Hannibal Season 2, Episode 5
"Mukōzuke"
Original airdate: March 28, 2014
Writers: Ayanna A. Floyd, Steve Lightfoot, Bryan Fuller
Director: Michael Rymer
Cast: Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen, Laurence Fishburne, Caroline Dhavernas, Raul Esparza, Suzy Eddie Izzard
Death always surrounds the characters of Hannibal, sometimes as a fine mist and sometimes as an oppressive cloud. Right now that cloud is growing thicker, as Will presses his advantage and Hannibal plays a little defense to keep his secrets, and with "Mukōzuke," the casualties hit much closer to home.
The episode opens at Hannibal's home, where he's preparing a delicate, delicious-looking breakfast for Jack, who was of course up all night at Bella's hospital bedside. It's a chance to further nourish Hannibal's relationship with his closest ally in the FBI, but also a chance for him to explain his approach to Bella's suicide attempt. While we know he simply flipped a coin and moved forward with saving her life, he tells Jack that he saved her because, despite his belief that terminally ill people should get to die with dignity, he cared more in the moment about saving Jack from sudden, dramatic grief.
"As a doctor I had no choice," Hannibal says. "As a philosopher I had too many."
Jack is, of course, grateful, but what he doesn't know is that Hannibal took a life close to him shortly after saving another. Far away, at the same observatory where Abel Gideon hid out and where Jack found Miriam Lass's severed arm in Season 1, Freddie Lounds is checking out an anonymous tip. What she finds is what's left of Beverly Katz. She's been sliced vertically into several pieces and placed between giant panes of glass, like specimens between microscope slides. This is, for fans of the show's gore, an incredible display of the beautiful and the grotesque. The killer took great pains to perfect this presentation, and since we know that the killer is Hannibal, we can appreciate his work even as we are horrified. For the first time, one of the show's principal characters is dead, and it hits everyone like a truck.
Jack, overcome with grief now that he's lost a second agent in his unit, informs his staff, and then heads out to see Will. In a wordless, haunting sequence, Will learns what's happened, then gets strapped up in a straitjacket, tied down to a dolly, and finally outfitted with a bite mask. When the orderlies at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane finally roll him out, he's in full, classic Silence of the Lambs Hannibal gear. One of Hannibal's best tricks is its ability to show us classic iconography from Hannibal's previous stories in surprising new ways, and this is one of the most effective.
At the crime scene, Will briefly breaks down, almost unable to fathom having to picture himself as the killer who took Beverly's life. He's already lost Abigail Hobbs, his surrogate daughter, and now he's mourning a surrogate sister with her mutilated corpse right in front of him. The only thing that steels him is a vision of Beverly over his shoulder, urging him to go in, to interpret the evidence and chase her killer. So he does. He closes his eyes and sees himself, feels himself strangling Beverly, freezing her entire body, and then using a table saw to slice her.
"She cuts like stone," Will says, horrified that he has to go this far, that he's still willing to go this far to save more lives.
For the first time in a long time, Will and Jack, who undoes Will's restraints and lets him walk the scene, are united in purpose. They both want to stop this killer, no matter the cost, if it means saving everyone else close to them. That means that Jack is much more inclined to believe Will's theory that the copycat killer and the Chesapeake Ripper are one and the same, but when Jack asks who the killer is, Will holds back. He's not going to lecture his old mentor about Hannibal Lecter again. He needs Jack to chase the evidence and make the connection himself, just like Beverly did in her final hours.
So while Jack heads back to the lab with Beverly's remains, Will chats with Dr. Chilton (Raul Esparza is just enjoying every millisecond of this character) about trying to pinpoint the real killer's whereabouts. Abel Gideon (Suzy Eddie Izzard), who's been missing from the narrative since Will shot him outside Alana's house last season, might be the only one left who knows the Ripper's true identity, so despite his reservations, Chilton gets Gideon back to Baltimore. Alone together, Will and Gideon talk, and while he doesn't say the Ripper's name, Will reveals that he's recovered memories of the night when they were both in Hannibal's dining room. They both have the same information, but Gideon goes further. "He is the Devil," he tells Will about the Chesapeake Ripper. "He is smoke." And he offers one final bit of guidance: If Will wants to catch the Ripper, he'll have to kill him. There is no taking this man alive.
Meanwhile, Gideon's doing a little maneuvering of his own. Hannibal goes in person to meet with him, and because the two know that Chilton bugs every room, they have to pretend like they've just met for the first time. It's a tense, beautifully orchestrated standoff in which both doctors shit-talk Chilton, who's listening from his office. The Trinity of Evil Doctors are, finally, sharing the same scene, and it's wonderful.
But Will's already on the move to the next phase of his plan. Chilton's bugged most of the hospital, but he hasn't bugged the privacy room, so that's where Will chooses to meet with Freddie Lounds. He wants to find the killer who took out the bailiff and the judge in the courtroom episode, the "admirer" who wrote him a "poem" in blood, and he wants to use Freddie's website to do that. In exchange, he grants her the exclusive rights to his story, and they get to work. Freddie's exclusive new interview with Will hits TattleCrime, and while Hannibal's certainly reading it, he's not actually the killer Will is seeking.
That honor goes to Matthew Brown (Jonathan Tucker), an orderly at the Baltimore State Hospital who's been attending Will. He read the interview too, then disabled Chilton's recording system so he and Will could have a private chat. Matthew sees them as mutual merchants of death, trading shop talk and admiring each other's work. Will sees Matthew as a bullet he can fire out at his target, and because he knows Hannibal killed Beverly, he talks to the orderly/killer into killing Lecter. Matthew is immediately on board, though he admits one key piece of information: He didn't kill the judge, only the bailiff. And while Chilton doesn't hear this information, Gideon, who's on the same cell block, definitely does.
Cue a visit from Alana, who confronts Will about talking to Freddie, then notices that Gideon is also back in the building. Because she knows he has a Thing for her, she goes to see Gideon to ask him why he was outside her house, ready to kill. Gideon, fascinated by everything unfolding now that he's back in town, tells her that he was manipulated in order to be outside her house at that precise time, either because someone wanted her dead or someone wanted Will to shoot him. He observes that Will is changing, that his quest for justice and truth has now pivoted to a quest for revenge. Alana gets what's implied here, calls Jack, and rushes to Hannibal's home.
While they search for Hannibal and Will agonizes in his cell – to the point that he literally envisions antlers sprouting from his back – Hannibal is at his health club, doing laps in the pool. What he doesn't know is that Matthew Brown is also there, ready to pop him with a dart gun and stage an elaborate death scene.
In a beautifully simple setpiece, Brown sets up Hannibal in the sauna near the pool, a room of gray stone with an elegant stepped layout. With Lecter unconscious, he suspends him from a noose, ties his arms to a bar, and cuts deep gashes into his forearms. Hannibal can slowly bleed out, or he can try to literally kick the bucket from beneath him and end things quickly. Hannibal's of course not interested in doing that, and even in a semi-dazed state, he's able to have a certain rapport with Matthew, who gloats that by killing Hannibal, the Chesapeake Ripper, he'll have become the Chesapeake Ripper. Hannibal's response? "Only if you eat me."
But of course, we never get to see that come to fruition. A quick trace of Hannibal's cell phone reveals his location. Jack and Alana get there just in time, Jack shoots Matthew and saves his friend, and back in his cell, Will has blood on his hands for no reason. He began the episode in a position to push his plan out to every ally in his vicinity, and he ends it as a would-be murderer by proxy. The walls were opening up for Will, and now they'll start to push in again, as Hannibal garners sympathy and, perhaps, still more cover. The game's getting interesting, and it's nowhere near over.
Next Time: "Futamono"
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