Hannibal
I burned through the first 4.5 episodes of Hannibal this weekend and… I like it? It doesn’t involve a murderous threesome (more’s the shame), but it’s also not as cringingly awful as The Following has become. So, congratulations ‘Hannibal’, you are the winning serial killer show!
‘Hannibal’ really succeeds in terms of mood. I’m not always a fan of Bryan Fuller’s try-hard visuals, (and I’m beginning to get a little bit sick of the deer following Will around,) but here they do help to evoke the mood of madness. In general, I love how crazy everyone is on this show. Too often, I find that crime dramas try to create logic out of murderers’ actions. ‘Hannibal’ really revels in the tainted mind and it’s better for it.
Our hero Will Graham’s own tainted mind creates a nice parallel within the narrative. It’s only too bad this show wasn’t created five years ago, before the trope of the ‘maverick white man who can solve crimes using his almost supernatural intuition’ became so stale and offensive. Why don’t crime writers realize that we, the audience, don’t want to see our hero make amazing leaps in deduction? That’s not fun. We want to follow the clues ourselves. Or, at the very least, watch competent professionals follow those clues just a mite quicker than we can. Supernatural intuition always feels way too much like a contrivance.
I also wish the show had more shape to it. There’s already developed a tedious tug-of-war between the character stories on the show and the serial-killer-of-the-week format. In ep5, in particular, the SKOTW felt undeveloped and the writers seemed to tire of it early - killing off said serial killer a 10 full minutes of runtime before the credits. And more than once at the end of an episode, the credits rolled and I thought, wait, that’s it? That’s your ending?
My other pet peeve is that the show’s dialogue is often distractingly stilted. It feels like the writers have just written long, florid monologues for each character and then chopped them up as dialogue, ignoring the fact that people don’t speak in image-rich, grammatically-perfect sentences.
That said, I’m willing to stick around, if only to watch the most interesting relationship on the show play out: Abigail and Lector.
Mads Mikkelsen’s great triumph has to be in how often he allows you to forget that Lector’s a psychopathic cannibal. Judged externally, he’s such a great guy! And he really is trying to help both Will and Abigail! The scenes of Lector inviting Abigail to dinner and giving her ‘shrooms were so bizarrely sweet. It’s only too bad we didn’t get to see them in context.
(Sidenote: I dread to think what the pulled ep4 contained which was so horrific that it couldn’t be shown in the wake of the Boston bombings, since the replacement ep contained people being eviscerated while they were still alive and turned into angel puppets.)
‘Hannibal’ really succeeds in terms of mood. I’m not always a fan of Bryan Fuller’s try-hard visuals, (and I’m beginning to get a little bit sick of the deer following Will around,) but here they do help to evoke the mood of madness. In general, I love how crazy everyone is on this show. Too often, I find that crime dramas try to create logic out of murderers’ actions. ‘Hannibal’ really revels in the tainted mind and it’s better for it.
Our hero Will Graham’s own tainted mind creates a nice parallel within the narrative. It’s only too bad this show wasn’t created five years ago, before the trope of the ‘maverick white man who can solve crimes using his almost supernatural intuition’ became so stale and offensive. Why don’t crime writers realize that we, the audience, don’t want to see our hero make amazing leaps in deduction? That’s not fun. We want to follow the clues ourselves. Or, at the very least, watch competent professionals follow those clues just a mite quicker than we can. Supernatural intuition always feels way too much like a contrivance.
I also wish the show had more shape to it. There’s already developed a tedious tug-of-war between the character stories on the show and the serial-killer-of-the-week format. In ep5, in particular, the SKOTW felt undeveloped and the writers seemed to tire of it early - killing off said serial killer a 10 full minutes of runtime before the credits. And more than once at the end of an episode, the credits rolled and I thought, wait, that’s it? That’s your ending?
My other pet peeve is that the show’s dialogue is often distractingly stilted. It feels like the writers have just written long, florid monologues for each character and then chopped them up as dialogue, ignoring the fact that people don’t speak in image-rich, grammatically-perfect sentences.
That said, I’m willing to stick around, if only to watch the most interesting relationship on the show play out: Abigail and Lector.
Mads Mikkelsen’s great triumph has to be in how often he allows you to forget that Lector’s a psychopathic cannibal. Judged externally, he’s such a great guy! And he really is trying to help both Will and Abigail! The scenes of Lector inviting Abigail to dinner and giving her ‘shrooms were so bizarrely sweet. It’s only too bad we didn’t get to see them in context.
(Sidenote: I dread to think what the pulled ep4 contained which was so horrific that it couldn’t be shown in the wake of the Boston bombings, since the replacement ep contained people being eviscerated while they were still alive and turned into angel puppets.)