Hannibal Season 2, Episode 8
"Su-zakana"
Original airdate: April 18, 2014
Writers: Scott Nimerfro, Steve Lightfoot, Bryan Fuller
Director: Vincenzo Natali
Cast: Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen, Laurence Fishburne, Caroline Dhavernas, Katharine Isabelle
Will Graham is fishing again.
As "Su-zakana" opens, he's managed to talk Jack Crawford into coming out on a frozen lake to ice fish with him and, as is usually the case with this series, to learn something. Will explains that, in the winter, the fish he's after have slowed metabolisms, making them less hungry and thus less likely to bite. The solution is a more aggressive form of fishing, with live bait.
"I'm a good fisherman, Jack," Will says, and we know it's not an empty boast. We also know that Will isn't just talking about the fish in the lake.
For much of this season, Will's emerging clarity has brought with it a new rebellious streak, a sense that the morality which held him in check for Season 1 no longer applies, at least not entirely. At the end of the last episode, he sat down with Hannibal Lecter to resume his therapy, and now, with Jack's help, he's catching a nice seafood meal for Hannibal to prepare, a deliberately red meat-less choice to throw in Dr. Lecter's face. At dinner, Hannibal even makes a "joke" about Will and Jack's suspicions about his food, and they all chuckle and sip their wine while Hannibal's platings — which look more like eldritch beasts from the depths than simple seafood spreads — surround them. They are in the monster's lair, fishing with live bait. But will he bite?
Before we can know the answer to that, though, there's a crime solving to be done, and we've finally arrived at one of the strangest crime scenes in the show's history. In a quiet stable, a dead horse lays in the middle of a stall, a set of fresh sutures in her belly. When a veterinarian cuts her open, they find a dead horse trainer shoved inside. Will and Hannibal descend on the crime scene alongside Jack, and immediately draw comparisons to a birth. The woman's dead, of course, but whoever sewed her into the horse (who'd recently given birth herself) was hoping to offer some kind of chance at rebirth. This metaphor is carried further when, back at the lab, the team discovers that a live bird was implanted in her body, giving it the effect of having a heartbeat. Someone tried to give her soul a new form, followed by a release. It's one of the show's most intimate crime scenes, and one of its most bizarre.
Back at his office, Hannibal's doing a little fishing of his own with a new patient, Margot Verger (Katharine Isabelle), who's processing her trauma and rage after an attack by her own brother, Mason. We don't get to meet Mason in this episode face-to-face, but he does take the unforgettable step of sopping up his sister's tears and stirring them into a martini after he assaults her, so you know we're not dealing with a great guy here. In their sessions, Margot makes it very clear to Hannibal that she'd like to have the ultimate revenge, and Hannibal being Hannibal, he encourages the feeling without ever explicitly instructing her to kill her brother. Because he's a fisherman too, and now that he's had to release Will Graham (at least publicly), he wants another potential monster on his hook.
Hannibal's sessions with Margot are pleasant, but his resumed sessions with Will prove particularly intriguing when Will confesses that he still believes Hannibal is the Chesapeake Ripper, and while he might keep up a facade of peace, he's not going to stop trying to prove it. "I prefer sins of omission to outright lies," Will says, and even promises that he won't kill Hannibal now that he "finally" finds him interesting. However much Will might be playing to this particular crowd here, the flirtation in the scene is impossible to ignore. Hannibal's seduction has, at least partially, worked its magic.
Meanwhile, in the strange horse case, the Feds seem to pin down a suspect in Peter (Jeremy Davies), a former employee of the stable who was kicked in the head by one of the horses and now suffers various cognitive impairments. He seems like the prime suspect, and he's definitely guilty of something, but Will's not convinced. He goes deeper, and gets Peter to admit that, while he did dig up the woman's body and sew her into the horse, he did not kill her. His social worker (Chris Diamontopoulos), on the other hand…
We've talked before about the ways in which Hannibal manages to be both extremely sophisticated and not-at-all subtle at the same time. Here we have the ultimate example of a forced rebirth – a woman given new "life" long after she'd lost all choice in the matter – and it repeats metaphorically in the lives of the main characters. Will Graham is going through his own rebirth, emerging from a chrysalis carefully designed by Hannibal himself, to either become a cold-blooded killer or simply a deeply troubled man with blood on his hands. At the end of the episode, as Peter's social worker tries to frame him for the murders, Peter sews him into yet another dead horse. Will and Hannibal arrive just in time to see Peter putting the finishing touches on the scene, giving Hugh Dancy the opportunity to say the unforgettable line "Peter…is your social worker in that horse?" Then, the social worker pushes himself out of the freshly stitched horse, another forced rebirth, and emerges still trying to blame Peter for everything.
Will sees through it, and trains his gun on the social worker, putting his relationship with Hannibal on the verge of a kind of violent orgasm. Earlier in the episode, they talked about Will's newfound pleasure in "doing bad things to bad people," and now he seems ready to deal with that more directly than ever before. Hannibal watches and tries to make Will truly, fully aware of the gravity of his actions, testing his motives. His eyes ask the question Do you really love me? as he does it. And when Hannibal finally sees conviction in Will's eyes, he pulls the gun from his hand and embraces him. It's not quite a consummation, but it is perhaps the most intensely romantic thing that's happened on this show so far. Hannibal believes he has found his soulmate. We don't yet know what Will believes, but we do know something: He's a good fisherman.
Next Time: "Shiizakana"
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