Will Graham is out for...vengeance?
Review by Brandon Wolfe
Hannibal continues to ease us slowly into its third season like a warm bath. Last week, we caught up with Hannibal and Bedelia on their dreamy – or nightmarish – European excursion, and now we are brought up to speed on Will and Abigail Hobbs. After a replay of last season’s drawn-out, stab-filled climax, Will awakens in a hospital bed to find Abigail greeting him with a large bandage on her neck. She claims that Hannibal knew how to slash her with such surgical precision as to leave her alive, yet despite that, she still claims loyalty to him. She wants to track him down not out of vengeance, but to reunite with the compelling man whose fate seems so powerfully intertwined with her own. Will claims to want the vengeance, but one wonders if there’s not a bit of that longing in him as well. These two men have a very complex relationship, after all.
Eight months later, Will and Abigail arrive at the church in Italy where Hannibal left his ghastly, heart-shaped piece of corpse-sculpted art and Will makes the acquaintance of Inspector Rinaldo Pazzi (Fortunato Cerlino), who knows of Will’s former incarceration and wonders, somewhat rhetorically, if our hero’s arrival in Italy and the appearance of the mutilated body are perhaps not a coincidence. However, it soon emerges that Pazzi is well aware of Hannibal Lecter, as he once pursued the good doctor some twenty years earlier, back when Hannibal was committing atrocities that branded him with the moniker “The Monster of Florence.” Pazzi wants to apprehend Lecter for reasons far more straightforward than Will’s, ignoring in the process Will’s unambiguously certain warning that Pazzi will not survive the eventual encounter.
Pazzi, a character in the book and film Hannibal, represents perhaps the most marked change any character from the Thomas Harris universe has yet received on this show. The previous incarnation of Pazzi not only had no preexisting experience with Hannibal Lecter, but was a sneaky opportunist who saw the off-the-books apprehension of Lecter as the path to a handsome reward and the means of keeping his attractive young wife happy. This Pazzi, thus far, seems far more dedicated and noble than his predecessor (though he will almost certainly meet a similarly grisly fate). While the show has made cosmetic changes to certain characters, such as making Freddie Lounds into a woman, this is the first instance of the show reimagining a character from the Lecter canon so completely that they bear little resemblance to the person they were before.
There is briefly the question of how Abigail Hobbs could have survived her second throat-slashing of the series, leaving the fatality total for that season-ending bloodbath at, most probably, an unlikely zero. But Hannibal is a show where characters tend to walk off any act of violence that doesn’t land them in Lecter’s stomach, so it’s easy to look the other way when Abigail turns up unexpectedly alive. However, that just queues us up for the episode’s big fake-out, when it is revealed that Abigail did not, in fact, survive her last encounter with Hannibal, and that Will is only keeping her alive in what Lecter has referred to as the “memory palace,” the vast and intricate mindscape existing only in the heads of those with vivid enough imaginations. And although Abigail has never really resonated as a character in the series as much as I suspect the writers have intended her to (she’s essentially little more than an emblem of innocence that Will carries with him for purposes of self-flagellation), her death does have impact through Will, who internalizes her memory for a modicum of relief from all the tormented emotions with which he is forced to contend.
“Primavera” is a terrific showcase for the underrated Hugh Dancy, who doesn’t get nearly enough credit for the fantastic work he does on this series. Mads Mikkelsen tends to suck up all the oxygen on this show, but Dancy’s mixture of rage, resigned sadness and undefined longing – sometimes all of which is on display in a single scene – is mesmerizing. Will could easily come across as little more than the bland lead of some CBS procedural in the hands of a lesser actor, but Dancy sells every inch of this complicated, haunted character. He’s the true MVP of this show and he rarely gets the proper acknowledgement for just how much he brings to it.
Still, Hannibal could tend to pick up the pace a bit. The languid tone of “Primavera,” even more so than the similar leisurely “Antipasto,” does start to feel a bit like inertia at times, even with Will and Hannibal occupying the same space far sooner than expected. Presumably we’ll get caught up with Jack and Alana next week, to see how they’re doing after shaking off their own mortal wounds, but the manhunt for Lecter hopefully will move forward in full force soon before the onset of any real doldrums. Yet even when Hannibal is running a bit sluggish, it’s still the greatest source of disturbing imagery anywhere on television. When Will has his latest phantasmagoric glimpse of the Stag Man (his demonic, antlered vision of Lecter) emerging from the heart display into something sickeningly anthropomorphic yet utterly inhuman, it’s another one of those moments where you can’t believe you’re seeing something this insane anywhere on television, much less on NBC. This is Hannibal’s design. May it never change.
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