Hannibal 1x05: "Coquilles"
Welp, if any of y'all are reading the recaps instead of watching the show, or before watching the show to know when to scream and cover your eyes, this is the recap for you.As a side note, if you enjoyed the recaps enough to read them a second time, sometimes I go back and link to conversations we end up having in the comments, because God knows I
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Mine was unquestionably "it was an especially supercilious pig." Wait, no, that's a lie--it was "Did you just SMELL ME?" because obviously.
I can't believe that it took this recap, along with this v. symbolic gif, for me to put it together...is the Dire Ravenstag Will's subconscious manifestation of/warning about Hannibal?
Oh my Goooooood. Bryan Fuller keeps tweeting that it's a combination of the stag Cassie Boyle was impaled on and the ravens pecking at her body, which... was a murder Lecter committed. OH MY GOOOOOOD.
1) a reminder that Will is a possibly-unreliable narrator (pretty much every time we see a murder or lead-up to one, it's explicitly or implicitly Will's POV, and he's usually right but that doesn't make him infallible. It made me question, for example, whether Budish ever *really* saw his victims as crowned in flame, or if that is just Will's post-facto suspicion of how he saw them). And...
My only issue with that is that we saw Budish's POV before Will ever knew about him. In storytelling terms, that seems to indicate that it exists outside Will's mind?
2) a manifestation of Will's imagining-being-a-murderer guilt (since he's imagining that Budish would literally 'see him the same way' as a murder-rapist or other unspecified convicted felon.)
Yeah, that's definitely how I read it. What I'm curious about is how to interpret the dialogue. Does "I can bring it out of you" mean "I can remove this violence/guilt from you" and Will says "Not all the way out," or does it mean "I can bring it out in your character (i.e., make it worse, make it manifest)" and Will's resisting and saying, no, I refuse to let it all the way out?
In strict fairness to the character, I think it's possible for us as the audience to condemn Hannibal for things he says that are unpleasant, but ultimately useful. Like, I do think it's scary that he's trying to alienate Will from Jack Crawford, but on the other hand, he has a point that the whole empathing-with-murderers thing does NOT seem to be good for Will's mental health. And far from using Bella against Jack, he appears to have helped save their marriage? I don't know. It's another interesting facet of the 'the audience knows what the characters don't' phenomenon.
Yeah, that's something I find interesting about this version of the character, and I keep having to remind myself that his goals and perspective are different here before Shit Goes Down. Although, what seemed really manipulative was not "this is bad for you" (it is), but "And it's all Crawford's fault because he abandoned you, even though he's the one who made you get therapy and goes everywhere with you." Like, just the blatant untruth of that, which was so unsubtle that even Will picked up on it. So I'm now trying to look at it not as "who is he trying to screw over here just for the hell of it" but "how is this useful to him?" Sometimes it's useful in whatever way for him to work with people, and sometimes it's useful to work against them. I said this in another comment, but if Will gets so alienated from Crawford that he quits--no one needs Lecter anymore. So it's in his best interest to course-correct and make sure he doesn't push anyone too far.
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Somebody make gif compilations of all the stag appearances, quick! lol
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I'm not sure why I'm generally staying away from the tags on Tumblr (as rich a source of gifs as they must be). It may be that I'm afraid I'll get so overwhelmed with other people's thoughts that I won't be able to corral mine into recap format. Although, if y'all see anything interesting, definitely bring it over.
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I feel like Will's saying there's some evil in him that can't be removed because it's part of his nature. If he didn't always believe that, he may have started believing it after he killed Hobbs and felt good about it.
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