(S P O I L E R S)
In
which I took your life and tried to give it back to you.
Hannibal’s mixture of
the sacred and the profane, the stunning and the mundane, the phantasmagorical and
the standard has always been one of its greatest assets. As I’ve mentioned before in this essay
series, this uneasy balance has served as large scale symbol of Will’s
precarious grasp on reality, and of his gnawing fear that the nightmarescape of
his empathic visions will invade his waking hours. It’s also, to paraphrase Will, served as the
lure on the hook for viewers potentially on the fence about the prospect of
spending extended time in this twisted universe. A serial killer of the week here, a stock
plotline there: sometimes those are all it takes to make the more extreme
material more palatable (although these moments of sanity recede more and more
as Season 2 progresses.)
“Su-Zakana” is almost a prototype
for this narrative formula. The killer
of the week hook involves the disturbed Peter Bernardone and his social worker
Clark Ingram, a pair of dead horses, and an extended metaphor about rebirth
(including a bird flying out of a corpse’s body.) It’s surely outre fare for network
television; you don’t often see bodies being pulled out of horse stomachs in
prime time. But the central conceit of
the story is to offer a fairly obvious parallel between these two men and Will
and Hannibal. Clark is the smooth talking
psychopath, hiding in plain sight in a position of benevolent authority. And Peter’s halting demeanor, inability to
look people in the eye, and dark complexion and beard make him an alternate
version of Will gone completely to seed, consumed by his own worst
instincts. Will obviously sees this
parallel; his dialogue with Peter is peppered with oblique references to
Hannibal’s manipulation of him. And it’s
no coincidence that the horse killer story appears in the episode wherein Will
returns to therapy with Hannibal.
But that vein of madness is
ripped wide, and what ushers forth from the Verger storyline spills directly
into the next scene, a surreal montage of Hannibal and Alana mid-coitus. Their romance already has disturbing enough
implications, so to follow the incest inferences of Margot’s abuse with this
scene makes things even more queasy…yet still darkly erotic. Unless I’m forgetting something, it’s also
the show’s first sex scene, and it’s fully in keeping with Hannibal’s Svengali influence
on the tone of the narrative. Alan ends
their pillow talk by worrying that Will will open a door inside himself from
which he might not emerge, just as the scene cuts from Hannibal rolling over on
her to the unveiling of Sarah Craber’s corpse in the autopsy room. Eros and Thanatos have now run rampant over
three key scenes in a row, to increasingly grotesque effect.
Such a stark dichotomy in
storytelling makes this episode a surreal experience, both propulsive in its
story and completely off the rails in its excesses. And it lends it an economy that makes writing about it a fairly compact endeavor. But in the context of the remainder of Season
2, it’s only a preamble to the swirling madness that will engulf all of the
characters. Especially once Mason Verger
arrives in full. But more on him soon…
There’s no Hannibal without the leftovers:
*“Peter, is your social worker in
that horse?” (Will, injecting humor into a scene that seemingly has none.)
*With Jeremey Davies’s appearance
as Peter, this season can now boast quite the extensive roster of eccentric
character actors, including Amanda Plummer and the soon-to-debut Michael Pitt
(who is really a character actor in a leading man’s body.)
*Will’s near murder of Clark,
followed by Hannibal’s loving embrace of his pupil? Awwww…..
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