Among the many, many superlative phrases one could use to describe Hannibal is “a master class in adaptation”.
Taking the novels of Thomas Harris and stripping them for emotionally wrenching, deeply disturbing parts and tossing out the rest, showrunner Bryan Fuller has managed to evade most of the big traps of simply translating prose into film. The past few episodes have seen the stretching of that approach, however, as the show finally, squarely, and perhaps too directly, hits the territory of Harris’s novels – specifically Red Dragon.
Essentially all of the good things about this episode were original, or distinctly Hannibal stylistic touches, while the more obviously adapted moments groaned and creaked with the weight of a hundred years of serial killer thriller cliche – which is pretty much what the novels are riffing on in the first place.
Take perhaps the most fun, interesting scene in the episode: Hannibal’s opening “therapy” session with Francis Dolarhyde.
Director Michael Rymer shoots it much the same way we could have expected a lesser adaptation to shoot the Red Dragon part of Dolarhyde’s personality itself – a hallucination whispering murder into a susceptible, weak ear, a surreal representation of their phone call. Mads Mikkelsen is constantly looming over Richard Armitage – sometimes, we can hear him speak but not see his mouth move, until a cut finds him transported between Dolarhyde’s ear and the therapist’s chair – and their performances are so good that even though Armitage is enormous and powerful, Hannibal has unquestionably gained psychic control over a poor, broken killer. Dolarhyde is a strong but pathetic insane man consumed by darkness. Hannibal is the devil.
As good as this scene is, it also contains one of the worst, clunkiest adaptation choices in the history of the show – a single line of dialogue in which Dolarhyde describes Will as looking “not very handsome, but …purposeful”. This practically screams “from the original source material, in which Will is not played by Hugh Dancy”.
And, lo and behold, it’s taken almost but not quite directly from Dolarhyde’s correspondence with Hannibal in the novel Red Dragon, where Will is not only quite a bit older and sadder, but also less intertwined with Hannibal. Moments like these are small, but they begin to show the cracks in Hannibal’s approach to the novels. Still, it also leads to the most exciting part of the Red Dragon story so far: Dolarhyde’s attack on Will’s family.
The sequence itself, in which Dolarhyde shows up at the Graham homestead looking like Daredevil, is tense, but perhaps not peak Hannibal tense. (Did anyone think he was going to kill Molly or Walter? I wasn’t sure for a moment or two there.) What it does do is very consciously take a major sequence off the table for the last two episodes.
Red Dragon the novel takes place over the course of a single lunar cycle, ending with Dolarhyde trying to murder Will’s family and in turn being killed by Molly. That could still happen (though I find it pretty unlikely), but like the initial decision to have Miriam Lass (Anna Chlumsky) discover Hannibal through the Wound Man diagram (the way Will does in the novel), it removes a predictable ending and opens up a whole new space of adaptation, increasing the tension building for the last two episodes.
It also frames the Red Dragon arc – the entire Dolarhyde case – as just an occasion for another series of moves in the manipulative game of Hannibal and Will’s relationship. (As striking as Armitage is during this episode, the standout acting moment here is how wounded Mikkelsen looks when Will confronts Hannibal at the end of the episode – truly, like a capricious, jilted lover willing to burn the world.) This is great, and true to the relationships that ground the show, but it also lessens Dolarhyde’s importance, since by now he might be his own monster but is also a pawn of Hannibal’s. As it stands, he is one of the most important characters in the novel, and with only a couple of episodes behind him it’s tough to care as much about him as we’ve come to care about the rest of the cast.
None of that is Armitage’s fault. He continues to be excellent, bouncing just as well off romantic interest Reba as he does off sick mentor Hannibal, conveying both genuine surprise at the fact that a woman would want to spend time with him (and revealing, elliptically, the roots of his pathology) and a real, earnest, childlike need for Hannibal to help him. Somehow, we want him to succeed in escaping The Dragon, even as he watches the grainy, poorly-shot footage of Will’s family with Reba draped around him, staring bloody murder at the screen.
That moment is, perhaps, the closest the show has come to straightforward, traditional serial killer fare. But it works the same way many stories work when they need to spend time with their villain – he does it because he cares. It’s hard to forget that the reason he’s so intent on this murder is because he wants to stop himself from killing again.
Accordingly, we are in the position of being asked to identify nearly equally with him and Will, his hunter – but Will has both more and less on the line. He could walk away, or convince himself he is capable of doing so, until he has to run slowly into a hospital to find his wife getting out of surgery. Hannibal thrives in moments where it tries its hardest to flagrantly ignore genre conventions – its critique of the police procedural, its suggestion that maybe we’re not that different from the monsters we spend all day watching, its efforts to be as little like conventional television as possible. But Will’s emergency room jog, alongside nearly everything with Molly and Walter in “… And the Beast From the Sea”, is played totally straight, and suffers for it.
Before Dolarhyde’s assault, Molly and Walter take the apparently poisoned dogs to the vet, and decide not to tell Will.
“It’s not a lie if you keep your mouth shut,” Molly says, in maybe the most cliched line of Hannibal dialogue in the show’s history, followed by the camera obviously, painfully pushing in for a moment on an FBI notice asking for veterinarians to notify them of “mutilated” pets. (We get it! She’s making a mistake!)
And after the attack, Will has to attempt to “justify” himself to Walter, who portentously tells him to kill Dolarhyde, then runs off to watch baseball for some reason. Gabriel Browning Rodriguez is fine, but it would be hard to fit a child actor into any cop show, let alone this one. Hannibal exists in a world where it’s hard to imagine any of the characters actually ever having existed as children.
The other pieces of the fallout from the attempted murder are far more interesting – Molly begins to acknowledge the ways in which she is subject to the whims of all of these men, some of whom she has never even met (will we get a scene with her and Hannibal fighting for Will’s soul?). Jack mostly escapes blame, even though Molly is right to lay responsibility at his feet. Instead, he’s off acting the reluctant puppet-master with Alana, attempting to entrap Dolarhyde over the phone and failing in a last-ditch effort to no longer need Will’s services. Hannibal, of course, alerts Dolarhyde to the presence of the tap (because he likes messing with people), and he is punished accordingly.
It’s a little crazy to think that Hannibal might have ended without the title character ever wearing the mask and restraints which helped make him so distinctive in the films. As it is, we get our first shot of him in the straitjacket almost casually, as more of a comic punchline to his aborted phone call.
Alana Bloom keeps her promises, and Bryan Fuller keeps his – just, hopefully, not in the way you might expect.
