HANNIBAL Eps. 11/12: "Ko No Mo/Tome-Wan"

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In which we're maintaining our position on the event horizon of chaos.

"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."

–William Blake/The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

…and in these two episodes, Bryan Fuller manages to redefine excess in the televisual context like no one has before him.  I made great hay out of the subversive nature of “Naka-Choko”’s ending, but the build up to what lies at the end of “Tome-Wan” manages to up the ante for shock in this setting.  For as decadent and excessive as Hannibal Lecter can be, his is a mostly refined sense of these traits.  Mason Verger has no such limits or restraints.

In my previous essay, I discussed the career of Michael Pitt, and of his premature departure from Hannibal following Season 2.  Knowing about his impending absence while rewatching these final two episodes in which he appears adds a touch of melancholy to the proceedings.  Which is a weird thing to say about a closing act that includes heavy implications of child molestation and incest, while also dabbling in tear-stealing, man-eating pigs, and face-shredding.  But Pitt is obviously having such a blast playing Mason, taking great delight in the melodramatic excesses of this warped man-child (his baby face is a great and creepy complement to this.)  There are larger than life characters aplenty in this show, but up to this point they’ve all been generally tethered to some semblance of cohesion and linear logic.  Mason shatters that mold as a man completely consumed by his own privilege and excesses, his insane wealth carrying with it the curse of youth, while allowing him to take on a persona that represents the id unleashed.  So much of this run of Season 2 episodes has focused on Hannibal and Will debating man’s true nature, and of reconciling the beastly with the mannered.  But Mason is the bombastic end game for such a philosophy, an avatar of carnage amidst a legion of defenders of the norm.

And so logically that end game must lead to total consumption via excess.  Which brings us to the scene that tops even Hannibal and Will dining on what is ostensibly Freddie Lounds while debating the nature of God.  Hannibal’s core fanbase was aware of Mason’s gruesome origin story from the book and film of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal, but even in the context of this show’s grand guignol tradition, nothing can quite prepare the viewer for the sight of Michael Pitt slicing off his own face and feeding it to Will’s dogs.  And then, prompted by Hannibal, eating his own nose.  It’s the culmination of a Lecter-infused drug trip gone bad, but it’s also the penance for his sins: after a lifetime of feeding on others, he’s only left to devour himself.

What’s really interesting about Mason’s fate is how, much like other parts of Hannibal, it combines aspects of future storylines in the Lecterverse canon with this prequel setting.  Hence, Mason captures Hannibal with the intention of throwing him to the carnivorous pigs, which serves as the climax of Harris’s book of Hannibal.  And it’s not the only example of this tricky chronology on display here.  In “Ko No Mo”, what appears to be Freddie Lounds’s flaming corpse in a wheelchair is rolled down the ramp of an indoor parking garage.  Longtime Lecter fans know this image intimately: it’s the ultimate fate of the original, male Freddie at the hands of Francis Dolarhyde.  But with the revelation that this incarnation of Freddie is still alive, and in on Jack and Will’s plot to catch Hannibal, the possibility of that well-known death is muddled considerably.  Fuller has shown a strong willingness to toy with the preconceived Lecterverse, so there’s every reason to believe that this Freddie will last well into the Tooth Fairy storyline.  But as with the other references to previous Lecter films, it also simultaneously lends the proceedings an eerie sense of déjà vu and foreshadowing.  Which is perfect for a series that deals so heavily in the rupturing of time, in all its permutations.

That rupture mirrors Will’s fractured psyche, but it also loops back into the viral influence of Hannibal Lecter on the very fabric of the show.  Lest the audience forget this, the return of Bedelia DuMaurier is presented as a firm reminder.  Drawn back into an FBI interview with Will and Jack, she’s willing to implicate her former patient (or is it psychiatrist) in many things, but even she admits that his main crime is persuasion, not coercion.  And even as she advises that he “can get lost in self-congratulation”, she also offers a stinging rebuke to Jack about his chances of conquering over him (“If you think you're about to catch Hannibal, that's because he wants you to think that.  Don't fool yourself into thinking he's not in control of what's happening.”)  Once again, Gillian Anderson is a treat in the role of Bedelia.  Her coy, enigmatic demeanor gives the lie to even her most sincere moments, especially when retroactively considering her eventual season-ending flight to Europe with the fugitive cannibal.  It’ll be interesting to see how Season 3 further explores her motivations in this arena.  Part of me would like to think that her growing sense of contempt for Jack Crawford’s efforts leads her into Hannibal’s arms.  But she also tells him that “Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness”, so perhaps she’s laying out her cards without us knowing about it.

Many a viewer will sympathize with this “It’s Hannibal’s world; we’re just living in it” sentiment.  From a Manichean standpoint, the series can be seriously frustrating at times, as Lecter has an answer for almost every attempt to stop him.  It’s also entirely organic to a narrative that trades in surrealism and a hallucinatory psychogeography.  Indeed, by this point it’s probably a mistake to think of Hannibal as a serial killer thriller with outre tendencies.  It’s more like the ethereal materialization of Bacon and Bosch’s hellscapes, with slight touches of the normal grafted on.  Just as Will flirts with madness in his pursuit of Hannibal, so too does the viewer flirt with the outer reaches of standard moral and ethical boundaries in devouring the show.  And just as Hannibal himself debates the true meaning of God in a seemingly blank universe, so too does the audience consider the potentially nihilistic concept of no guiding force to re-establish right and wrong in the Lecterverse.  Giving yourself over to the demented pleasures of that form is an integral part of fully appreciating this thriller/philosophy lesson/voyage to the inner abyss.  And as Hannibal has proven so far, doing so can be an utterly thrilling endeavor.

Some penultimate leftovers:

*I’ve said it before, but for all her poor romantic choices, it can never be debated that Alan Bloom is potentially the moral center of the show.  Her earnest sense of justice and fairness in a world that seems to scoff at those concepts is so moving, especially in the climactic scene of “Ko No Mo”, in which she rails at Jack for the web of lies he’s spun, only to have her world doubly upended by the reveal of Freddie’s survival.

*“Tome-Wan”’s standoff between Hannibal and Will features some of James Hawkinson’s most daring cinematography, as he frames both men as being almost completely overwhelmed by the shadow the other in the foreground.  It seems like a fairly small part of the episode’s visual scheme, but even in micro form it’s a bold gambit for a show of this format.

*Unless I’m forgetting someone, Mason is the first of Hannibal’s patients that we see lying on the couch in his office.  Which obviously makes him very uncomfortable, as he motions the trust fund maniac back to the chair facing him.  And for as much as Hannibal considers Mason to be a gauche menace, he’s also one of the only characters to make him crack an authentic grin.

*During Margot’s hysterectomy, was I the only one who saw Mason and company’s red scrubs as a nod to David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers?

*“I’m full of myself!” (Mason, post-nose dinner.)

*“What game of chicken are you and the sperm donor playing, Dr. Lecter? (Mason, to Hannibal)

HANNIBAL Eps. 22/23: "Shiizakana/Naka-Chono"

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In which this is the nightmare that followed him out of his dreams.

It’s all about that final scene, isn’t it?  All of the feinting, and lingering glances, and circling around each other?  All of it meant to build to one of the most subversive scenes in, at the very least, network television history, if not the annals of the medium in general.  The one in which the ostensible protagonist and the ostensible antagonist (although we’ve long since abandoned reductive definitions like those in the context of Hannibal) sit down to dine on what is heavily implied to be the body of a just recently butchered, petite female journalist.  In which they continue their long-standing personal symposium on the nature of God, punctuated by that ostensible protagonist tossing out “You can't reduce me to a set of influences.  I'm not the product of anything.  I've given up good and evil for behaviourism.”  And in which they finish off the episode with a knowing grin between them, the conclusion of a tete-a-tete laden with homoerotic undertones (itself the conclusion of a long-gestating homoeroticism in said relationship.)

See, Hannibal non-converts?  This is what you’ve been missing in the late hours of Friday night prime time for the past two years.  Let the show’s move to Thursday nights serve as a wake up call.

It’s so strange discussing the anarchic glee that Hannibal displays in the latter stages of Season 2 from an objective perspective, because longtime viewers (or writers who decide to shotgun the entire run in a month and a half for an essay series) have, much like Will Graham with Hannibal, become so inured to the freaky stylistic timbre of the narrative that a scene like the aforementioned one just seems like a logical progression of the plot.  Granted, when I think back to watching this episode for the first time a year ago, it seemed deeply disturbing…although part of me had to figure that all was not as it seemed.  And in retrospect, knowing that so much of what we see in these penultimate episodes is the carefully crafted product of Will’s design, his grand plot to catch Hannibal once and for all, some of the shock is lessened.  But his deep dive into Lecter’s abyss is not without its ambiguous implications.  In a recent interview with Backstage, Hugh Dancy noted that Will remains somewhat of a mystery to him, that he tries to embrace the more nebulous aspects of the character in portraying him.  This is why Hannibal is still such a thrilling experience the second time around: the radical psychological dialectic refuses easy answers on the moral and ethical spectrum. 

This two episode run is a sterling example of such a dialectic, its narrative thrust trading in the role of animal instinct in human lives.  Once again, the killer of the week device is employed as commentary on the main storyline, although the tale of animal trapped in a human body Randall Tier invades that central story in a more severe manner than most of the show’s pop-up psychopaths.  In a near-repeat of his warning to Garret Jacob Hobbs, Hannibal advises Randall of the FBI’s approaching hoofbeats.  But his greater intent this time is to push his former patient toward murdering Will, or at least toward testing the boundaries of Will’s growing commitment to their relationship.  There’s much discussion between Will and Hannibal about the need to embrace their animalistic side.  In analyzing one of Randall’s murders, Will tells Jack that “He wants to maul.  There’s nothing personal about this” and that “He’s not denying its natural instincts.  He’s evolving them” (in regards to the appropriation of the predatorial instinct.)  In “Naka-Chono”, when Will’s empathic vision of Randall’s killer delivers him into a discussion with this man that he just slaughtered and hung on an animal skeleton, his victim states that “This is my becoming.  And it’s yours.” 

It’s another in the show’s long line of foreshadowings to the eventual arrival of Francis Dolarhyde, but it also cements the uneasy question of what dark instincts are growing within Will.  Early on in “Shiikazana”, Hannibal prods him about his fantasy of murdering him (by manipulating the nightmare stag that has haunted him since he killed Garret Hobbs, which also serves as a direct nod to one of young Hannibal’s more gruesome murders in the prequel Hannibal Rising.)  Will’s response (“I felt a quiet sense of power”) could be applied to so many of the disturbed, impotent individuals in the Lecterverse, all chasing after a dominance that flirts with the divine.  It’s no mistake that animal imagery is so closely associated with these would-be pupae. Jame Gumb’s Death’s-head Hawkmoth, Dolarhyde’s Red Dragon, Mason Verger’s pigs (more on them in a moment): all of these men aspire to transcendence by regressing themselves to their basest instincts, mirrored by the way in which so many of Hannibal’s murder tableaus elevate their very human victims to near-transcendent works of art.  Will Graham may never fully reach the depths of impotence that they all inhabit, but he comes close to touching it, enough so to rip away at the fabric of his sanity.  His self-defense-driven murder of Randall Tier is morally sound, but the manner in which he delivers up the corpse to Hannibal as a peace offering can’t just be dismissed as part of his plan.  Those actions scar Will in ways that are still left to be explored.

Scars and the animal instinct both serve large roles in “Naka-Mono”, in which the death of Randall Tier appears to release his instincts into the veins of the plot.  In a surreal and somewhat queasy sequence, Hannibal continues his seduction of Alana by comparing the musical qualities of his Theremin to their love making (which is all shot with a near-impressionist sheen by James Hawkinson.)  The scene is crosscut with Margot’s seduction of Will (to produce the male heir she needs to inherit the Verger fortune?), their exploration of their mutual physical and mental scars the animalistic foreplay, Hannibal’s distant voice the narration “guiding them from dissonance to composition.”  And then, in a truly audacious sequence, the two sexual couplings are merged in a psychotropic visual melange, as Will psychologically shifts between Margot and Alana, before ending up in bed with her and Hannibal.  But his most prescient vision (and one of the show’s most disturbing) is of the Wendigo plowing away on Alana (which itself calls back to the POV closeup of Will as the nightmare stag in “Shiizakana”, drenched in blood, clothed in stag hide, a look of ecstasy adorning his face as he rises from his human meal.)

Such a perverse sequence is aptly complementary to the arrival of Mason Verger into the main plot.  Michael Pitt has always been an actor who’s fascinated me.  His delicate good looks give him the air of a melancholic leading man, but his career choices veer much more toward the life of a character actor.  Cast opposite Steve Buscemi in Boardwalk Empire, he was the damaged soul/prodigal son whose flight from the gangster life was motivated by a debilitating personal trauma.  And from the mumbling Kurt Cobain surrogate in Last Days to the psychopathic pretty boy in the American version of Funny Games to the burgeoning sexual experimentalist of The Dreamers, he’s always pushed at the boundaries of his assumed career path.  He’s also developed a reputation as being difficult to work with, which was abetted by his early departure from Boardwalk and his quitting Hannibal after Season 2.  Whether these rumors are true is anyone’s guess, but his body of work is still constantly intriguing.  In his limited turn as Mason, he imbues what is probably the most deviant, despicable character in the Lecterverse (at least in the context of what is revealed about him in Thomas Harris’s Hannibal) with a demented sense of delight, the self-satisfied decadence of a man living in a hermetically sealed world, whose unlimited financial power both protects him and traps him in cycle of searching for an elusive and greater high (one of his first lines is “What do I want?”, repeated four times.)  Bryan Fuller has described Mason as The Joker to Hannibal’s Batman, which is a real testament to the complexity of Lecter’s character in this version of his story.  And like the Clown Prince of Crime, Mason uses part of Hannibal’s repertoire against him.  For as Will and others have noted in the past, the Chesapeake Ripper views his victim as pigs, the very animal that Mason utilizes to predatory extremes, eventually against his sister’s psychiatrist at the conclusion of this season.             

To the leftovers we go:

*After years of hiding in plain sight, Hannibal is forced to deal with an ever growing army of doubters in these late season episodes.  “Naka-Mono”, in particular, gives voice to Margot, Freddie, and Alana in this regard (Freddie as the voice of reason is a real delight.)  Viewed through the pseudo-rape/assault lens of “Yakimono”, it’s a fitting development for this story.  It also provides another layer to the Hannibal/Alana/Will love triangle, as her questioning of the boundaries of their relationship when the trio have dinner is soon thereafter followed by Will and Hannibal’s episode-ending culinary meetup (which plays very much like the spurned lover getting back with the true object of his affection after sleeping with his true love out of revenge.)

*In their initial conversation in “Shiizakana”, Will and Hannibal are shot by James Hawkinson in a series of increasingly closer one-shots.  The effect is both intimate and disorienting, a further establishment of the collapsing psychological reality of this season.

*Come one now: how many other shows would attempt a Theremin-centric love scene?

*“What’s your private carnage?” (Will, to Margot)

*“You will always be ruled by your fascination with teeth.” (Hannibal, to Randall)

HANNIBAL Ep. 21: "Su-Zakana"

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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 then there’s the rest of the narrative.  And boy, does it embody everything that’s great about Hannibal when it lets its freak flag fly.  Appropriately enough, this vein of madness is first tapped with the debuting Margot Verger.  Katharine Isabelle has always possessed a striking, feral beauty (which she used to great effect in Ginger Snaps), so she’s a perfect fit as one half of quite possibly the most dysfunctional of all the show’s duos.  Immediately following Hannibal’s discussion of the horse as Sarah Craber’s cocoon, the scene cuts to a disturbing montage of exotic fish in an ornate oval tank, Margot’s head being slammed down onto it, her tears being soaked up in a gauze square (by what will turn out to be brother Mason), and another one of Season 2’s close up shots of an eye.  When narrative logic resumes, it’s tempered by her discussion of killing her monstrous brother in Hannibal’s office. 

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…..

HANNIBAL Ep. 20: "Yakimono"

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In which he got inside my head.  I remember a dream about drowning.  And then being awake.  And not awake.  Being myself, and not myself.

One of the great pleasures of rewatching Hannibal in its entirety has been being able to dissect the hazy nightmare world that Bryan Fuller and his collaborators create, to savor the lush art direction and helter skelter soundwork without the primary plot-driven concerns of an initial viewing (even though the show’s labyrinthine plotting is still a part of this experience.)  Giving myself over to some of the more outre moments, while also clinically studying all of the complex psychological undertones and power dynamics has revealed so many levels of richness in what on paper is a 43 minute per week, network remake of a cannibal film.  And to revel once again in the darkest of dark humor in which the series trades?  That’s almost a bonus.

But for all the discussion of how deliriously warped and decadent Hannibal is, the real human drama on display can sometimes be forgotten.  I mentioned this in my essay about the death of Beverly Katz, and the profound emotional scars it leaves on Jack, Will, and the others.  Watching “Yakimono” again, I was deeply struck by how very real and disturbing an episode it is.  For beyond the plot’s acceleration of the hunt for Hannibal lies a raw examination of the horrifying aftermath of trauma.

In my essay for “Kaiseki”, I mentioned how Will’s flashback to Hannibal inserting Abigail’s ear into his stomach via feeding tube carried with it the queasy air of rape, especially in the often homoerotic context layered over the two men’s relationship.  “Yakimono” picks up this implication and runs with it, reframing Hannibal as something more than just a empathy-free sociopath.  What first summoned up such associations for me was the opening scene, in which the newly discovered Miriam Lass is medically evaluated by Zeller and Price.  We’ve seen the standard medium shot of this process before, the featured character looking directly into the lens as their possessions and physical characteristics are read over the soundtrack.  It’s always featured the same mugshot blank look on that character’s face.  It’s not until Miriam is subjected to this process that it becomes truly uncomfortable. 

Credit Anna Chlumsky with selling Miriam’s pain through the subtleties of her vacant stare.  During her first conversation with Jack, James Hawkinson frames both characters in tight side profile, a choice he hasn’t often used in this series.  It’s reminiscent of Tak Fujimoto’s extensive usage of first person POV close ups in The Silence of the Lambs, which simultaneously created a sense of intimacy and danger.  Similarly here, the audience is forced to stare at long, unbroken takes of Miriam recounting the trauma of her imprisonment.  Remove the fantastical serial killer aspects, and her words (part of which form the quote at the beginning of this essay) strikingly resemble those of a rape victim, or of someone finally exiting an abusive relationship.  We know that the strobe-like flashbacks of her shadowy captor are Hannibal’s doing, but they also approximate the suppressed memories of an attacker often associated with this type of victimization.  Granted, there’s no explicit implication that Hannibal’s imprisonment of her contained sexual assault.  But when he attacks her in his office in the Season 1 flashback, the way his dominant physicality takes her from behind can’t be completely scrubbed of any latent sexuality.

And in this context, Will’s acquittal and subsequent return to the real world in “Yakimono” also hammers home his victim status.  The clincher is his conversation with Miriam, as the two survivors of Hannibal’s schemes share their pain.  Even though Will can now remember those nefarious machinations, he still bears the same emotional wounds that his youthful counterpart does.  Framed this way, his time in the BSPH dungeon is doubly upsetting; it’s like the girl who’s been raped by the popular guy who no one would ever blame.  As Abel Gideon muses to Alana before his death: “All the things that make us who we are.  What has to happen to make those things change?”  Will Graham doesn’t start out as a rock of stability, but when his breakdown is seen through the rape/assault lens that Fuller uses in this episode, the depths to which he sinks to deal with it are truly horrifying and heart-rending.

Even beyond Miriam and Will, there’s the trauma of victimhood to be had with Frederick Chilton, everyone’s favorite prick of a doctor.  I’ve lauded Raul Esparza before for the delight he takes in hamming it up as Chilton.  What’s remarkable in these last few episodes is how, much like Eddie Izzard did as Abel Gideon, he’s given the chance to reveal the sympathetic, human side of what could easily become a caricature.  His very real fear of being the next course on Hannibal’s plate becomes distinctly palpable as the plot unfolds, especially when he awakens in his house after being drugged by his nemesis, covered in blood he didn’t shed, the ingenious frame job complete.  Again, in the rape/assault context presented here, he’s another one of Hannibal’s victims who’s been drugged and left to awake to the aftermath of an unseen crime.  When he eventually ends up in the interrogation room with Alana (whose wine, it’s implied, was drugged in the previous episode to make her complicit in Hannibal’s pursuit of Gideon…although that too takes on some unsavory implications as well), he’s a clearly broken man, the mask of smarm that he so expertly wears removed to show a despairing blank stare, the same one that’s featured in that recurring medical intake shot in which we saw Miriam earlier in the episode.  So when driven by the implanted false memory of him as her captor, she shoots him in the face, it’s a disturbing conclusion to a cycle of trauma and violence in which the perpetrator’s final joke is to make his victims figuratively cannibalize each other.

None of this is to imply that Bryan Fuller’s grand narrative gambit is to cast Hannibal Lecter as a pseudo-rapist.  That would profoundly alter the fabric of the show, and skew the moral and ethical complexity of his character towards something far more direct.  But viewing the brutal impact of his actions through this lens, even if briefly, lends a devastating sense of gravitas and power to the series.

A few leftovers before we go:

*This episode marks the final Season 2 appearance of Raul Esparza as Chilton.  Between having his kidney stolen and being shot in the face by Miriam, he became the punching bag of the show.  And he’s returning in some role in Season 3, a survivor to the end!

*”I have to deal with you and my feelings about you” says Will to Hannibal at the end of the episode.  In the show’s latent homoerotic context, it’s a humorous line.  It also begins Will’s undercover descent into Hannibal’s psyche, and the deeper entrenchment of the ambiguity-laced romance between them. 

*“I sowed the seeds and watched them grow.” (Will, deep in his empathic vision, at the Ripper’s hideaway/workshop.)

*“I would like to remain not dead for the forseeable future.” (Universal insight and humor from Chilton.)