Hannibal Season 2, Episode 10
"Kō No Mono"
Original airdate: May 9, 2014
Writers: Jeff Vlaming, Andy Black, Bryan Fuller
Director: David Slade
Cast: Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen, Laurence Fishburne, Caroline Dhavernas, Katharine Isabelle, Michael Pitt
It was only a matter of time before Hannibal got around to ortolans.
One of the more infamous fine dining delicacies in the world, forbidden from traditional sale due to its endangered nature, the ortolan is a small bird which, as Hannibal explains in the episode's opening scene, is drowned in brandy and then roasted whole. It's also meant to be eaten whole, in a single mouthful, and tradition dictates that the diner places a napkin over their head to hide their face from God.
"I don't hide from God," Hannibal tells Will, and together they consume the forbidden bird.
I have never eaten ortolan, but my understanding of the experience is that it's about more than eating a little bird you're not typically meant to eat. Consuming the bird whole, in one bite, means that everything is chewed at the same time. Organs, skin, flesh, cartilage, all of it bursts in your mouth at the same time, and as your teeth break up the bones, the bones scrape and cut the inside of your mouth, adding blood to the melange of flavors. Your blood.
It's a give and take, a sacrifice and an indulgence, a transformative experience that you couldn't get from deboning the bird or breaking it up with a knife and fork. And it's the perfect way to open "Kō No Mono," an episode that's all about transformative experiences, what they give and what they take. In Will's mind, he sees himself reborn, bursting from the belly of a stag while the antlered shade representing Hannibal looks on. He is becoming something else, sacrificing and indulging.
You may have noticed that the recent crop of episodes have shied away from a Case of the Week procedural format focusing on individual killers. You may also have noticed that the show's plotting has become a bit more impressionistic, more tone poem than mystery story. It's a shift that might be tricky for some Hannibal fans, but for me it's the correct move, a lean into the overarching question of the season: Can you beat the Devil if you also make a deal with him?
The shift in plotting doesn't mean there's any lack of murder, though. We get a truly gorgeous, horrific crime scene early in the episode that's a direct nod to Thomas Harris' Red Dragon and its film adaptation, as the flaming corpse of Freddie Lounds rolls into a parking garage in a wheelchair, putting an end to everyone's favorite tabloid crime journalist. She's so burned to a crisp that she's only identifiable by dental records, and as Hannibal and Will theorize over the body, Alana starts to think more deeply on the last chat she had with Freddie, the one in which Freddie suggested Alana's boyfriend and her ex-situationship might be on a killing spree together. It's a great scene, because it both puts Alana on her own investigative path and allows us, yet again, to see the crime scene refracted through Hannibal and Will's views as both profilers and killers. They are, in essence, profiling themselves, and doing it accurately while also avoiding any salient details which could get them caught.
In happier news, Margot Verger is indeed pregnant after her encounter with Will in last week's episode. If it's a boy, she can secure her piece of the Verger fortune and her brother Mason will be powerless to stop her. It seems to be a victory, but while Will is pondering what it might mean for him to be a father, Alana's trying to cut through the smokescreen of whatever it is Will and Hannibal are up to. Freddie's funeral births more odd behavior from Will, and when Alana tries to warn Will off of getting too close to Hannibal, Will only acts more suspicious…until he doesn't. In our first real hint of what's at play in weeks, he lets his mask drop, warns Alana to be careful, and gives her his gun with instructions to buy ammunition and practice using it. Whether she buys that Will is protecting her from Hannibal or not, she takes the weapon.
Meanwhile, Mason Verger has started therapy with Hannibal shortly after we watched him make a child cry so he could drink the kid's tears. With Mason, and Michael Pitt's wonderfully buoyant performance, we get a glimpse at a different kind of evil. There's nothing careful about him, or reserved, or even particularly refined. He just likes making other people hurt, and that includes Margot. Fortunately for him, Lecter – ever the puppet master – drops hints that perhaps Margot is going to try and get pregnant without his knowledge. It's the only push Mason needs.
But even as Mason ponders the next target in his endless path of destruction, Hannibal and Will are talking about new life and family. Hannibal opens up in one of Mikkelsen's best moments of the entire series, talking about his dead sister, Mischa, and how he acted as a surrogate father to her. Abigail Hobbs reminded him of Mischa, he says, which is why they were so close, but Abigail's apparent death "had to happen" to keep his secrets, so that chance at family passed him by. In one of the most emotionally arresting moments of the entire series, Hannibal confides to Will that he will occasionally drop teacups on the floor to watch them shatter, then stare at the fragments in the wild hope that they will spontaneously reform, heal, be made whole. For all his manipulation, his cruelty, and his callous disregard for human life, Hannibal is, at his core, also a human being who wants to be made whole, and he sees Will as a potential path to that wholeness. But can he ever stop shattering teacups long enough to appreciate them for what they are?
Whether it's Hannibal or Will or someone else, Freddie's body doesn't get to remain whole for very long either. Her grave is still fresh when someone exhumes her and, with the help of other parts around the cemetery, arranges her charred corpse into a tableau of the many-armed Hindu goddess Shiva. At the crime scene, Will considers the possibility of a copycat killer/grave robber, while Alana looks on and grows increasingly fearful. Her fears grow deeper when, back at Hannibal's house, his super-smelling ability picks up gunpowder on her hands. Alana is perhaps the most idealistic of any of the show's major characters, but she's not naive, and she's all too aware that the jaws of a trap seem to be slowly closing around her.
After a direct threat from Mason to impregnate her with his own seed, Margot packs her things and flees the Verger estate, only to be blindsided by another car as she speeds away. When she wakes up, Mason's standing over her, and reveals that he's arranged for doctors to perform a hysterectomy, taking not just her unborn child but the chance that she could ever have children again. He will engineer an heir for himself, and she will be powerless to do anything about it. There is no end to his cruelty, and at the hospital later, Will resolves to match Mason's ruthlessness with a little of his own.
But while Will is playing yet another dark game of death, Alana is at Jack's office, breaking down across from him, begging to understand what's going on. She feels the walls closing in, and while she doesn't want to be crushed between them, she also wants to make sure Will is OK, and she's sure Jack knows something. At last, to the relief of both Alana and the audience, Jack lets her in, takes her into a conference room, and reveals that – surprise! – Freddie's not really dead. She's a player in a larger investigative game, which presumably includes Will, with Hannibal in the crosshairs. It reveals that Jack still has tricks up his sleeve, but it also seems to reveal Will as a very talented performer when he's in Hannibal's company.
No matter how much he's masking his true intentions around Hannibal, though, Will's emerging taste for doing bad things to bad people is very much real, and we know that because the episode ends with him paying a visit to Mason. Furious over Margot's fate, he attacks the meat-packing scion and dangles him over his own man-eating pigs, to Mason's surprise and delight. Before he can deliver a killing blow, though, Will's reborn self, the one who will eat the ortolan and take a human life if he must, has an epiphany. Hannibal's pushed him into these situations before, so what makes Will think it's not happening again?
So he pushes away, spares Mason's life, and does something he's already tried with frustrating results: He suggests that perhaps Mason's prized pigs would prefer to dine on Hannibal.
Just two episodes remain in Season 2, and Will's actions in this episode, from the ortolan to the pigs, reveal something terrifying about his place in this narrative. Regardless of what happens next, who survives and who doesn't, and how the FBI deals with the whole mess, there is no going back for him. Something monstrous has been unleashed from the depths of Will Graham's psyche and it will not simply return to dormancy. He might catch Hannibal, he might not, but however this ends, he will be a monster.
Next Time: "Tome-wan"
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