Hannibal Season 2, Episode 12
"Tome-wan"
Original airdate: May 16, 2014
Writers: Chris Brancato, Bryan Fuller, Scott Nimerfro
Director: Michael Rymer
Cast: Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen, Laurence Fishburne, Gillian Anderson, Michael Pitt
Last week's episode showed us much more of the Season 2 game board than we'd been privy too for quite some time. We certainly knew that Will Graham was attempting to work some kind of layered manipulation over Hannibal Lecter, but until last week, the endgame wasn't entirely clear because it's so clouded by genuine emotional connection.
Now, in "Tome-wan," Will finally spells it out. In a meeting with Jack Crawford early in the episode, he explains that, despite all the conversations they've had and all the things they've done, including mutilating Randall Tier's body, he's still no closer to proving Hannibal is a murderer. Hannibal, Will explains, makes veiled references, eludes to the possibility of murder, but never says it outright, and more importantly, has never let Will catch him doing it. Randall's killing was in self-defense, and mutilating a body post-mortem is not the same as murder. The final trick, the hardest trick, is catching Hannibal in the act, or at least tying enough physical evidence to him that there's no longer any doubt that he's the Chesapeake Ripper. Will's plan is to use Mason Verger, impulsive and fiendish monster that he is, to finally close the trap.
Or perhaps the hardest trick is catching Hannibal in the act without Hannibal knowing that's what you're doing, and he certainly seems to understand at least some of what Will's after. In their latest therapy session, he asks Will to imagine his ideal murder scenario for Hannibal. In his mind Will sees Hannibal in a straitjacket, suspended in Mason Verger's barn. Will cuts his throat, pushes him out into the pig pen, and lowers him down where the man-eaters can devour him. It's an image he doesn't entirely share with Hannibal, but Hannibal knows well enough to understand the deadly game Will's set up between himself and Mason. When Hannibal asks why, he admires Will's answer: "I was curious what would happen."
Even with the curtain pulled back, we can feel the shared convictions of these two men. We know that Will's working with Jack to pull Hannibal into some kind of trap that will expose him as the Chesapeake Ripper, and we know that Hannibal likely knows something like that is happening. Yet the two men have a little moment of domestic tenderness over who should actually kill Mason, since they both clearly want to. And when Will asks if Hannibal plans to eat Mason, Hannibal simply replies "Whenever possible, one should always try to eat the rude." Will's response – "Free range rude" – seals the flirtation. Will's playing a part in a very deadly game, yes, but there's still a connection here, a chemistry that neither of them can deny, and that may be Will's undoing.
What Hannibal doesn't know, though, is that Jack Crawford now has a secret weapon: Dr. Bedelia Du Maurier (Gillian Anderson) has been summoned from her hiding place by the FBI, and she's ready to tell her story. She's one of the rare living people who understands what Hannibal is, because she's one of his victims. Her patient who attacked her? Hannibal didn't kill him. Bedelia killed him, not out of self-defense necessarily, but because Hannibal had groomed her to do it. She warns both Will and Jack that Hannibal cannot be underestimated, and if he's in a trap he's in it willingly. She also offers Will an insight that may help him catch Hannibal:
“Hannibal can get lost in self-congratulation, at his own exquisite taste and cunning. Whimsy. That will be how he will get caught.”
But it's not Hannibal's whimsy Will has to worry about, not yet. It's Mason's. While a group of his thugs kidnap Hannibal, Mason himself visits Will at his home and invites him into his limousine. Everyone meets back at the Verger family farm, where Hannibal is suspended in the exact scenario Will imagined. Mason asks Will to do the honors and bleed Hannibal so the man-eating pigs can have a "taste," and Will cuts Hannibal loose instead. Chaos ensues, and when Will awakens, he realizes Hannibal's gone, and the pigs have devoured Mason's hired muscle. Mason, like Hannibal, is nowhere to be found. This presents our entry to one of the most horrifying and horrifyingly beautiful sequences of violence ever placed on television.
Hannibal has, of course, abducted Mason, and administered a psychotropic variety of drugs of his own invention. Mason, high as a kite and extremely suggestible, takes the knife Hannibal offers him, and agrees to stab himself to test his fat depth, much like his father taught him to do with pigs. Some time later, Will makes it back to his house in Virginia and finds Mason sitting in his living room, feeding pieces of his own face to Will's dogs. A great taste of an actor in horror storytelling is how well they convey character and emotion from behind heavy prosthetics and gore effects, and here Michael Pitt gives a masterclass. The entire lower half of his face is a mangled, bloody mess framing his teeth, and yet his eyes do so much work, conveying his drug-induced state, yes, but also the madness beneath all of that, something inherent in his nature that Hannibal unleashed.
This, after all, is Hannibal's speciality: Unleashing the monster inside everyone around him. It's the entire series summed up in a single sequence, as Hannibal appears over Will's shoulder and tells Mason to slice off his nose and eat it. We've been warned time and again by other supporting characters, chief among them Dr. Chilton and Dr. Gideon, that Hannibal was this person, a soul so hyper-intelligent and determined that he may as well be the Devil himself, and here it's on full display for Will in a way it's never been before. It is Hannibal at his most whimsical.
And yet, at the end of this horrific scene, Hannibal's hands are still entirely clean. Mason does all the cutting. He's holding the knife. Hannibal's just pulling the strings. Even when Will tries to convince him to kill Mason by saying he should do "whatever you think is best," Hannibal stops short, breaking Mason's neck but not outright killing him. Later, recovering in bed at home behind a mask and a neck brace, Mason tells Jack Crawford that he simply took "a tumble" into the pig pen, where the pigs started to eat his face before Margot rescued him. He offers absolutely no hint of Hannibal's involvement, either because he doesn't remember or because he's too frightened to do anything else. Or maybe it's neither of those things. Maybe he's simply awestruck by a person whose monstrousness outstrips his own. Now, his reward is being left in the clutches of Margot, who promises to take care of him just as well as he took care of her.
However Mason feels about what's happened to him, Hannibal is, for the moment, in the clear. As the chaos dies down, Will and Hannibal return to where they started the episode, in their therapy chairs. Will brings up the reality that, no matter how careful they are in their shared mission of murder and mayhem, they will one day be caught and revealed to the world. Very aware of Hannibal's capacity for whimsy, Will suggests that perhaps he should confess his crimes to Jack rather than letting Jack find out on his own. After all, Jack is Hannibal's friend. Hannibal agrees, setting the stage for the Season 2 finale, when we'll finally learn the resolution to that fight which opened the season…maybe. Will has extended an invitation to Hannibal to unleash his whimsy like never before, but just how whimsical will the good doctor get?
Next time: "Mizumono"
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