead become the living, the hunters become hunted, and the victims get a little agency back. In that spirit, what started with our lone victim on the run continues with Will Graham.
In a meeting with Alana and Hannibal back at the hospital where he's still locked up, Will, quivering with anxiety and fear, expresses deep confusion over his situation. Last week he was completely, utterly convinced that he knew exactly what was going on, and now he's less sure. "I am the unreliable narrator of my own story," he says, while his two psychiatrist friends offer him help, closure, understanding. They promise to help him learn what really happened, and Will breaks down in tears, only to turn them off again the moment he's alone back in his cell. He has come to know Hannibal better with all that time alone to think, and now he's ready to use Hannibal's own manipulative game against him.
Hannibal no doubt senses this, but he's got problems of his own. Bedelia swings by his office just to tell him that she's no longer comfortable being his therapist. We've seen her wrestling with this issue for some time, and though we don't have all the details, we know that she's aware Hannibal is, in some capacity at least, a killer. We also know she's terrified, and Gillian Anderson does a remarkable job of maintaining Bedelia's cool elegance while also making it clear that she's not entirely sure she'll leave Hannibal's house alive. She does, of course, even after she tells Hannibal that she's convinced he's "dangerous." She's right.
And it seems to truly get to Hannibal, at least for a while. Back at the FBI lab, the body of our escaped mural victim has washed up, and Hannibal's having a hard time focusing, getting in the way of Beverly (Hettienne Park) and Brian (Aaron Abrams) as they try to examine the body. Bedelia's clearly on his mind, but he's also in the way simply because he is fascinated by the work — not the investigators' work, but the killer's. The visual effects team does a remarkable job here, depicting the places where the victim's skin ripped away as elaborate spider-webbed cracks in the resin layer atop their flesh. It's gorgeous in that horrible way that so much of Hannibal is gorgeous.
Eager to move the case forward, Beverly mentions a theory about the killer and his victims that she cribbed from Will during their visit, and Hannibal immediately picks up on the line of thinking as something that Will would have offered. Unfortunately for Beverly, so does Jack, which leads to a tense conversation in his office. Fortunately for Beverly, that conversation ends with Jack telling her their chat never happened, and while he doesn't give her express permission to visit Will, he chooses his words in a way that allows her to go for it while maintaining plausible deniability.
This is one of the more remarkable moments of the season so far, not just because it reveals how desperate Jack is to catch this killer, but because everyone back at Quantico is still emotionally invested in Will as a person. It's not that they don't buy the evidence, it's that they believe, however reluctant they are to deal with it, that the real Will Graham is not the killer the evidence says he is. As Will steps up his game when it comes to reclaiming his freedom, this is vital. He's building support.
Meanwhile, Hannibal's putting his super nose to good use, smelling the cracks in the resin on the victim's body in search of some clue that'll lead him to the killer. He smells a cornfield, so vivid and vibrant that it springs up in his mind. His next stop? Will's place, of course. Now that he knows Will has heard about the mural case, he wants to pick his brain, see if their thinking lines up. He plays therapist first, warning Will that he shouldn't dwell on the morbid, while Will only responds "It's the only thing that feels normal." Hannibal leaves without much in the way of new information, but he doesn't need much. He's already on the trail.
No sooner has Hannibal left Will than Beverly shows up, armed with more case file information for Will to dwell on. He agrees to help, on one condition: He wants her to wipe her mind of everything she knows about his case, all the evidence, all the suppositions. He wants her to start completely over, not in a search for his innocence, but in a completely objective examination of all the facts. He wants to know what she sees when she's at a remove. It's the next gambit in his increasingly elaborate game. Beverly agrees, and Will offers several key pieces of information. He understands that the victim escaped rather than being discarded, and that the killer's den is somewhere isolated, near the river where the bodies have washed up. He also offers a warning: What Hannibal says about a killer and what he thinks about a killer are often very different things.
Meanwhile, Hannibal has already found the cornfield, and the silo, where the killer's built his masterpiece. He climbs to the top of the silo to view it from above, so when the killer returns to apply a fresh layer of resin, he's there to offer a simple greeting: "Hello. I love your work."
Some time later, the FBI finds the same silo, with a fresh body already sewn into the center, where the previous victim escaped. But something's weird about this victim. For one thing, he doesn't fit the color pattern of the design the killer was going for. For another, he's missing one leg below the knee. All of this leads us to one of the most delightfully macabre sequences in the whole of the show. As the crew in the lab discuss this, the show pieces it together for the audience. The person in the center of the mural is the killer, put there by Hannibal, who took his lower leg so he could, naturally, make a nice osso bucco at home.
One of Hannibal's greatest tricks as a series is daring us to find the food delicious-looking while also showing us exactly how it's made (a clever dig at the meat processing industry, among other things), and this osso bucco is one of the best examples of that. I don't care that I watched Hannibal saw a human foot off these "shanks" to make it. It looks delectable, and it adds to the feeling that Hannibal doesn't just want to be a great killer. He wants to be a killer among killers, a giant among them — and it's working.
Back at Quantico, Jack's dividing his time between two therapists. There's the therapist he's seeing to deal with his guilt over Will, which is considerable, and then there's Bedelia, who stops by to let him know that this will be their last conversation about Hannibal Lecter. "I simply can't offer any more insight," she tells him. It's a lie, but also it's not, because she knows if she does offer more insight, she'll probably end up dead.
But y'know who can offer more insight? Will Graham, who tells Beverly and Hannibal what Hannibal already knows: The last body in the mural is the killer, which means he had help to finish his masterpiece. Will goes into his mind, places himself in the mural, and sees Hannibal's influence, while we see Hannibal talking the killer into this manner of death, injecting him with heroin while he lays him in place.
"Your eye will now see God reflected back," Hannibal tells this killer, placing him in a position of glory even though he knows what's going to happen next, knows it's a victory for him. It's his masterpiece now. Will can't tell Beverly what he sees, of course, not yet, but he's working on a masterpiece too. For the first time in a long time, we can see Will's mind working for him and not against him. We can see him piecing together what he needs to get his freedom, so when the Inspector General investigator (Cynthia Nixon) comes to offer him a plea deal, he rejects.
"I guess I'll have to save my own life," he tells her, and retreats back into his fishing dream, with a twist. This time, while he stands in the water preparing his cast, corpses float by. Like Will said, it's the only thing that feels normal. Whether he's a prisoner or he's free, he's never truly free of the specter of death.
But this time the last word of the episode doesn't belong to Will, or Hannibal, or Jack. It belongs to Bedelia, who stops by Will's cell to offer him just three words of consolation: "I believe you." Some time later, Hannibal breaks into Bedelia's house, his intentions quite clear, only to find the place dark, the furniture draped, a perfume bottle resting on Bedelia's chair. She's gone, and as a parting gift she has left her scent, so Hannibal can trigger an instant sense memory of her — his therapist, his friend, his fixation — any time he wants. It's a gift, yes, but it's also a taunt. Hannibal is now hemmed in on two fronts. Will's on his trail and Bedelia's in the wind. He's never been tested like this before, but one thing we know for sure about Hannibal Lecter: He loves a challenge.
Next Time: "Hassun"
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