It’s important that the climax sees Gideon and Will squaring, as the episode spends most of its running length drawing a parallel between the two, presenting them as lab rats chasing each other through a maze, but with different guys in lab coats manipulating them from the outside. After openly admitting last week that he’s using Will as a guinea pig, Hannibal finds someone to talk psychological-torture-shop with in Chilton, who’s “psychic driving” therapy forced the Chesapeake Ripper persona onto Gideon during his time at the asylum. Aware of the deception thanks to Alana Bloom’s counseling in “Entrée,” Gideon escapes a transport car, and sets out to capture the real Ripper’s attention, by thinning out a few pages in Hannibal’s Rolodex of professional colleagues.
Gideon’s preference for using Columbian neckties (wherein the throat is cut open, and the victim’s tongue is left hanging out like a deli counter ticket) is pretty gnarly, and Izzard’s performance dances nicely between notes of sinister and silly, but like most killers of the week, Gideon is just a means to an end. As much as we like Hannibal (despite the fact that he’s a sociopathic maniac), seeing the fans who admire him try to get his attention is always a good reminder that yes, Hannibal killing people is bad, not just for what his own actions entail, but for how they can inspire others to follow suit.
That’s a pretty broad and fantastical lesson, one you can expect in a universe where serial killers are a dime a dozen, but “Roti” arrives at a much more grounded, and interesting point about violence while still using Gideon. “He only became crazy after he killed his wife,” Chilton tells Alana and Will at one point, and it’s the real giveaway line for what the show has been building up to with Will all season. It’s not the encephalitis, or the constant exposure to serial killers that’s driving Will insane: it’s his murder of Garrett Jacob Hobbs in the pilot that has made a lasting, necrotizing impression, and it’s one that’s not going away anytime soon.
The show has been exploring that toll more and more as Will’s hallucinations become increasingly pronounced, this week trapping him in a room plagued by deer antlers, and really, really, really, laying into imagery that implies he’s having a meltdown. Not even the digital clocks are holding it together anymore, and the orchestra of crazy going on in his head looks like it’s about to crescendo at any moment. When he and Gideon are finally alone outside Alana’s house, Will shoots the doctor both to protect his friend, and to end his own torment. The guilt he feels over killing Hobbs has forced him to commit the same act again, with Will gunning down Gideon just so that he can be sure it’s not Hobbs haunting him. This equates to treating a burn with ice: temporary relief that will only inflame the injury. Will’s taken Gideon’s advice to use violence in order to make his own world more stable, but that’s just going to cause him to unravel further, and force him into more situations that, from his perspective, can be best resolved with a bullet, a knife, or even a pair of handcuffs if need be.
So, here is where the hope lies for Hannibal, in seeing whether it is Will can vanquish his own violent impulses, or if he’ll succumb to them time and again. And any good quest like this needs a villain, and Hannibal has one hell of one in its titular character. Lecter’s hands-free influencing of Will has rapidly become an game of puppetry, having now engineered the exact circumstances needed for Will to kill Gideon. He’s manipulated Will before, and lied to him plenty, but Hannibal is only intensifying his subject’s trials the further Will spins out of control (to that end, I’d put money down saying the aspirin Will is taking is exacerbating his encephalitis in some way, by Hannibal’s hand of course).
But what does Hannibal get out of all this? He’s clearly more interested in Will than the common sheep he’d rather eat, so why push him so close to the brink of the abyss? I theorized a few weeks ago that Lecter wasn’t looking for a friend, because he could never mentality adapt to a “normal” relationship. Looks like I got it backwards: Hannibal is looking for a friend – just not one that will pull him out of the dark recesses of his own mind. Rather, Hannibal knows the only friend he would ever want is one he can bring down to his own level, even if that means letting wave after wave of madness and death crash against Will’s psyche, until he can’t help but drown beneath the horrors.
And yet, despite how dark the path it walks may be, Hannibal still has that hope that makes it worth experiencing. Fans crossed every finger and toe praying that the show would get a second season, and it did. And hell, if a fantastic drama can survive with these ratings on NBC, maybe hope is the one thing even Hannibal can never kill.
- Stray Thoughts
-Like the smiley face cutter from last week, I too have pretty terrible facial recognition. Last week was the first time I realized one of the MEs is actually Scott Thompson. Linking to the Kids in the Hall theme song is my means of an apology.
-At this point, Alana’s hot ‘n cold tendencies towards Will almost have me convinced she’s part of Hannibal’s plot to mess with Will’s head. There’s a time and a place for a “will they, won’t they,” and for Will, this is not it.
-Among my favorite little things about the show is the way the seasons have progressed through the episodes. Things getting colder and darker outside as Will keeps getting nuttier is on the nose, but I just find it refreshing to see a television show recognize that seasons exist, let alone winter.
-I haven’t watched it just yet, but this link from Bryan Fuller is about the creation of the show’s intro sequence, which is all kinds of perfect in my book.
-Yes, there is a distinct possibility that all the Game of Thrones talk was inspired by Will staring at a giant frozen wall of ice. It was do some GoT talking, or force an X-Men analogy based on Will exploding into a pile of water in his dream.
