Hannibal Season 2, Episode 13
"Mizumono"
Original airdate: May 23, 2014
Writers: Steve Lightfoot, Bryan Fuller
Director: David Slade
Cast: Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen, Laurence Fishburne, Caroline Dhavernas
I've been thinking about Hannibal Lecter and God a lot.
It's not just me. Hannibal as a series has clearly pointed me towards the juxtaposition over the last several episodes. Hannibal likes to mention God, likes to use him as a philosophical framework by which he can justify his own actions, even glorify them. God can kill, God can consume, so why can't he?
But there's more going on here than simple moral justification, as the back half of Season 2 has proven over and over again. Hannibal doesn't just think of God as his excuse, or as an intellectual exercise to busy his ever-agile mind. He thinks of God as a guide to human behavior, a sign that we are all in search of some kind of higher power. In his arrogance and self-congratulation, what Bedelia du Maurier dubbed "whimsy," he sees himself not just as that higher power, but as someone who can point the way for others like him.
Hannibal Lecter is an evangelist.
If Season 1 was an exploration of how far Hannibal would go to preserve his own way of life, Season 2 is an exploration of how far he'll go to build a new one. All this time, through Will Graham, through Abigail Hobbs, and through countless other patients and friends we haven't even met yet, Hannibal's been building a movement, like a prophet gathering disciples. Now his moment of Messianic ecstasy has come…if he can survive it.
While Hannibal is predictably stoic about his survival, at first, Jack and Will aren't. They know very well that "Mizumono" represents the night they finally tighten the noose around Hannibal's neck, and they're making every possible preparation. Jack says goodbye to his dying wife, while Will goes to Freddie Lounds and asks her to avoid writing about Abigail when she publishes his story.
Both men know what they have to do, and we know what they have to do. That fight scene that opened the season, in which Jack and Hannibal beat each other senseless, is about to come to fruition, and it's starting to become clearer to other characters as well. When investigator Kade Prurnell (Cynthia Nixon) gets wind of the unorthodox methods Jack's been using to try and catch the Chesapeake Ripper, she demands his badge, while Alana tries desperately to warn Will off whatever's about to happen. We are all barreling toward the same blood-soaked conclusion.
What's left to settle, of course, is Will's role in all of this. Among the many, many other things it's about, Hannibal is a series of masks, of the roles we slip into in various situations social, professional, and violent. We see it most clearly with Hannibal, and the elegant tablescapes he conjures to serve up human flesh to Baltimore's elite, but it's there with Will as well, and while he's let his mask slip enough to clue Alana into what's been happening, he hasn't been so clear with the audience on where he actually stands with Hannibal. He knows the darkness is encroaching around him, and that every second he spends with Hannibal makes him more monstrous, and yet there's a part of him that undeniably likes it, finds solace in it. More than that, he finds kinship in Hannibal, perhaps the only person who has ever truly, completely seen him. As Hannibal says at one point in this episode, "Love and death are the great hinges on which all human sympathies turn." For Will, Hannibal is that hinge, and he either has to turn with it, or break it.
The point of no return arrives when, as part of Prurnell's crackdown, Alana warns Will that there's a warrant for his arrest in the Randall Tier murder. As the Feds close in on Will for the second time in his life, he makes his escape, and in a brilliant mirror of the series premiere, calls Hannibal to warn him.
Hannibal has, of course, prepared for all of this. He's destroyed many of his papers, including patient notes, and he's even invited Jack over for a last supper, where he intends to reveal his true self to his friend in the FBI. Jack arrives early for dinner and the fight we've been waiting all season to see. It unfolds just like we remember, except for one bit of prelude in which the two men, seeing each other more clearly than they've ever been able to before, consider the moment. Hannibal, by revealing himself and (he hopes) killing Jack, is showing his genuine friend his true self, being vulnerable by reveling in his monstrousness. Jack, in a moment of what feels like genuine respect, returns the favor, and the fight is on.
Meanwhile, Alana's making her way to Hannibal's house with Will's handgun still in her purse. She enters the home as Jack and Hannibal's fight starts to wrap up, and arrives just in time to point the gun at Hannibal while Jack remains locked in the pantry, bleeding profusely and on the brink of death. It's a heartbreaking moment, as all of Alana's worst fears are made real in the image of a bloodstained Hannibal, completely unmasked, happy to level with her about everything. He even, in a gesture of what seems like honest affection, tells her that she can "stay blind" and simply leave his house unharmed, free of any fear that he'll come after her in the future. Instead, Alana pulls the trigger…and finds that Hannibal has already emptied the gun of bullets. He's always steps ahead of everyone.
But that's not the scene's greatest heartbreaker. That arrives moments later, when Hannibal reveals that Abigail Hobbs (Kacey Rohl) is still alive. She wordlessly enters the room as Alana gapes at her, simultaneously astonished and horrified. In return, Abigail mutters an apology, then shoves Alana through a second story window. She plummets, haloed in glass, to the street below, alive but motionless, perhaps as close to death as Jack is.
It's here that Will finally enters the picture, having slipped the Feds just long enough to try and see the plans through. He finds Abigail on the street, who urges him with what little strength she has left to go inside and get Hannibal. He calls for backup, then rushes into the house, where he finds his surrogate daughter and his partner, his husband in all but name, waiting for him. A perfect, happy family.
Will is heartbroken by the scene, not just because Hannibal lied to him, but because all this time, the Good Fisherman seems to have been planning a catch and release.
"You were supposed to leave," Will says, on the brink of tears, overwhelmed and lost and right back where he was at the end of last season, with marionette strings leading up to Hannibal's hands. In response, Hannibal says simply that he and Abigail were waiting for Will, but he also adds a rebuke. It's Hannibal's turn to be heartbroken, because he understands that, whether Will intended to actually let him flee or not, Will did send Jack into Hannibal's home with the goal of arresting him. The FBI was going to come down in full force if Prurnell hadn't intervened and stopped the operation. He was about to lose everything. So, what can he do except take everything from Will?
In a nod to Thomas Harris's original Red Dragon novel, Hannibal slips a knife into Will's stomach, essentially guts him, and leaves him to bleed out on the floor, but even here he is not done. At the beginning of the episode, when Will made the choice to shift from fisherman to hunter, he saw the ghost of Garrett Jacob Hobbs at his door, telling him once again to "See." Now Hannibal, in his way, makes the same appeal, and slits Abigail's throat. He doesn't just want to kill Will. He doesn't just want to get away. He wants everyone, absolutely everyone, involved to suffer. He wants his would-be disciples to know that he will not, on this particular day, be a martyr to his own cause. So, while a bleeding Will comforts a dying Abigail, Hannibal walks outside, past Alana's writhing form, and into the fresh rainfall. It's a baptism of sorts, a cleansing, God raining down his own life-giving force onto a man who would be God. For Hannibal, it's a sign that he's done the right thing. The evangelist has been rewarded, and will now spread his gospel elsewhere.
All of which brings us to the question: What now? We know Hannibal's ending, at least for the moment, as he takes to the skies on a first class flight with Bedelia du Maurier – his best pupil or the woman who'll finally catch him? – at his side, begging the question of what she knew and when she knew it. We don't get to see what becomes of anyone else. They're all bleeding, wounded, dying, perhaps never to return, while Hannibal Lecter flies over it all.
Like a God.
Next Time: Season 3!
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