Hannibal Season 1, Episode 1
"Apéritif"
Original airdate: April 4, 2013
Writer: Bryan Fuller (Characters by Thomas Harris)
Director: David Slade
Cast: Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen, Laurence Fishburne, Caroline Dhavernas, Hettienne Park
It takes 22 minutes, fully half the runtime of your average network drama, for the title character in Hannibal to appear. It's the first of many, many smart decisions made to craft one of the best horror shows of all time, and one of the best dramas of the 2010s.
We know Hannibal Lecter. By the time Hannibal began its run on NBC, the character had appeared in four novels and was portrayed by three actors across five feature films. Anthony Hopkins' Oscar-winning performance in The Silence of the Lambs forever enshrined him in popular culture. We don't need to see Mads Mikkelsen's version of Hannibal the Cannibal to know what he's going to eventually do. We've met the monster.
So instead, we meet an entirely different kind of monster when Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) walks into the opening scene.
I'm using the term "monster" quite lovingly here, because Hugh Dancy's portrait of Will Graham is one of the most innately and necessarily empathetic pieces of acting I've ever seen on television. His work in this show is so complex that he gives titans like Mikkelsen and Laurence Fishburne a run for their money, but when we meet Will, on the doorstep of a double murder, it's clear that he very much sees some part of himself as monstrous.
"I can empathize with anyone," Will tells his boss at the FBI, Behavioral Science Unit head Jack Crawford (Fishburne), "It's less to do with personality disorder than an active imagination."
Will's gift, his curse, is seeing through someone else's eyes. Anyone else's eyes, his active imagination taking hold as he tries to piece together the decisions a person makes. When we meet him, he's doing that with a murderer who walked into a house and shot two people, robbing them of any ability to struggle or feel pain in an instant with surgically placed bullets. But this is not about the murders. It's about the way Will's mind works, as creator Bryan Fuller and director David Slade quickly show us.
When Will drifts into what Hannibal Lecter (Mikkelsen) later calls "pure empathy," a pendulum swings in his mind, clearing all the blood, the cops, the sirens and lights from view and leaving him with a blank slate upon which he can project a recreation of the killer's "design," not just their actions but the reasons behind those actions. But he's not passively watching while a hypothetical killer does these things. He is the killer, shooting down two people in cold blood, ripping their lives apart, and because of his pure empathy, he feels every moment of it. His active imagination, whether he likes it or not, reinforces his monstrous side.
Which is why Will has retreated from fieldwork and taken up a post teaching FBI trainees about criminal profiling and investigation. After the show reveals that the crime scene was a flashback, we learn that Will is on the autism spectrum, that his empathic abilities give him rather powerful nightmares, and that he has trouble socializing with his more neurotypical colleagues and students. We learn all of this because Crawford tells us, because he knows the pitfalls of putting Will back out in the field. But he must, because there's a serial killer he just can't catch.
This killer just abducted his latest victim, and Crawford's hoping they can catch him before he kills her, or before he takes another one, which is where Will comes in. All of the victims look the same – young college age women with auburn/brunette hair and pale "wind-chafed" Midwestern skin – which leads Will to theorize that each of these killings is about one specific person, whether their perp has actually killed her yet or not. It's a fairly straightforward piece of profiling, but things change dramatically when Will and Jack go to the house of the latest victim and find her not vanished, but tucked back into her bed, unbeknownst to her terrified parents. Her corpse has been returned to the site of her abduction as, according to Will, "an apology," an analysis reinforced by another key detail: The killer cut out her cancerous liver, then put it back, because there was, in Will's words, "something wrong with the meat."
This realization rattles Will more than any standard crime scene could. His nightmares return, coupled with an increasing sense of frustration. He explains to Jack, in a scene set in a bathroom right out of The Shining (one of many, many incredible visual motifs in this series), that the killer "loves" his victims in his own twisted way, that he wants to honor them, and that when he couldn't honor his latest catch in the right way, he simply put her back. It's a "kind of crazy," as Crawford puts it, that Will can't fathom. Even his finely tuned sense of empathy can't peer through this fog.
Will copes with this mental and emotional storm by doing something the show leads us to believe he's done many times before: Rescuing a dog. He finds a stray by the side of the road near his home in rural Virginia and spends much of a night befriending, bathing, and re-homing him with his other dogs. There are half a dozen canines under Will Graham's roof and no other humans. It's an uncomplicated form of companionship, one Will can fall back on, and it speaks volume about the parts of him that are decidedly un-monstrous.
Meanwhile, Crawford goes in search of a psychiatrist who can help him peer deeper into Will's mind, understand why he's so good at what he does and why it's so hard for him to keep doing it. Will's colleague and friend Alana Bloom (Caroline Dhavernas), an FBI consultant, turns Jack down, revealing along the way that she's never even been alone in a room with Will, lest her professional curiosity about his condition pollute their friendship. So instead, Jack turns to Alana's mentor, a respected Baltimore-based psychiatrist and medical doctor named Hannibal Lecter.
The first time we meet Hannibal in this series he's – what else? – eating, enjoying a meal in his beautiful home which also doubles as his psychiatry office. At first glance, this man is uncomplicated, or at least not as complicated as Will Graham. He's content, quiet, careful, and, as it turns out, bored to tears. When we actually see Lecter with a patient, we learn that he's desperate for something interesting to put his agile mind to work, so when Crawford comes calling, complete with a healthy dose of flattery, he's too intrigued to turn down the offer.
The first meeting between the two men, under the guise of Lecter assisting as an outside consultant in the investigation, is prickly, to say the least. Lecter is downright perky, eager to work a problem, even more eager to get to know Will and his "knack for the monsters," as Lecter puts it. But Will's very being makes him naturally standoffish, something which intensifies as he recognizes that Lecter's asking probing questions about the way his mind works, the way he feels about things. Hannibal is, on top of everything else, a remarkably funny show, an element drilled home by Crawford's (improvised) shout at an FBI agent to "Use the ladies room!" when he's having a private conversation with Will in the men's. Here, that humor emerges in full bloom, a verdant tangle of verbal barbs, ripostes, and charm capped off by Will's "You wouldn't like me when I'm psychoanalyzed" line.
But the humor is also a doorway into something deeper, something that will ultimately become one of the great throughlines of this entire series. Lecter is not just immediately fascinated by Will, but infatuated with him. Mikkelsen's natural grace and icy charm as a performer gives way to wicked smirks and the kind of smoldering eyes you might see on a first date that's going really, really well. We will talk much, much more about this in the future, but it's important to note that it's here already, from the very first meeting of the show's two main characters. This is a courtship, and Lecter immediately takes things to the next level.
How? Well, he decides to be a copycat for the killer Will's chasing, murdering a girl who fits the profile and leaving her posed and naked atop deer antlers in the middle of a field, her lungs surgically removed. While Lecter's back home cooking up those lungs and looking back with satisfaction on what he's done, Will quickly catches on to this copycat killer's game, immediately pinning it on someone else, someone who's practically begging Will to see the contrasts. Breakthroughs emerge, as Will realizes the real killer has a daughter who looks like all of his victims, a daughter about to leave home, a daughter this killer wants to honor. As for the copycat? Will labels him almost impossible to catch, noting that there's little in the way of a detectable motive and the copycat might not ever kill in the same fashion again.
Lecter heads out to assist in the investigation and bonds with Will by making him breakfast, complete with homemade sausage that's probably full of…well, you get it. Will's updated profile, coupled with a shred of metal pipe found on the last victim by forensics expert Beverly Katz (Hettienne Park), leads the team to a construction site, where a resignation letter with no home address points Will to Garret Jacob Hobbs (Vladimir Jon Cubrt). With Crawford absent due to a court date, it's up to Will and Hannibal to follow-up on the lead, but before they head to Hobbs' home, Hannibal places a discreet call on the job site's office phone, warning Hobbs that "they know." He wants to follow Will, even wants to help him, but Lecter can't let a fellow cannibal go down without a fight.
Once the case-breaking clue is in hand, in keeping with a more classic police procedural format, everything happens quite quickly. Will arrives at Hobbs' home just in time to see Hobbs throw his wife out the front door, her throat cut. Inside, Will finds his killer holed up in the family kitchen, a knife to his daughter's throat. Just as Will thought, Abigail Hobbs (Kacey Rohl) looks exactly like the other victims, and now Hobbs is ready for his final act of love. He cuts Abigail's throat and Will empties the clip of his pistol into Hobbs. Panicked and desperate to save the dying girl, Will freaks out while a dying Hobbs whispers the word "See" repeatedly.
With the danger gone, Lecter, who's been watching all of this from a distance with a mixture of intrigue and cool detachment, finally steps in and uses his medical training to stabilize Abigail, whose throat was fortunately only partially cut. The Minnesota Shrike case is solved, but not without cost.
In the aftermath, Fuller and Slade settle a few dangling narrative threads, and make it clear that Alana is furious at Jack for letting Will get too deep into the field, so deep that he had to take a life. Most importantly, though, they leave us with a curious, fascinating tableau to close the episode. Will, shaken and exhausted, goes to Abigail's hospital room, where she's sleeping and hooked up to all manner of tubes and wires. He finds Lecter there, wearing a very Dadlike sweater and looking immaculate, asleep in a chair by Abigail's bed, holding the girl's hand. Comforted, if only slightly, by this sight, Will settles into another chair in the same room and nods off, leaving us with the most cursed My Two Dads situation ever to air on network television.
This final scene is about Abigail, as future episodes will reveal, but it's mostly about Will, and what Hannibal hopes he can do to deepen their bond, especially now that Will has taken a life. Over the course of just 44 minutes of television, we have watched this practiced, perfect killer make the raggedy profiler breakfast, flirt with him over coffee, and even kill a young woman just to help him out at work. Hannibal is, among many other things, a romance, something that becomes clearer and clearer with the benefit of hindsight. It's something we will talk much, much more about in the weeks to come, but for now we are left with this strange vision of a bloodied, twisted American family, a daughter and her two surrogate fathers, ready to go into the dark together.
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