Reviews Series / Hannibal

Season 2: Magical Madmen

In my previous season review, I wondered out loud how Hannibal Lecter could afford to live whilst running Balitmore's least-productive psychiatric practice. Now after finishing the second series, I'm wondering how he is able to do everything else. The man is simultaneously an (alleged) talented psychiatrist, surgeon, composer, artist, chef, horticulturist, perfumer, murderer, martial artist, and knife thrower. The man knows everything from multiple languages to pig husbandry. He also appears to have magic powers.

Season 2 starts with Jack Crawford and Hannibal having a fight to the death. It is the series way of informing us that people will finally get a clue and do something about Hannibal (but only by the season finale). It is, however, a bit of a cop out. Without going into spoilers, yes Jack Crawford is now aware that his former close friend eats people, but things are left very much unresolved about the consequences of that. Before we get to that point, Will Graham has other problems - he has landed in jail, expertly framed for every murder by Hannibal Lecter. In the meantime, he does what he usually does from his cell and solves murders where the victims are turned into artworks.

I recently re-watched the movie Silence of the Lambs, and in it I couldn't help but notice the difference in terms of how mundane its reality is to Hannibal. Clarice Starling is living in a bland, grey world, putting up with workplace sexism and a grounded murder case. Even Dr Lecter, the weirdest thing about her story, is simply a very clever man who passes the time by trolling his visitors. Subsequent movies and this tv show have since mythologised the man to the point where he is a superhuman who can do whatever he wants, with the infinite time and means to do it. I feel like the premise of Hannibal Lecter has gone missing along the way, in the show's effort to rise above the book's and film's many cultural imitators.

What we end up with is a surrealist drama that is at odds with its banal police and forensics framework. I complained before about how no one consults security camera footage in this show (which would immediately prove Lecter is a murderer), and I was coming to accept that perhaps in this weird, dream version of North-Eastern US, such things don't exist. But then a pathologist turns around one episode and mentions seeing a culprit on a camera in an unrelated case. The detective work comes crashing in to undermine the surreal story in which a millionaire pig breeder flavours his martinis with children's tears. Is it real life, or is it just fantasy? The show can't make up its mind, to its detriment.

I'm done with Hannibal. It still looks lovely, but that's a distraction from an unsatisfying, frustrating, weightless story that doesn't quite work on a basic conceptual level. Buy the cookbook tied to the season, but don't bother with watching it.