Hannibal Season 2, Episode 9
"Shiizakana"
Original airdate: April 25, 2014
Writers: Jeff Vlaming Bryan Fuller
Director: Michael Rymer
Cast: Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen, Laurence Fishburne, Katharine Isabelle, Mark O'Brien
Will Graham is freer than he's been in a long time.
The opening sequence of "Shiizakana" takes us to a very familiar place that's been given a fascinating makeover: Will's mindscape, long a place where he recoiled from the violence he forced himself to investigate. Now, though, he's savoring that violence, imagining Hannibal tied to a tree, his life in the hands of the nightmarish stag that seems to govern much of Will's dreams at this point. Will imagines his vengeance, using the very engines of darkness that Hannibal nurtured in his brain, while Hannibal confesses his love in the moments before he's torn asunder.
It's the kind of vision that Will Graham would have fought against, tried to push out of his head before, but no longer. "Shiizakana" arrives in the wake of Will almost murdering a serial killer, and in their therapy sessions together, he confesses that he regrets Hannibal stopped him at the last moment. He longs to feel the sense of justice and satisfaction he got from killing Garrett Jacob Hobbs, or from those few hours when he thought that he'd managed to get Hannibal killed. He wants to enjoy killing, and while we know that his resumed sessions with Hannibal are part of a plan to get closer to the Chesapeake Ripper, we also know that Will is committed to a certain degree of honesty. The vision makes it clearer: He is free to think these thoughts, even to act on these urges, and he wants to be sure Hannibal knows it. More than that, though, he wants to be sure we know it.
This week's killer draws a very clear and unsubtle line under the themes developing here in the back half of Season 2, and that's how easily a human being can drift into the territory of a beast. A body turns up at a truck stop, mutilated by powerful claws and jaws, leaving the FBI stumped as to the murder weapon. It's too powerful for an animal attack, yet there's no manmade weapon in play. After some careful investigation, the team discovers that the bite marks on the body – and those of two more found in a snowy field later – were made by the teeth of a cave bear, a long-extinct prehistoric creature. To make things more interesting, the bite strength is beyond anything an actual animal could muster. Someone's made themself a monster suit, using servo motors to increase their strength. They've dreamt about becoming a beast, and now they've crossed over, transforming before the very eyes of the investigators.
Meanwhile, Will's chance encounter with Margot Verger outside Hannibal's office pays some very interesting dividends. Margot, still obsessed with plotting the death of her abusive brother Mason (himself a monster shed of much of his humanity), sees something in Will, something kindred and intriguing. She sneaks a peek at Hannibal's appointment book and tracks Will to his house in the woods, where they talk over whiskey. They offer each other unflinching honesty, as Margot confesses she wants to kill her brother, and Will confesses he tried to kill Hannibal. It's a moment that feels vaguely forced, but only for a moment, because in spending time with the obsessive and morbidly curious Margot, Will starts to see a pattern.
It's a pattern that compounds when, while examining the second animal killer crime scene, Will deduces that a man is using animal parts to kill, not using a live animal to do his bidding. Hannibal confesses that the profile fits one of his former patients, a young man with "species dysphoria" named Randall Tier (Mark O'Brien). Randall came to Hannibal years earlier believing that he was meant to be an animal, not a man, and now works as a curator and preservationist at a museum, caring for the bones of the creatures he so longs to slip inside.
Of course, Hannibal already knows all of this, and more. He slips into the museum after closing to talk to Randall, revealing that his therapy didn't actually manage Randall's dysphoria, just refocused it. He was grooming the boy, preparing him to become a killer in his own singular way, and now he offers a warning: The Feds are coming, and when they do, Hannibal wants Randall to do something quite specific.
Will, armed with his conversations with Margot, returns to therapy and reveals to Hannibal that, before she disappeared, Bedelia du Maurier (Gillian Anderson) told him "I believe you," confirming his suspicions about Hannibal and the Chesapeake Ripper. As Hannibal digests this, clearly unsettled, Will brings forward his new conclusions. Bedelia knew what Hannibal was not just because of their interactions, but because of Hannibal's interactions with his other patients. Randall Tier is not the first patient Hannibal has groomed into a killer, and he won't be the last, as his interactions with both Will and Margot make very clear. It's an extension of the show's observation that Hannibal is The Devil incarnate, whispering in the ears of potential sinners, longing for as many transformations as he can muster.
To that end, Hannibal sics Randall and his cave bear suit on Will, who's alone in his house with his dogs. But Will's not just a good fisherman. He can hunt when he needs to, and he manages to lure Randall to leap into his house, where he waits with a shotgun. This time, though, Will doesn't call Jack Crawford to pick up the pieces after he's assaulted in his own home. Instead, he takes Randall's corpse straight to Hannibal, lays him out on the dining room table, and waits. As the episode ends, Will declares he and Hannibal are "even steven" because they've both sent serial killers after each other.
Hannibal has always been a show deeply concerned with the thin veil separating all of us from our most violent urges. Its title character, after all, is a man who drapes himself in finery of all kinds, only to lurk in the shadows as a maneater when no one's looking. "Shiizakana" brings all of those meditations about that thin veil to the fore, creating an environment where nearly every character is just a step or two removed from the all-out monstrous, if they're not already there. And that's exactly the way Hannibal likes it. In one of their sessions together, Will asks Hannibal what he thinks about when he thinks about killing, and Hannibal responds: "I think about God." It's the Hannibal writing team's effort to insert one of the more macabre hobbies Dr. Lecter possesses. "I collect church collapses," he tells Will, offering a story from his ongoing archive of events in which God seemingly broke his own houses of worship to murder his followers. For Hannibal, it's evidence that, if God exists, he too is riding that very thin line between humanity and monstrosity. "Typhoid and swans, it all comes from the same place," Hannibal says.
It's a declaration of Hannibal's psychopathic nature, to be sure, but it's also a sort of mission statement for the entire show. Hannibal is a show about beauty in all its forms, and about discarding the line between the classically beautiful and the unsettling beauty of the grotesque. That line has been all but obliterated now. All that's left is to see how far Will Graham, and everyone else around Hannibal, will stray into monstrous territory.
Next Time: "Naka-choko"
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