Hannibal Season 2, Episode 1
"Kaiseki"
Original airdate: February 28, 2014
Writers: Steve Lightfoot, Bryan Fuller
Director: Tim Hunter
Cast: Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen, Laurence Fishburne, Caroline Dhavernas, Gillian Anderson
Season 2 of Hannibal opens with a gauntlet thrown down.
The show's had no shortage of daring choices up to this point, of course. We ended the first season with the reveal that Hannibal framed Will Graham for his murders, leaving the profiler on the wrong side of a jail cell. It was a devastating paradigm shift that set the stage for an entirely new series to emerge from the rubble. But even with that kind of potential in its pocket, "Kaiseki" goes a step further, flash-forwarding to a truly monstrous fight to the death between Jack Crawford and Hannibal Lecter.
It's a moment that arrives without fanfare, without preamble. It isn't happening, and then suddenly it is, moving with the same speed as Hannibal's expertly thrown knife. The two men fight until Jack is cornered, locked in a closet and possibly bleeding out, while Hannibal throws himself at the door from the other side. From there, we flash back 12 weeks, to see where the seeds of this clash of titans were planted.
It begins, appropriately, with a meal. The episode titles have switched to Japanese culinary terms for this season, and they reflect the emphasis on precision, grace, and aesthetics balanced with flavor present in that particular food culture. We witness this as Hannibal delicately plunges pieces of sea urchin into a bowl of lemon-infused water, preparing them for the perfect presentation. Jack, his dinner guest, is suitably impressed.
But the meal is not a celebration. As Hannibal explains, the meal itself is traditionally eaten in the wake of a loss. "This is a loss. Will is a loss and we are mourning a death," he says, which of course prompts Jack to leap to Hannibal's defense. After all, they're both in the same position: people who trusted Will only to discover he was a monster all along. To that end, Jack and Hannibal agree that investigating Will's accusation that Lecter is the real killer is something the FBI must do. It'll rule Hannibal out and allow them to move on with the evidence against Will. And for Hannibal, if he makes it through, it'll make him much less of a target for any future investigators.
While Hannibal and Jack are thinking about Will, Will is thinking about Hannibal. We join him again while he's imagining himself fly fishing in a stream, far away from his actual reality: locked in a cell for an interview with Dr. Frederick Chilton (he pulled through from last season, short a kidney but still an arrogant trickster). Chilton sees Will as his new star patient, but Will gives him nothing. He knows how to retreat into himself, how to hide. Instead he demands that Hannibal come to see him.
At Quantico, Jack is facing a different kind of pressure beyond his need to investigate his friend Hannibal. Alana, still incensed over what Will has gone through, filed a report with the bureau accusing Jack of misconduct in his treatment of his star profiler. That opens him up to internal investigation, something Alana didn't intend, but she also refuses to recant her report. Jack's biggest fight isn't for another 12 weeks, but he's already getting battered with body blows, and Alana has the steel to see something like this through if it means sticking up for Will. Oh — and to make Jack's day even harder, a couple of workmen in Maryland are pulling debris out of a stream when they stumble upon multiple horrifying corpses. So, work beckons.
Meanwhile, Hannibal's back at Bedelia's, talking through his desire to answer Will's call and go visit. Bedelia points out that any interaction between the two men will lead to them manipulating each other, but Hannibal makes an actual emotional issue out of it. He doesn't just want to toy with Will. He misses his friend. He did not ever want this breakup. He wanted Will to embrace his true nature and run away with him. He hates that he can't have it all, but of course he doesn't say all of that to Bedelia. Instead he insists that he's still fascinated by Will, whose "mentality is grotesque but useful, like a chair of antlers." Someone's been writing love poems again!
And when Hannibal finally does see Will, who hears his presence as the clomp of approaching stag hooves, he thinks at least for a moment that Will feels the same way. Will explains that Lecter's influence on him is so great that he no longer hears his own voice as his inner monologue. "My inner voice sounds like you," he says. "I can't get you out of my head." More love poetry? Not quite. Will, growing more clear-headed by the day, now suspects that Hannibal's voice in his head means some kind of deliberate tampering. There are memories he's cut off from, places where evidence is still hiding. He vows that he'll get it out of his head, whatever it takes, and while Hannibal plays it off, it's also clear that part of him believes it, and he's thrilled by that. It really feels, at this point in the show, like Will could cut Hannibal's throat and Hannibal would die smiling. He rejoices in the sense that he's found an equal, a fellow monster, and the many small ways in which this manifests are adding up to something quite profound.
Back at the Bureau, Beverly swabs Hannibal's cheek for DNA, and we learn that investigators have also confiscated basically Hannibal's entire closet, searching for any trace of evidence that could tie him to the murders. Hannibal's careful, and he knows it, which means he can focus on what really matters in this moment: being named, in Beverly's words, "The new Will Graham." Joining Jack by the stream in Maryland, Hannibal finds multiple bodies, all coated with some kind of resin in an attempt to preserve them. He quickly deduces that these are "discards," rejected experiments in pursuit of something greater, and there are half a dozen of them? So what does that mean in terms of how many bodies the killer kept?
Hannibal returns to Bedelia on cloud nine, reveling in what was something akin to intercourse for him. "I got to be Will Graham today," he tells her, while signing over a consent form that allows her to answer questions from the Feds. It's very clear that she knows he expects her to lie, and that they're both keeping secrets for one another, just like Hannibal did with Abigail (for a while, anyway). Exactly what those secrets are…well, we'll have to wait and find out.
Alana, meanwhile, has made her way over to Will, where she tries to impress upon him the defense that he simply can't remember what he did, and so can't truly be guilty. This naturally frustrates Will, who's clawing at every shred of memory he can find in his head, so Alana agrees to try to recover his memories through hypnosis. When she puts him under, though (with Chilton listening through a bug all the while), he only sees Alana herself as a dark shade, and Hannibal at the head of an ornate, macabre tale, in his stag form. He pushes Alana away and retreats, while Chilton revels in his new information. And because Hannibal knows Chilton, he knows he can get him to revel out loud, so it's dinner time at Dr. Lecter's for him.
Here again, just in Mads Mikkelsen's performance, we get a sense of two sides of Hannibal at war. He wants to see if he can get away with this, of course, and he's going to do whatever it takes to make that happen. But as he ponders the idea of Will somehow recovering his memories and using them against him, there's at least a little part of Hannibal that wants to see if Will really could catch him on a level playing field. Both are thrilling prospects, but Hannibal doesn't have to worry about that right now. Another killer is at work, and he's just abducted a young Black man from the subway, injected him with something, and sprayed him with resin.
At the lab, using the assembled bodies, the team susses out what they know. It's a killer who abducts his victims, gives them an overdose of heroin to kill them quietly, then shoves in a bunch of preservatives, coats them with resin and lets them, well…set. It's disturbing enough that Beverly, in an attempt to find some connection between the victims, takes the case to Will. He's at least a little taken aback by the audacity of his, but he does help. Looking at a sheaf of photos of missing persons who might be tied to the killer, Will sorts them by skin tone, then says: "It's a color palette."
Then, everything turns back to the matter of Will, as he recovers a memory for the first time. He manages to dig up the moment when Hannibal intubated him and shoved Abigail's ear down his throat. It's a breakthrough, but he still has to actually convince someone that it's a real memory. In a very delicately acted conversation, Jack and Alana come to the conclusion that Will has to recover his memories, if only so he can accept what he did. In his own visit with Will, though, Jack only gets more promises of the real truth coming out, as Will warns him that Hannibal is dangerous. "You let the fox into the hen house," he says, all as Jack backs away, defeated. Back at home, Hannibal contemplates the empty chair across from him, missing his friend.
The first season of Hannibal presented itself as the story of the FBI slowly closing in on Hannibal Lecter, only to reveal in the final episodes that Hannibal was, in fact, closing in on the FBI. He is the fox in the hen house now, but he's not the only one with power and influence here. The big question of Season 2 isn't whether or not Hannibal gets caught. He's fighting Jack in the prologue, so we know at least some of the jig is up over the next 12 weeks. No, the big question of Season 2 is whether or not Will Graham escapes all of this with anything of himself left intact.
But that's not the only question. Because in a grain silo somewhere, a killer is building a mosaic of human dolls. And one of his victims just woke up.
Next Time: "Sakizuke"
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