Hannibal 2x05: "Mukōzuke"
So... it's been a while. The last twelve months have not the easiest year of my life. I don't know if I can finish up the recaps before season 3 starts on June 4, but I'll give it my best shot. (If I can't make it in time, I'll just keep going until I catch up.) I'd also like to intersperse some Twin Peaks recaps (with commentary from Lily Rose/ @lily_delphine) as well. Even I can tell that's delusionally ambitious, but we'll see how it goes, giving Hannibal the priority since it's actually going to be back on the air first.
At this point, the spoiler policy is that I'm going to point out the massive amounts of foreshadowing without actually giving things away, in case you haven't actually watched the show (a lot of people have been interested in the story without being able to handle the gore). Spoilers will be allowed in the comments, and if I have to footnote things to discuss the plot elements down there, I will. Actually, it's going to be super fun going through the season again knowing what happens and being able to pick up on all the themes they wove in; I look forward to slapping myself in the face on a daily basis.
Meanwhile, I left you on a massive cliffhanger:
PREVIOUSLY ON: EMPATH AND CANNIBAL, WHICH WAS A LONG, LONG TIME AGO: Evidence Queen Beverly Katz was too good for this world. I mean, yes, there was also strobe metronome gaslighting and Amanda Plummer was the Worst At Helping With Bees and Will decided to make a deal with Chilton and Chilton promptly betrayed him, but that is garden-variety Supreme Fuckery for this show. No, "Takiawase" will always be remembered as Beverly's Last Stand.
Death makes angels of us all.
Also, Hettienne Park revealed that she asked if Beverly could kick Hannibal in the balls on her way out, and nothing we saw precluded that from having happened. I'm just saying.
@HettiennePark: Me: Ma, r u watching #HANNIBAL tonight? Ma: Ob course! Me: What if my character dies? Ma: Noooo..too soon to die, isn't it? I gonna be cry.
@lorettaramos: your poor mother...
@HettiennePark: She'll be fine. I had some egg rolls delivered to her house. #TooSoon?
( oh my God I love her mom)
By the way, the Storify with the original episode livetweeting and background info is here.
Also-also, "Cleo, why do you come on this podcast and just..." "...make us all sad?" "This is my design." "NOOOOOOO!"
So: right after the episode where Hannibal "baited a hook" and "lured" Beverly in...
[screencapped.net]
Seafood. I swear to God. Which is montaged in contrast with the slop Will gets in the dungeons.
@aMoTPodcast: Every time I'm disappointed at #Hannibal escaping comeuppance, I just imagine him locked up eating lukewarm Beef Stroganoff.
@lily_delphine: Canned creamed corn.
@lurkeriatipsos: In velcro slippers. *cackles* *cranks up PraiseTV*
(MY DAY HAS COME)
At the moment, however, Hannibal remains cooking at large for Jack in a fetching red sweater, which is probably symbolic but also alarmingly casual.
@BryanFuller: #HANNIBAL IS LISTENING TO "SCENES OF CHILDHOOD FROM FOREIGN LANDS" BY ROBERT SCHUMANN #RIPBEVERLY
@neoprod: Jack eats his protein scramble and crustacean on the oyster shell to the Debussy tune of La Cathedrale Engloutie
And then, due to a love of '80s animation, I remembered that engloutie means "drowned": "This piece is based on an ancient Breton myth in which a cathedral, submerged underwater off the coast of the Island of Ys, rises up from the sea on clear mornings when the water is transparent. Sounds can be heard of priests chanting, bells chiming, and the organ playing, from across the sea."
Which is significant, because this episode has a MASSIVE water theme going. I saw someone (possibly this meta post?) pointing out that the entire series has had a really interesting fire/water motif: Hannibal is fire (the flames in his pan; burning Georgia alive; the Ravenstag bursting into flame) and Will is water (his love of fishing; his dreams of tsunami waves and ice shelves melted by heat; his tearful S1 breakdowns). And this episode is awash, literally, in water imagery--but now, rather than express Will's vulnerability to "fire," it has connotations of drowning and overwhelming and spilling over: finally, Will fighting back.
@BryanFuller: JANICE POON'S ILLUSTRATION FOR #HANNIBAL'S BREAKFAST WITH JACK #RIPBEV
@arrakisfilm: cutting the opening food montage was fun! Only sound was on the egg
(beverllykatz.tumblr.com)
As for that little stunt, food stylist Janice Poon (JANICE ILU) writes, "I've tried it and can only get it 1 out of 4 tries, and I’ve seen Benihana chefs flub the manoeuver when they have an entire grill as target. Mads has to crack his eggs into a 8-inch diameter skillet. [...] I guess I don’t have to tell you that when Mads arrives on set, I briefly describe the egg trick to him whereupon he just tosses an egg up in the air and breaks it perfectly on the spatula. Did it. Unbelievable. I insist it was a lucky fluke but he does it again. I accuse him of practicing when I wasn’t looking but he laughs (as if he has time to practise egg-cracking between scenes) and confesses he was a juggler in his youth." Of course he was.
So it turns out that the dish in question, which generally involves eggs, bacon and oysters in some fashion, is called "Hangtown Fry," and and once you've gotten to the end of the episode, you'll understand why I CANNOT EVEN right now. And Hannibal's version apparently involves an oyster platter with crawford crawfish holding water beetles; if that's supposed to evoke scarabs/death/Bella/Hannibal being a terrible person/wtf in some way, I'll throw shoes. Again. Some more.
"You have to eat something, Jack," says Hannibal, laying a hand on his shoulder. "You've been up all night." So what you're telling me here is that... this is the actual morning after Bella tried to overdose on morphine and Hannibal caught Beverly at his house? This is mere hours later? Good God. "Feed the body, feed the mind," adds Hannibal, because of course he does.
And Jack is here to eat the hell out of your comforting gestures, maybe put on some grief bacon while he's here. Meanwhile, I spent the whole week after "Takiawase" tormenting friends and acquaintances by pointing out that, if Beverly's bullet through the floor places the Murder Basement right beneath the dining room, that means that all Hannibal's guests have been dining over it this whole time. And over [SPOILER] that/who/which Beverly saw in it. Alana, Chilton, Freddie, killers of the week, entire dinner parties. How many times did Hannibal have Jack over for dinner, right on top of it all? Meditate on that, if you will.
"She knew she couldn't beat the cancer," says Jack, sitting down at that very same table, "so she... decided to beat it to the finish line. I suppose I can't blame her for wanting to control how she dies."
"I believe those who can no longer function at an acceptable level have the right to die," says Hannibal, calmly packing away scrambled eggs. You know, every now and then he tries to people in a comforting way, but it comes out like " I was so worried about you! I strongly advised against it." Or, you know, like this.
"She cast you as an executioner. She wanted to die. I can't tell you how grateful I am that you didn't allow it to happen," says Jack. And you know, I get it--the Crawfords basically stated their situation as "I love you too much to stay" and "I love you too much to let go"--the unanswerable pull between love and relief. This is a story a lot of people have to live, and it's already rough without Murder Satan being involved, so it's REALLY, REALLY AWFUL that Hannibal's dancing between the two of them playing God (" saving lives is just as arousing as ending them," UGHHHH), as well as specifically manipulating the situation to stay in Jack's favor.
@tenebris: You know, I'm really starting to wonder who the bad break-up is really gonna be between this season.
"As a doctor," says Hannibal, "I had no choice. As a philosopher, I had too many. It wasn't what I could do for Bella, it was what I couldn't do to you, Jack. I guess I'm a better friend than therapist." "You're a great friend, Hannibal," says Jack.
I'm sorry, could you say that again? Into this recorder? There's a certain empath who ought to hear this.
(There's a segue in my head from that to "speaking of people known to use recording devices," but that's too ham-handed even for me.)
@DeLaurentiisCo: Does @Tattle_Crime have any leads on the whereabouts of Beverly Katz? Following any leads?
@Tattle_Crime: Got an odd phone call today @DeLaurentiisCo, it was garbled but they said something about "See what you've already seen". Strange.
After that hella symbolic breakfast scene, we find Freddie approaching the Observatory, carefully ascending the stairs--
@Tattle_Crime: I got a hot tip about the Observatory and I'm checking it out. Don't worry, I brought Lois.
@BryanFuller: FREDDIE LOUNDS' GUN IS A DERRINGER SNAKE SLAYER NAMED "LOIS" @Tattle_Crime @LaraJeanC #LOISLANE
--in her best pirate ensemble, no less:
All we know right now is that she's faced with a row of glass panes, a blood-tinged pool of water, and [TRICKLING SOUND].
@LaraJeanC: Drip drip. I'm sensing a theme this episode. #awaitingthepool
@cleolindajones: oh God bless that her first move is to reach for HER CAMERA
Sometime later, Jack arrives with a stoic shrug of his coat--he hasn't been told who Freddie found ("Send someone else, Jack," she says, "she's one of yours"). He looks so stone-faced going in that maybe he's guessed who it is but is just not prepared for what he's about to see; maybe he assumes the body they've found is, at long last, Miriam's. It's... not.
(full gif set, graphic imagery)
Writes Janice, "Beverly has been in and out of the frying pan so many times in the draft scripts of the last two episodes that I have known for several months I will be cooking her up for Hannibal…yet I am utterly stopped in my tracks when I see vivisected silcone Beverly in the studio, sliced up in clear acrylic like a Damien Hirst cow. I stand 5 inches away from the piece and it looks real. I would like to marvel at the talent of François Dagenais, our prosthetic guy who makes these human sculptures, but I can’t. My mind is too busy screaming 'She’s really dead!'"
@neoprod: MUKŌZUKE: a SLICED dish of seasonal sashimi. Say it isn't so.....
[*CLAWING AT MY OWN FACE*]
@MrAaronAbrams: I LOVE YOU @HettiennePark! YOU'RE TRULY AMAZING. Hope to see you soon XO. Not in Hannibal Heaven but yknow at a bar or somethin.
@MrAaronAbrams: Jimmy's gonna have to pick up some of the kiss slack. #RIPBev #Hannibal @ScottThompson_ @HettiennePark [AWWWWW]
We'll get more into the actual tableau in a bit; for now, we have to watch a montage of Beverly's ID badge, her lab coat hanging at her empty desk, and Jack breaking the news to both Jimmy and Brian. I thought Laurence Fishburne breaking down was bad, but this is just the worst. It's just terrible. And then Jack has to tell the rest of the department: "At aproximately 9 am this morning I received a phone call from Freddie Lounds. Acting on an anonymous tip, she discovered a female body and immediately contacted my office. I was amongst the first on the scene. The victim has been identified as our colleague, Special Agent Beverly Katz. She will be memorialized at FBI Headquarters and Field Offices so that her ultimate sacrifice will always be remembered. That's all."
Well, not entirely all: here's Will in the visitation room with a thousand-yard stare, not hearing anything Jack or Alana are trying to tell him--just the sound of his element, water. When he turns his head, Beverly is standing by the window, the blinds hanging there like the panes of glass she was posed in.
"I want to see her," says Will.
@DireRavenstag: Time to get dressed up, my Will! So handsome in your mask! All tied up and presentable.
So now we finally get to see the show's version of The Mask. Interestingly enough, Buzzfeed posted shots of Anthony Hopkins trying on various masks for Silence of the Lambs, and one of the considerations, apparently, was whether his eyes could be seen. So the show builds off that design and uses the same shape ( although they considered various mouths) for Will's mask, but takes it one step further by making the entire faceplate clear.
@cleolindajones: Admittedly, I'm kinda upset that Will didn't EARN that mask in any way. #Hannibal #BITEEVERYONE
@tinytempest: right? #Hannibal earned it, he bit the crap out of everyone. Has Will bitten anyone? NO
To be fair, it would probably be hard to get anyone to believe in Will's innocence after he'd launched himself teeth first at the Baltimore State Dungeons staff. On the other hand, there has been a woeful lack of face-biting on this show so far.
(I am D Y I N G to see them cram Mads Mikkelsen into the full Hannibal Lecter regalia. SANTA, I HAVE BEEN SO GOOD.)
Poor Will just doesn't even look present as the orderlies strap him into the jacket and the restraints and the hand truck and the whole celebrity sociopath shebang, while Freddie snaps pictures of him outside the observatory.
@jonathanmtucker: little dangerous at times having actors rolling poor dancy around in that fully locked suit.
Of which I have plenty of set pictures in the Storify. And that's Matthew Brown right there (and Jonathan Tucker was a total joy livetweeting the night it aired, let me tell you), the orderly we previously saw bringing Will food in " Hassun." So there goes Will into the observatory, trundled out on his dolly--I was going to say all these restraints are completely unnecessary, but then I remembered how he escaped the jail van in " Savoureux," and... tough but fair. Maybe it's for the best, even, that he phyiscally can't react to his first glimpse of Beverly sliced up in glass specimen panes.
@manatee73: Watching EP.205 of #Hannibal and am convinced Jack Crawford is never crueler than when he unstraps Will in the observatory.
Yeah... Crawford tells everyone to GTFO and manhandles the completely helpless Will out of the restraints himself. Because while the Chesapeake Ripper killed Beverly--obviously Will couldn't have--I could imagine Jack having a sense that everything went to hell around the time Will started working with them and (supposedly) became a killer himself. Instead of Will helping Jack catch the Ripper, everything got exponentially worse. And maybe Jack really blames himself, since he sent Beverly down the Miriam path (for that matter, he's the one who brought Will in to consult in the first place), but it's easier to project that anger onto Will.
And now, Will gets to see the crime scene for himself. Said Bryan Fuller just after "Takiawase" aired, "You can’t just kill somebody to kill somebody. It has to sting for the audience, and it has to sting for the other characters. A lot of episode five is non-dialogue scenes where you see everybody’s reaction to what has happened. … I’m excited about people’s reactions to all of that that happens in episode five. [Breathless.] You’ve gotta see episode five!"
@Battista_j: I just yelled FUCK! for about 30 seconds.
And now I understand why he was like YOU GOTTA SEE THIS, because my general policy is to avoid posting any images that are gory or unusually disturbing, but I really, really want to now. (I won't.) (But I really, really want to.) (Here, have some concept art.) It takes the weirdly beautiful imagery of The Cell and adds both a human element and an emotional one, and somehow it just really gets you in how fitting it is, that if this character died because she delved into the evidence and got too close to catching Hannibal, this is the send-off she would get. You've heard the phrase "donate your body to science"? She will be memorialized so that her ultimate sacrifice will always be remembered.
And then Jack steps back and leaves Will to it.
@cleolindajones: oh Jesus don't empath it!
"The Chesapeake Ripper wants to perform," says Will. "Every brutal choice has elegance... grace. His mutilations hide the true nature of his crimes." I cannot wait for the day Will ends up trying to actually empath one of Lecter's murder scenes, is all I'm saying.
OH, BEVERLY
I DIDN'T WANT IT TO BE THIS WAY
At first, he just can't do it. (Man, they just keep on showing the tableau from every angle imaginable, obscuring nothing. NBC: Not Giving One Single Fuck Since 2013.) And then Memory Palace Beverly appears and says what she said the last time Will blamed himself for someone's death:
"You said you just interpret the evidence. So interpret the evidence."
Now the golden mind metronome turns back time and puts Beverly back together, which is intensely cool, until Will is alone with her, whole, in the darkened murder basement.
(thumbsinthefridge.tumblr.com)
And then he starts strangling her.
@cleolindajones: KICK HIM IN THE BALLS!
"I know her," says Will, speaking as her killer, because YEAH, I GUESS HE DOES
(screencapped.net)
FUCKER
"I strangle Beverly Katz," empaths Will as she struggles, "looking in her eyes. She knows me. And I. Know. Her." Not only is this the first time Will's empathed Hannibal killing someone--I think it's the first time he already knew who the killer was. Beverly knows it's Hannibal and Hannibal knows it's Beverly and Will knows it's Hannibal and Hannibal knows that Will's going to see this tableau, he left it here for him as a warning about what happens when people get in his way and Will knows he did and EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT EVERYBODY KNOOOOOWS, MAN.
But we need to talk for a moment about how Hugh Dancy is the unsung hero of this show. He's constantly mirroring or mimicking the other actors--not just in the scenes where Will empaths crimes, where he also lets Will's own distinct personality peek through in response. But it's so subtle that you often don't notice it. And it comes from a bit in Red Dragon about how Will constantly, involuntarily takes on other people's speech patterns; I don't think I noticed how often Hugh does it until a specific moment where he channels Jeremy Davies' character in "Su-zakana" (2x08) coming up, but this episode in particular is a showcase for it. Thus, we get Will's icy (I'm sorry) interpretation of Hannibal here:
"I expertly squeeze the life from her... rendering her unconscious" --okay, Hannibal did this to Miriam, this is pretty standard-- "I freeze her body... preserving shape and form so I can more cleanly dismantle her."
@HettiennePark: Foreigner - Cold As Ice
@HettiennePark: #Bevsicle #RIPBev [with Caroline Dhavernas in Dark Alana makeup]
@BryanFuller: CONTINUITY PHOTO FOR #KATZICLE #RIPBEV
AND THEN
@Maxasaurusrex: did he freeze a fucking body overnight and table saw her
@cleolindajones: yes
He has a table saw. He has a fucking table saw. The saw in the pantry was just his casual everyday saw. The basement is where he keeps his heavy-duty arts-and-crafts saw. Was Beverly actually dead when she was frozen, or just kinda frostbit? Hannibal Lecter has a full-length tabletop murder saw.
"She cuts like stone."
A SAAAAAAAAAW
(So that was melting ice-blood trickling onto the observatory floor. Although--I'm sorry, this is a terrible line of thought I'm going down--I could see him draining most of the blood first, as in this beautiful but entirely disturbing fan art.)
@cleolindajones: Could you actually freeze and slice someone like that? * COMMENTERS INTENSIFY*
@aMoTPodcast: Realistically? I'm going with "writers realized it was the best possible alternative to plastination"
@cleolindajones: "Look, he has a freezer, he has a saw, he's a murder wizard, what do you want"
@aMoTPodcast: *Goes to BodyWorlds* "Okay, it is our literary responsibility to do all of that. How do we do all of that?"
@cleolindajones: "It is our literary responsibility to, at some point, make references to Casino Royale. GO."
Guys, I don't think you know how much I love Casino Royale. Sure, Skyfall was great, but that is the Bond movie for me--my mom was a huge old-school fan, but the movies just never really did anything for me until they restarted the series. And then a few days after "Mukozuke" aired, THIS happened:
@BryanFuller: #HANNIBAL ROYALE BY @DAVID_A_SLADE
(*tiny screams*)
I'm sorry, I've wandered off from the fact that Hannibal Lecter is the motherfucking worst.
"I pull her apart... layer by layer," says Will, as we see the tableau expand. "Like she would a crime scene." Get your drink ready: "This is my design."
You know, it's interesting how not sexualized Beverly's tableau is. In case you're not looking at the pictures, what Hannibal's done is saw (SAAAAAW) Beverly straight down the middle, leaving one fully-clothed half of her body to stand next to the unclothed half that's been arranged in thin slices between panes of glass. The placement of the panes rather elegantly obscures Things What You Can't Show On TV; the camera angles emphasize the broad anatomical interiors of the slides rather than the thin edges of exposed skin. Obviously it's upsetting; it's Beverly and we care about her, and watching everyone on the show break down and grieve for her is heartbreaking. And beyond that, there's a gigantic, upsetting cognitive dissonance between the half we recognize to be Beverly and the half we don't, the scientific cross-section we barely register as human. And yet it is human, it is entirely human, it is the anatomical reality of the human form that most of us don't see or think about very often. As I've said before, the sight of blood doesn't freak me out, but the sight of gore and muscle--i.e., the body as meat--does. (Hence my periodic shrieks of " MEAT WINGS!!") There's a shot in " Sorbet" of the soprano's vocal cords, presenting the idea that art and beauty comes from that meat. And I feel like a lot of us spend a lot of time subconsciously pretending that science will eventually let us live forever, and that our food in clean white supermarkets simply sprang into being. Death--anatomy, its fragile bleeding fallibility--is shocking in a way it wasn't, say, a hundred, two hundred years ago. And the thing about Hannibal is that he's both a surgeon and a chef, "transferring his passion for anatomy into the culinary arts," and while his cannibalism is depraved and grotesque on most levels, "man as flesh" is a concept he's reconciled far better than most of us have. This tableau is knock-down horrifying for us, but to a mindset like his, it is a creation of respect and inevitable truth. So as disturbing as the "human as meat" concept has always been for me, I found myself looking closer at the cross-sections, and finding what we're made of beautiful.
(To take the sting out of it: Hettienne Park kissing "Accordion Katz" on the cheek.)
"I will leave no usable evidence"--and now, a glimpse of something prowling behind the slides--
@DireRavenstag: OH HAI, WILL. Just watching you work, boo. Just keep doing your thing.
"but... she found something. She found me," Will intones as the wendigo peers between the panes. "What she found is already gone. What did I take from her?"
In the waking world, Jack comes forward again: "It's the Chesapeake Ripper." "It's the Ripper... and the copycat," says Will, and they are two tastes that taste terrible together. "The same killer. Two masks... Beverly helped me see it." "Help me see it," says Jack, because OH MY GOD, DO YOU NOT GO HERE? HAVE YOU NOT BEEN WATCHING YOUR OWN SHOW? Beverly was looking for a connection, Will tells him, and she found something. "Where were you last night?" asks Will, visibly struggling. "In the hospital. With my wife," Jack says quietly. (Hannibal was a very busy God-complex cannibal last night.) "I told Beverly to go to you, tell you everything she knew," Will manages to say, and omg, he needs a hug so bad. "Instead, she went looking for evidence. She... met the Ripper last night, Jack, she... she will be... missing organs. He had to take his trophies."
"Who is he, Will?"
I kind of can't blame Will for being entirely beyond saying it out loud ONE MORE TIME at this point. And yet.
@cleolindajones: SAY IT #Hannibal
@LaraJeanC: TELL HIM WILL!!! Why won't you tell him...
@valaripradiks: HE DIDN'T SAY IT.
@cleolindajones: HE WOULDA SAID IT IF HE'D THOUGHT JACK WOULD BELIEVE HIM omg jaaaack
@lily_delphine: Jack can't hear the thing. He has to SEE.
"Beverly made her connection to the Ripper. You have to make your own, Jack." "Then what did I bring you here for?" "To... say goodbye." And I'm just going to lie down under my desk now.
Back at the Baltimore State Dungeon therapy cages:
@cleolindajones: GET THE FUCK OUT, CHILTON
"Would you like to talk about what happened at the observatory?"
Will would not: "You discussed my therapy with Hannibal Lecter, Frederick." To refresh your memory, Will and Chilton had made a deal to keep Munchausen By Cannibal away from Will's bruised psyche, thanks. So of course Chilton promptly went behind Will's back and tried to play both sides of the fence, because he thinks he's badass enough to dance this dance but SPOILER, you guys, he is not. He is so totally, totally not. "I gave him a peek before I snatched down the shades," replies ~Frederick, because you don't friendblock Hannibal Lecter with no explanation. Also, from Red Dragon:
"What he has in addition is pure empathy and projection,” Dr. [Alan] [yes, Alan] Bloom said. "He can assume your point of view, or mine-and maybe some other points of view that scare and sicken him. It's an uncomfortable gift, Jack. Perception's a tool that's pointed on both ends."
"Why aren't you ever alone with him?"
"Because I have some professional curiosity about him and he'd pick that up in a hurry. He's fast."
"If he caught you peeking, he'd snatch down the shades."
Somewhat hilariously, Chilton has to ask what Will and Beverly discussed because he couldn't listen in for once--the "privacy room" is the only one he is legally not allowed to monitor. "And you that that stop you?" LOL WILL. Okay, FINE: "We talked about the Chesapeake Ripper. Then she went and found him." "Psychopaths can be indifferent to those sorts of setbacks," says Chilton (indeed, Hannibal seemed pretty into Arts & Crafts Night there). "I know something of the monster you are dealing with. He is a well-educated man. A socially competent man. He has surgical experience or, at the very least, know-how." "You thought Abel Gideon was the Chesapeake Ripper," Will points out. "Evidently," Chilton says sulkily, "I was wrong about that."
But Gideon, Will tells him, knows who the Ripper is: "Wouldn't it be interesting if we both said it was the same man?" "Yes it would." (Raúl Esparza's face is a gift.) Replies Will, "It's a shame we can't talk to Abel Gideon about the Chesapeake Ripper. Well, just think, Frederick"--here we go, reeeeeel in that fish--"you could be the one who catches him after all."
@neoprod: "Gideon knows who the Chesapeake Ripper is" - Will psychic driving Chilton.
And he didn't even have to use strobe lights, Hannibal.
Over at the BAU lab, there's slices of Beverly laid out on consecutive tables and Jimmy's on the verge of tears and it's just awful. I mean, Brian is just barely holding it together himself, but Jimmy's the one who's killing me softly over here.
"Beverly isn't your responsibility," Jack tells them. "You should be allowed to grieve. You shouldn't have to wade through it" (ughhhh, word choice). "We're not running away from this, Jack. Beverly wouldn't," says Jimmy. In fact, Brian says hoarsely, "I double-checked the autopsy report. What you found at that observatory wasn't all Beverly."
PREVIOUSLY:
@DeLaurentiisCo: Wait, did she say kidney? Remember that.
" These kidneys, they were placed inside her body after she was killed. I typed them against DNA samples and they belong to the mural killer," says Brian; Jack realizes, "Whoever killed James Gray and sewed him into his mural also murdered Beverly--swapped out their kidneys." "Right now, the only thing we have to go on is--we find her kidneys and we find her killer."
Yeah, you're... you're not going to find those. Unless there are leftovers.
[screencapped.net]
@cleolindajones: oh go to hell, seriously go to hell
Guys, it's just... it's just awful. (As it should be.) I don't know that we've actually watched him butcher and cook meat from someone we knew before, and... meat grinder, and... frying pan, and... Jesus Christ, I can't. Is that a fucking bouquet garni? Fancy Cannibal, I swear to God.
@Sonnolenta: is that a shepherd's pie. No.
@cleolindajones: PROBABLY
Because lambs, and... but no, technically it's a kidney and mushroom tart, accompanied by slices of head cheese and cross-sections of beet-chevre terrine, which is gorgeous, but also THE WORST.
@cleolindajones: ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME WITH THE MASK
@BryanFuller: FOOD ILLUSTRATOR JANICE POON'S HOMAGE TO #PUSHINGDAISIES AND #SOTL
(DID YOU KNOW that in Medieval-Renaissance cooking, a pie crust was called a coffin?)
And there that smug motherfucker sits, eating his Katz-and-mushroom pie and smirking to himself, square between the devil horns that stand on his mantelpiece like parentheses of evil.
(SAAAAAATAAAAAAN)
(Intentionally, says Mads Mikkelsen: "He’s very special. He’s an invention. The closest thing I could find to that was the fallen angel. The fallen angel believes in the beauty of the darkness. That is so incomprehensible to us, we can't understand it, and so we're attracted to it. So I wasn’t reading textbooks about mental disease, I was imagining how it was to be Satan." While we're here, I'll mention that Jodie Foster observes on the Silence of the Lambs Criterion commentary that "we go towards what we fear." Which explains not only a lot of what happens in the books, but why we're sitting here watching this show week after week.)
(Be right back, gonna go watch Bella Crawford slap him another fifteen times.)
CONTINUE: PART TWO.
At this point, the spoiler policy is that I'm going to point out the massive amounts of foreshadowing without actually giving things away, in case you haven't actually watched the show (a lot of people have been interested in the story without being able to handle the gore). Spoilers will be allowed in the comments, and if I have to footnote things to discuss the plot elements down there, I will. Actually, it's going to be super fun going through the season again knowing what happens and being able to pick up on all the themes they wove in; I look forward to slapping myself in the face on a daily basis.
Meanwhile, I left you on a massive cliffhanger:
PREVIOUSLY ON: EMPATH AND CANNIBAL, WHICH WAS A LONG, LONG TIME AGO: Evidence Queen Beverly Katz was too good for this world. I mean, yes, there was also strobe metronome gaslighting and Amanda Plummer was the Worst At Helping With Bees and Will decided to make a deal with Chilton and Chilton promptly betrayed him, but that is garden-variety Supreme Fuckery for this show. No, "Takiawase" will always be remembered as Beverly's Last Stand.
Death makes angels of us all.
Also, Hettienne Park revealed that she asked if Beverly could kick Hannibal in the balls on her way out, and nothing we saw precluded that from having happened. I'm just saying.
@HettiennePark: Me: Ma, r u watching #HANNIBAL tonight? Ma: Ob course! Me: What if my character dies? Ma: Noooo..too soon to die, isn't it? I gonna be cry.
@lorettaramos: your poor mother...
@HettiennePark: She'll be fine. I had some egg rolls delivered to her house. #TooSoon?
( oh my God I love her mom)
By the way, the Storify with the original episode livetweeting and background info is here.
Also-also, "Cleo, why do you come on this podcast and just..." "...make us all sad?" "This is my design." "NOOOOOOO!"
So: right after the episode where Hannibal "baited a hook" and "lured" Beverly in...
[screencapped.net]
Seafood. I swear to God. Which is montaged in contrast with the slop Will gets in the dungeons.
@aMoTPodcast: Every time I'm disappointed at #Hannibal escaping comeuppance, I just imagine him locked up eating lukewarm Beef Stroganoff.
@lily_delphine: Canned creamed corn.
@lurkeriatipsos: In velcro slippers. *cackles* *cranks up PraiseTV*
(MY DAY HAS COME)
At the moment, however, Hannibal remains cooking at large for Jack in a fetching red sweater, which is probably symbolic but also alarmingly casual.
@BryanFuller: #HANNIBAL IS LISTENING TO "SCENES OF CHILDHOOD FROM FOREIGN LANDS" BY ROBERT SCHUMANN #RIPBEVERLY
@neoprod: Jack eats his protein scramble and crustacean on the oyster shell to the Debussy tune of La Cathedrale Engloutie
And then, due to a love of '80s animation, I remembered that engloutie means "drowned": "This piece is based on an ancient Breton myth in which a cathedral, submerged underwater off the coast of the Island of Ys, rises up from the sea on clear mornings when the water is transparent. Sounds can be heard of priests chanting, bells chiming, and the organ playing, from across the sea."
Which is significant, because this episode has a MASSIVE water theme going. I saw someone (possibly this meta post?) pointing out that the entire series has had a really interesting fire/water motif: Hannibal is fire (the flames in his pan; burning Georgia alive; the Ravenstag bursting into flame) and Will is water (his love of fishing; his dreams of tsunami waves and ice shelves melted by heat; his tearful S1 breakdowns). And this episode is awash, literally, in water imagery--but now, rather than express Will's vulnerability to "fire," it has connotations of drowning and overwhelming and spilling over: finally, Will fighting back.
@BryanFuller: JANICE POON'S ILLUSTRATION FOR #HANNIBAL'S BREAKFAST WITH JACK #RIPBEV
@arrakisfilm: cutting the opening food montage was fun! Only sound was on the egg
(beverllykatz.tumblr.com)
As for that little stunt, food stylist Janice Poon (JANICE ILU) writes, "I've tried it and can only get it 1 out of 4 tries, and I’ve seen Benihana chefs flub the manoeuver when they have an entire grill as target. Mads has to crack his eggs into a 8-inch diameter skillet. [...] I guess I don’t have to tell you that when Mads arrives on set, I briefly describe the egg trick to him whereupon he just tosses an egg up in the air and breaks it perfectly on the spatula. Did it. Unbelievable. I insist it was a lucky fluke but he does it again. I accuse him of practicing when I wasn’t looking but he laughs (as if he has time to practise egg-cracking between scenes) and confesses he was a juggler in his youth." Of course he was.
So it turns out that the dish in question, which generally involves eggs, bacon and oysters in some fashion, is called "Hangtown Fry," and and once you've gotten to the end of the episode, you'll understand why I CANNOT EVEN right now. And Hannibal's version apparently involves an oyster platter with crawford crawfish holding water beetles; if that's supposed to evoke scarabs/death/Bella/Hannibal being a terrible person/wtf in some way, I'll throw shoes. Again. Some more.
"You have to eat something, Jack," says Hannibal, laying a hand on his shoulder. "You've been up all night." So what you're telling me here is that... this is the actual morning after Bella tried to overdose on morphine and Hannibal caught Beverly at his house? This is mere hours later? Good God. "Feed the body, feed the mind," adds Hannibal, because of course he does.
And Jack is here to eat the hell out of your comforting gestures, maybe put on some grief bacon while he's here. Meanwhile, I spent the whole week after "Takiawase" tormenting friends and acquaintances by pointing out that, if Beverly's bullet through the floor places the Murder Basement right beneath the dining room, that means that all Hannibal's guests have been dining over it this whole time. And over [SPOILER] that/who/which Beverly saw in it. Alana, Chilton, Freddie, killers of the week, entire dinner parties. How many times did Hannibal have Jack over for dinner, right on top of it all? Meditate on that, if you will.
"She knew she couldn't beat the cancer," says Jack, sitting down at that very same table, "so she... decided to beat it to the finish line. I suppose I can't blame her for wanting to control how she dies."
"I believe those who can no longer function at an acceptable level have the right to die," says Hannibal, calmly packing away scrambled eggs. You know, every now and then he tries to people in a comforting way, but it comes out like " I was so worried about you! I strongly advised against it." Or, you know, like this.
"She cast you as an executioner. She wanted to die. I can't tell you how grateful I am that you didn't allow it to happen," says Jack. And you know, I get it--the Crawfords basically stated their situation as "I love you too much to stay" and "I love you too much to let go"--the unanswerable pull between love and relief. This is a story a lot of people have to live, and it's already rough without Murder Satan being involved, so it's REALLY, REALLY AWFUL that Hannibal's dancing between the two of them playing God (" saving lives is just as arousing as ending them," UGHHHH), as well as specifically manipulating the situation to stay in Jack's favor.
@tenebris: You know, I'm really starting to wonder who the bad break-up is really gonna be between this season.
"As a doctor," says Hannibal, "I had no choice. As a philosopher, I had too many. It wasn't what I could do for Bella, it was what I couldn't do to you, Jack. I guess I'm a better friend than therapist." "You're a great friend, Hannibal," says Jack.
I'm sorry, could you say that again? Into this recorder? There's a certain empath who ought to hear this.
(There's a segue in my head from that to "speaking of people known to use recording devices," but that's too ham-handed even for me.)
@DeLaurentiisCo: Does @Tattle_Crime have any leads on the whereabouts of Beverly Katz? Following any leads?
@Tattle_Crime: Got an odd phone call today @DeLaurentiisCo, it was garbled but they said something about "See what you've already seen". Strange.
After that hella symbolic breakfast scene, we find Freddie approaching the Observatory, carefully ascending the stairs--
@Tattle_Crime: I got a hot tip about the Observatory and I'm checking it out. Don't worry, I brought Lois.
@BryanFuller: FREDDIE LOUNDS' GUN IS A DERRINGER SNAKE SLAYER NAMED "LOIS" @Tattle_Crime @LaraJeanC #LOISLANE
--in her best pirate ensemble, no less:
All we know right now is that she's faced with a row of glass panes, a blood-tinged pool of water, and [TRICKLING SOUND].
@LaraJeanC: Drip drip. I'm sensing a theme this episode. #awaitingthepool
@cleolindajones: oh God bless that her first move is to reach for HER CAMERA
Sometime later, Jack arrives with a stoic shrug of his coat--he hasn't been told who Freddie found ("Send someone else, Jack," she says, "she's one of yours"). He looks so stone-faced going in that maybe he's guessed who it is but is just not prepared for what he's about to see; maybe he assumes the body they've found is, at long last, Miriam's. It's... not.
(full gif set, graphic imagery)
Writes Janice, "Beverly has been in and out of the frying pan so many times in the draft scripts of the last two episodes that I have known for several months I will be cooking her up for Hannibal…yet I am utterly stopped in my tracks when I see vivisected silcone Beverly in the studio, sliced up in clear acrylic like a Damien Hirst cow. I stand 5 inches away from the piece and it looks real. I would like to marvel at the talent of François Dagenais, our prosthetic guy who makes these human sculptures, but I can’t. My mind is too busy screaming 'She’s really dead!'"
@neoprod: MUKŌZUKE: a SLICED dish of seasonal sashimi. Say it isn't so.....
[*CLAWING AT MY OWN FACE*]
@MrAaronAbrams: I LOVE YOU @HettiennePark! YOU'RE TRULY AMAZING. Hope to see you soon XO. Not in Hannibal Heaven but yknow at a bar or somethin.
@MrAaronAbrams: Jimmy's gonna have to pick up some of the kiss slack. #RIPBev #Hannibal @ScottThompson_ @HettiennePark [AWWWWW]
We'll get more into the actual tableau in a bit; for now, we have to watch a montage of Beverly's ID badge, her lab coat hanging at her empty desk, and Jack breaking the news to both Jimmy and Brian. I thought Laurence Fishburne breaking down was bad, but this is just the worst. It's just terrible. And then Jack has to tell the rest of the department: "At aproximately 9 am this morning I received a phone call from Freddie Lounds. Acting on an anonymous tip, she discovered a female body and immediately contacted my office. I was amongst the first on the scene. The victim has been identified as our colleague, Special Agent Beverly Katz. She will be memorialized at FBI Headquarters and Field Offices so that her ultimate sacrifice will always be remembered. That's all."
Well, not entirely all: here's Will in the visitation room with a thousand-yard stare, not hearing anything Jack or Alana are trying to tell him--just the sound of his element, water. When he turns his head, Beverly is standing by the window, the blinds hanging there like the panes of glass she was posed in.
"I want to see her," says Will.
@DireRavenstag: Time to get dressed up, my Will! So handsome in your mask! All tied up and presentable.
So now we finally get to see the show's version of The Mask. Interestingly enough, Buzzfeed posted shots of Anthony Hopkins trying on various masks for Silence of the Lambs, and one of the considerations, apparently, was whether his eyes could be seen. So the show builds off that design and uses the same shape ( although they considered various mouths) for Will's mask, but takes it one step further by making the entire faceplate clear.
@cleolindajones: Admittedly, I'm kinda upset that Will didn't EARN that mask in any way. #Hannibal #BITEEVERYONE
@tinytempest: right? #Hannibal earned it, he bit the crap out of everyone. Has Will bitten anyone? NO
To be fair, it would probably be hard to get anyone to believe in Will's innocence after he'd launched himself teeth first at the Baltimore State Dungeons staff. On the other hand, there has been a woeful lack of face-biting on this show so far.
(I am D Y I N G to see them cram Mads Mikkelsen into the full Hannibal Lecter regalia. SANTA, I HAVE BEEN SO GOOD.)
Poor Will just doesn't even look present as the orderlies strap him into the jacket and the restraints and the hand truck and the whole celebrity sociopath shebang, while Freddie snaps pictures of him outside the observatory.
@jonathanmtucker: little dangerous at times having actors rolling poor dancy around in that fully locked suit.
Of which I have plenty of set pictures in the Storify. And that's Matthew Brown right there (and Jonathan Tucker was a total joy livetweeting the night it aired, let me tell you), the orderly we previously saw bringing Will food in " Hassun." So there goes Will into the observatory, trundled out on his dolly--I was going to say all these restraints are completely unnecessary, but then I remembered how he escaped the jail van in " Savoureux," and... tough but fair. Maybe it's for the best, even, that he phyiscally can't react to his first glimpse of Beverly sliced up in glass specimen panes.
@manatee73: Watching EP.205 of #Hannibal and am convinced Jack Crawford is never crueler than when he unstraps Will in the observatory.
Yeah... Crawford tells everyone to GTFO and manhandles the completely helpless Will out of the restraints himself. Because while the Chesapeake Ripper killed Beverly--obviously Will couldn't have--I could imagine Jack having a sense that everything went to hell around the time Will started working with them and (supposedly) became a killer himself. Instead of Will helping Jack catch the Ripper, everything got exponentially worse. And maybe Jack really blames himself, since he sent Beverly down the Miriam path (for that matter, he's the one who brought Will in to consult in the first place), but it's easier to project that anger onto Will.
And now, Will gets to see the crime scene for himself. Said Bryan Fuller just after "Takiawase" aired, "You can’t just kill somebody to kill somebody. It has to sting for the audience, and it has to sting for the other characters. A lot of episode five is non-dialogue scenes where you see everybody’s reaction to what has happened. … I’m excited about people’s reactions to all of that that happens in episode five. [Breathless.] You’ve gotta see episode five!"
@Battista_j: I just yelled FUCK! for about 30 seconds.
And now I understand why he was like YOU GOTTA SEE THIS, because my general policy is to avoid posting any images that are gory or unusually disturbing, but I really, really want to now. (I won't.) (But I really, really want to.) (Here, have some concept art.) It takes the weirdly beautiful imagery of The Cell and adds both a human element and an emotional one, and somehow it just really gets you in how fitting it is, that if this character died because she delved into the evidence and got too close to catching Hannibal, this is the send-off she would get. You've heard the phrase "donate your body to science"? She will be memorialized so that her ultimate sacrifice will always be remembered.
And then Jack steps back and leaves Will to it.
@cleolindajones: oh Jesus don't empath it!
"The Chesapeake Ripper wants to perform," says Will. "Every brutal choice has elegance... grace. His mutilations hide the true nature of his crimes." I cannot wait for the day Will ends up trying to actually empath one of Lecter's murder scenes, is all I'm saying.
OH, BEVERLY
I DIDN'T WANT IT TO BE THIS WAY
At first, he just can't do it. (Man, they just keep on showing the tableau from every angle imaginable, obscuring nothing. NBC: Not Giving One Single Fuck Since 2013.) And then Memory Palace Beverly appears and says what she said the last time Will blamed himself for someone's death:
"You said you just interpret the evidence. So interpret the evidence."
Now the golden mind metronome turns back time and puts Beverly back together, which is intensely cool, until Will is alone with her, whole, in the darkened murder basement.
(thumbsinthefridge.tumblr.com)
And then he starts strangling her.
@cleolindajones: KICK HIM IN THE BALLS!
"I know her," says Will, speaking as her killer, because YEAH, I GUESS HE DOES
(screencapped.net)
FUCKER
"I strangle Beverly Katz," empaths Will as she struggles, "looking in her eyes. She knows me. And I. Know. Her." Not only is this the first time Will's empathed Hannibal killing someone--I think it's the first time he already knew who the killer was. Beverly knows it's Hannibal and Hannibal knows it's Beverly and Will knows it's Hannibal and Hannibal knows that Will's going to see this tableau, he left it here for him as a warning about what happens when people get in his way and Will knows he did and EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT EVERYBODY KNOOOOOWS, MAN.
But we need to talk for a moment about how Hugh Dancy is the unsung hero of this show. He's constantly mirroring or mimicking the other actors--not just in the scenes where Will empaths crimes, where he also lets Will's own distinct personality peek through in response. But it's so subtle that you often don't notice it. And it comes from a bit in Red Dragon about how Will constantly, involuntarily takes on other people's speech patterns; I don't think I noticed how often Hugh does it until a specific moment where he channels Jeremy Davies' character in "Su-zakana" (2x08) coming up, but this episode in particular is a showcase for it. Thus, we get Will's icy (I'm sorry) interpretation of Hannibal here:
"I expertly squeeze the life from her... rendering her unconscious" --okay, Hannibal did this to Miriam, this is pretty standard-- "I freeze her body... preserving shape and form so I can more cleanly dismantle her."
@HettiennePark: Foreigner - Cold As Ice
@HettiennePark: #Bevsicle #RIPBev [with Caroline Dhavernas in Dark Alana makeup]
@BryanFuller: CONTINUITY PHOTO FOR #KATZICLE #RIPBEV
AND THEN
@Maxasaurusrex: did he freeze a fucking body overnight and table saw her
@cleolindajones: yes
He has a table saw. He has a fucking table saw. The saw in the pantry was just his casual everyday saw. The basement is where he keeps his heavy-duty arts-and-crafts saw. Was Beverly actually dead when she was frozen, or just kinda frostbit? Hannibal Lecter has a full-length tabletop murder saw.
"She cuts like stone."
A SAAAAAAAAAW
(So that was melting ice-blood trickling onto the observatory floor. Although--I'm sorry, this is a terrible line of thought I'm going down--I could see him draining most of the blood first, as in this beautiful but entirely disturbing fan art.)
@cleolindajones: Could you actually freeze and slice someone like that? * COMMENTERS INTENSIFY*
@aMoTPodcast: Realistically? I'm going with "writers realized it was the best possible alternative to plastination"
@cleolindajones: "Look, he has a freezer, he has a saw, he's a murder wizard, what do you want"
@aMoTPodcast: *Goes to BodyWorlds* "Okay, it is our literary responsibility to do all of that. How do we do all of that?"
@cleolindajones: "It is our literary responsibility to, at some point, make references to Casino Royale. GO."
Guys, I don't think you know how much I love Casino Royale. Sure, Skyfall was great, but that is the Bond movie for me--my mom was a huge old-school fan, but the movies just never really did anything for me until they restarted the series. And then a few days after "Mukozuke" aired, THIS happened:
@BryanFuller: #HANNIBAL ROYALE BY @DAVID_A_SLADE
(*tiny screams*)
I'm sorry, I've wandered off from the fact that Hannibal Lecter is the motherfucking worst.
"I pull her apart... layer by layer," says Will, as we see the tableau expand. "Like she would a crime scene." Get your drink ready: "This is my design."
You know, it's interesting how not sexualized Beverly's tableau is. In case you're not looking at the pictures, what Hannibal's done is saw (SAAAAAW) Beverly straight down the middle, leaving one fully-clothed half of her body to stand next to the unclothed half that's been arranged in thin slices between panes of glass. The placement of the panes rather elegantly obscures Things What You Can't Show On TV; the camera angles emphasize the broad anatomical interiors of the slides rather than the thin edges of exposed skin. Obviously it's upsetting; it's Beverly and we care about her, and watching everyone on the show break down and grieve for her is heartbreaking. And beyond that, there's a gigantic, upsetting cognitive dissonance between the half we recognize to be Beverly and the half we don't, the scientific cross-section we barely register as human. And yet it is human, it is entirely human, it is the anatomical reality of the human form that most of us don't see or think about very often. As I've said before, the sight of blood doesn't freak me out, but the sight of gore and muscle--i.e., the body as meat--does. (Hence my periodic shrieks of " MEAT WINGS!!") There's a shot in " Sorbet" of the soprano's vocal cords, presenting the idea that art and beauty comes from that meat. And I feel like a lot of us spend a lot of time subconsciously pretending that science will eventually let us live forever, and that our food in clean white supermarkets simply sprang into being. Death--anatomy, its fragile bleeding fallibility--is shocking in a way it wasn't, say, a hundred, two hundred years ago. And the thing about Hannibal is that he's both a surgeon and a chef, "transferring his passion for anatomy into the culinary arts," and while his cannibalism is depraved and grotesque on most levels, "man as flesh" is a concept he's reconciled far better than most of us have. This tableau is knock-down horrifying for us, but to a mindset like his, it is a creation of respect and inevitable truth. So as disturbing as the "human as meat" concept has always been for me, I found myself looking closer at the cross-sections, and finding what we're made of beautiful.
(To take the sting out of it: Hettienne Park kissing "Accordion Katz" on the cheek.)
"I will leave no usable evidence"--and now, a glimpse of something prowling behind the slides--
@DireRavenstag: OH HAI, WILL. Just watching you work, boo. Just keep doing your thing.
"but... she found something. She found me," Will intones as the wendigo peers between the panes. "What she found is already gone. What did I take from her?"
In the waking world, Jack comes forward again: "It's the Chesapeake Ripper." "It's the Ripper... and the copycat," says Will, and they are two tastes that taste terrible together. "The same killer. Two masks... Beverly helped me see it." "Help me see it," says Jack, because OH MY GOD, DO YOU NOT GO HERE? HAVE YOU NOT BEEN WATCHING YOUR OWN SHOW? Beverly was looking for a connection, Will tells him, and she found something. "Where were you last night?" asks Will, visibly struggling. "In the hospital. With my wife," Jack says quietly. (Hannibal was a very busy God-complex cannibal last night.) "I told Beverly to go to you, tell you everything she knew," Will manages to say, and omg, he needs a hug so bad. "Instead, she went looking for evidence. She... met the Ripper last night, Jack, she... she will be... missing organs. He had to take his trophies."
"Who is he, Will?"
I kind of can't blame Will for being entirely beyond saying it out loud ONE MORE TIME at this point. And yet.
@cleolindajones: SAY IT #Hannibal
@LaraJeanC: TELL HIM WILL!!! Why won't you tell him...
@valaripradiks: HE DIDN'T SAY IT.
@cleolindajones: HE WOULDA SAID IT IF HE'D THOUGHT JACK WOULD BELIEVE HIM omg jaaaack
@lily_delphine: Jack can't hear the thing. He has to SEE.
"Beverly made her connection to the Ripper. You have to make your own, Jack." "Then what did I bring you here for?" "To... say goodbye." And I'm just going to lie down under my desk now.
Back at the Baltimore State Dungeon therapy cages:
@cleolindajones: GET THE FUCK OUT, CHILTON
"Would you like to talk about what happened at the observatory?"
Will would not: "You discussed my therapy with Hannibal Lecter, Frederick." To refresh your memory, Will and Chilton had made a deal to keep Munchausen By Cannibal away from Will's bruised psyche, thanks. So of course Chilton promptly went behind Will's back and tried to play both sides of the fence, because he thinks he's badass enough to dance this dance but SPOILER, you guys, he is not. He is so totally, totally not. "I gave him a peek before I snatched down the shades," replies ~Frederick, because you don't friendblock Hannibal Lecter with no explanation. Also, from Red Dragon:
"What he has in addition is pure empathy and projection,” Dr. [Alan] [yes, Alan] Bloom said. "He can assume your point of view, or mine-and maybe some other points of view that scare and sicken him. It's an uncomfortable gift, Jack. Perception's a tool that's pointed on both ends."
"Why aren't you ever alone with him?"
"Because I have some professional curiosity about him and he'd pick that up in a hurry. He's fast."
"If he caught you peeking, he'd snatch down the shades."
Somewhat hilariously, Chilton has to ask what Will and Beverly discussed because he couldn't listen in for once--the "privacy room" is the only one he is legally not allowed to monitor. "And you that that stop you?" LOL WILL. Okay, FINE: "We talked about the Chesapeake Ripper. Then she went and found him." "Psychopaths can be indifferent to those sorts of setbacks," says Chilton (indeed, Hannibal seemed pretty into Arts & Crafts Night there). "I know something of the monster you are dealing with. He is a well-educated man. A socially competent man. He has surgical experience or, at the very least, know-how." "You thought Abel Gideon was the Chesapeake Ripper," Will points out. "Evidently," Chilton says sulkily, "I was wrong about that."
But Gideon, Will tells him, knows who the Ripper is: "Wouldn't it be interesting if we both said it was the same man?" "Yes it would." (Raúl Esparza's face is a gift.) Replies Will, "It's a shame we can't talk to Abel Gideon about the Chesapeake Ripper. Well, just think, Frederick"--here we go, reeeeeel in that fish--"you could be the one who catches him after all."
@neoprod: "Gideon knows who the Chesapeake Ripper is" - Will psychic driving Chilton.
And he didn't even have to use strobe lights, Hannibal.
Over at the BAU lab, there's slices of Beverly laid out on consecutive tables and Jimmy's on the verge of tears and it's just awful. I mean, Brian is just barely holding it together himself, but Jimmy's the one who's killing me softly over here.
"Beverly isn't your responsibility," Jack tells them. "You should be allowed to grieve. You shouldn't have to wade through it" (ughhhh, word choice). "We're not running away from this, Jack. Beverly wouldn't," says Jimmy. In fact, Brian says hoarsely, "I double-checked the autopsy report. What you found at that observatory wasn't all Beverly."
PREVIOUSLY:
@DeLaurentiisCo: Wait, did she say kidney? Remember that.
" These kidneys, they were placed inside her body after she was killed. I typed them against DNA samples and they belong to the mural killer," says Brian; Jack realizes, "Whoever killed James Gray and sewed him into his mural also murdered Beverly--swapped out their kidneys." "Right now, the only thing we have to go on is--we find her kidneys and we find her killer."
Yeah, you're... you're not going to find those. Unless there are leftovers.
[screencapped.net]
@cleolindajones: oh go to hell, seriously go to hell
Guys, it's just... it's just awful. (As it should be.) I don't know that we've actually watched him butcher and cook meat from someone we knew before, and... meat grinder, and... frying pan, and... Jesus Christ, I can't. Is that a fucking bouquet garni? Fancy Cannibal, I swear to God.
@Sonnolenta: is that a shepherd's pie. No.
@cleolindajones: PROBABLY
Because lambs, and... but no, technically it's a kidney and mushroom tart, accompanied by slices of head cheese and cross-sections of beet-chevre terrine, which is gorgeous, but also THE WORST.
@cleolindajones: ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME WITH THE MASK
@BryanFuller: FOOD ILLUSTRATOR JANICE POON'S HOMAGE TO #PUSHINGDAISIES AND #SOTL
(DID YOU KNOW that in Medieval-Renaissance cooking, a pie crust was called a coffin?)
And there that smug motherfucker sits, eating his Katz-and-mushroom pie and smirking to himself, square between the devil horns that stand on his mantelpiece like parentheses of evil.
(SAAAAAATAAAAAAN)
(Intentionally, says Mads Mikkelsen: "He’s very special. He’s an invention. The closest thing I could find to that was the fallen angel. The fallen angel believes in the beauty of the darkness. That is so incomprehensible to us, we can't understand it, and so we're attracted to it. So I wasn’t reading textbooks about mental disease, I was imagining how it was to be Satan." While we're here, I'll mention that Jodie Foster observes on the Silence of the Lambs Criterion commentary that "we go towards what we fear." Which explains not only a lot of what happens in the books, but why we're sitting here watching this show week after week.)
(Be right back, gonna go watch Bella Crawford slap him another fifteen times.)
CONTINUE: PART TWO.