Hannibal Season 2, Episode 7
"Yakimono"
Original airdate: April 11, 2014
Writers: Steve Lightfoot, Bryan Fuller
Director: Michael Rymer
Cast: Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen, Laurence Fishburne, Caroline Dhavernas, Raul Esparza, Anna Chlumsky
Miriam Lass is alive.
It was not our imaginations, or Jack Crawford's fantasy, or some kind of bait and switch at the end of the last episode. Miriam, abducted by the Chesapeake Ripper years earlier to Jack's great regret and guilt, is truly alive, which forces one question to the front of everyone's mind: Why?
Why would Will Graham's intelligent psychopath, whom the FBI's been hunting for years, who never makes mistakes and actively cultivates an environment of terror and brutality, who already murdered one of Jack Crawford's agents in the coldest way possible, leave someone alive? Nothing about this is an oversight, not even the tree bark clues which led Jack to Miriam's hiding place? This was all part of the plan, so what's going on here?
"Yakimono" is the episode here to answer not just that question, but many questions. And yet the real Chesapeake Ripper clings to shadows, the Devil incarnate playing puppet master on the grandest scale yet.
It starts with a frustrating realization for Jack as he interviews a traumatized Miriam (Anna Chlumsky). Though she spent a very long time in the Ripper's captivity, and even heard him explain to her that he was going to cut off her arm, she does not know his face. He was careful to hide that, which means it comes down to the Ripper's voice. Jack, who now shares Will's suspicions about Hannibal, puts Dr. Lecter in a room with Alana, with Miriam on the other side of privacy glass, so she can hear him, but she's convinced it's not the right guy. It's yet another hole in the evidence pointing to Hannibal, but Miriam does at least have a theory as to why she was kept alive for so long: "He was saving me for last."
Meanwhile, Will's getting out of prison! The evidence that the Chesapeake Ripper is still out there somewhere was simply too great to keep him locked up anymore, so he gets to put on his comfy clothes again and go back to work. On his way out the door, Dr. Chilton corners him, terrified that Hannibal's going to find a way to kill them both. He wants Will to keep pushing, and he wants to help, not out of some sense of nobility but out of self-preservation. He's already been brutalized by one killer, and he doesn't want to end up on the menu of another. Will, who by now is more than aware of Chilton's true colors as a manipulative, egotistical clout chaser, can't help but be amused, and offers sage advice as Chilton ponders finding a way to make peace with the Ripper: "There's no bargaining with smoke."
Will's reunion with Jack is a bit more productive, because Jack is finally ready to humble himself before his master profiler. He's simply seen too much to avoid it. We've talked before this season about Jack's guilt, the sense that death is closing in all around him like a cosmic adjudicator to correct the mistakes he's made in his life. When Miriam Lass returned, he got the rare opportunity to have a conversation with someone he'd long since written off as a ghost, and now Will Graham is a free man, a walking rebuke to yet another of Jack's mistakes. He vows that he won't give up on any of his people again, and he and Will get to work. It's a remarkable moment, but it does make you wonder if Jack's on his way to overcorrecting, if he's lost all measurable bearing in his once-keen investigative mind.
Will's investigative mind, however, is crystal clear. Hugh Dancy plays Will as a free man with a certain hunger, a vigor he didn't have when he was chasing faceless killers back in Season 1, because now he knows exactly what he's up against, and he's about to learn more. In the Ripper's rural lair, a condemned building that now holds the remnants of his last few crime scene stagings, Will goes back into that dark place, putting himself back in the mind of the Chesapeake Ripper. But what he sees this time is not a solution to one crime. Instead he sees the connections between them all, the secret machinery that's persisted from crime scene to crime scene, move to move, the scaffolding that connects him to Miriam, to Beverly, to everyone else ever snared in the Ripper's web. The Ripper always wanted them to find Miriam. Why? Because her unreliable memory, like Will's before, can now be used to pin the Ripper's crimes on someone else.
The last time Will got this close to the Ripper evidence, and the personal touch Hannibal's putting on all of his crimes now, he tried to have Hannibal killed. So what will he do now that he's able to take matters into his own hands? First, he warns Jack that Miriam's not to be trusted, for reasons she probably isn't even aware of, then he warns Hannibal at gun point to back off in a late night visit. Hannibal, ever implacable, offers only a question in response: "Don't you want to know how this ends?" And the terrifying thing is that Will does, somewhere deep down he desperately wants to know, wants to see the next phase of the game, if not to participate then at least to understand. Maybe even to see if it all means something more than suffering.
Will's pursuit of Hannibal, of course, now brings him into conflict with Alana, who's grateful to Will for rewiring her into a more compassionate person (she has her own dog now!), but furious with him for continuing to paint her new boyfriend as a killer. It's a standoff neither of them can win, and when Will finally gets to meet with Miriam, we get a clue as to why. When the two surviving Chesapeake Ripper victims sit down together, Will remarks on how they're both "free," prompting Miriam to simply respond: "Neither of us are really free. He's not done."
And the Ripper, aka Hannibal, absolutely isn't done. In fact, we're about to see the fruits of his labor, the reason he kept Miriam in his back pocket for so long. Will's already theorized that Miriam can't remember Hannibal's face because he used the same light hypnosis on her that he did on Will himself. The question now is what all that hypnosis actually made Miriam believe she saw.
We get our answer soon enough, as Hannibal finally does what Chilton's feared for weeks and shows up at his house in his murder raincoat. But he's not here to kill Chilton. As the FBI arrives to investigate the premises and bring Chilton in for questioning, Hannibal drugs the doctor, kills the agents at the door, and stages their bodies in the most hilariously opulent crime scene we've seen yet, literally painting Chilton's pristine walls with FBI. Oh, and he leaves Abel Gideon's corpse in the house too, just to really drive the point home.
What happens next is quite predictable. Chilton wakes up and runs to Will's house, hoping he of all people will understand what's just happened. Will, instead, calls Jack, and the feds descend on Chilton, the new Chesapeake Ripper. Even as he professes his innocence, Miriam's on the other side of the glass, crying and screaming because she recognizes his voice and, eventually, his face. Hannibal, it turns out, can do a really good Frederick Chilton impression. This is all brilliant black comedy, because at the core of it all we as an audience understand that everything about it is, as Will and Jack discuss at the Ripper's lair, a piece of theater. It's all a show, and Hannibal is a consummate showman who's fooled them all again, to the point that Miriam is so moved by the show that she takes out her service weapon and puts a round in Chilton's throat.
It might not have made sense to see Will call the cops on the doomed Dr. Chilton, but it does minutes later, when he turns up at Hannibal's door for their standing evening therapy appointment. Hannibal, it turns out, kept the hour open for his friend all this time, just like Will knew he would. So Will arrives, with a fresh shave and a haircut, ready to "resume" his therapy under the guise of understanding that Chilton was the Ripper all along. For six episodes we watched Will try to orchestrate Hannibal's capture from behind bars, pushing so hard that Hannibal had to activate his backup Patsy with Dr. Chilton. Now, Will is free, and so is Hannibal, and they're about to draw closer to one another than they ever have before. But still Miriam's observation lingers: Neither of them is free. Even Hannibal's not free. Everyone is so inextricably tangled at this point that even what passes for justice in this world is bound to get an innocent person hurt. We just have to wait and see who'll be next under the knife.
Next Time: "Su-zakana"
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