I'm as mixed on the second season as I was on the first, which moves forcefully into becoming both more of its own entity with the recontextualisation of events into its own world, and yet also gets too frustratingly wedded to TV cliches at the crucial moments as well (the incessant score for one thing - it is often beautiful, but needs to be applied sparingly not slathered all over the whole show like a sauce that takes away the flavour of the meat. But also the trope of falling back into the use of female characters as over emotional hotheads who screw everything up to provide cliffhanger moments and/or closure to storylines. And the other TV trope of futzing around dragging plotlines out over a number of episodes and losing all the tension when they would perhaps work better handled quicker). However despite those issues, I'm more positive than negative on the series, and there are still some magnificent moments, and at least one laugh out loud line reading:
"Is that your Social Worker inside that horse?"
And after complaining about the ghost jump scare visions and the heavy handed deer metaphor, the visions get dialled back (though perhaps more due to circumstance!) and the deer metaphor actually gets developed into something coherent and meaningful. Plus, although it is also perhaps too symbolically heavy handed, I loved the river fishing metaphor for Will Graham (all the events and bodies rushing past him while he tries to hook out the individual killers), which near the end of the season gets to duel with the briefly sketched in introduction of Lecter's 'memory palace'.
In a bit of a turnaround from the first season, I much preferred the first half of the second season with Will Graham in the insane asylum to the second half when he is back on the beat. I loved that the theme of the first episode was of everybody dealing in their own way with the absence of Will Graham, and the way that Hannibal gets pressed into taking Will's place at the crime scenes. With the telling difference being that Hannibal is not able to empathise with either the killer or victims, but instead uses his practical and aesthetic skills to get by. Although his more artistic perspective perhaps leads him to make overconfident assumptions that turn out to be wrong? Or are they wrong because Hannibal is purposefully messing up solving the cases?
This is a great section of the show (and beautifully undermining usual TV conventions) as suddenly all of the 'murders of the week' start going unsolved for a couple of episodes at a time. Lecter's presence (and this is really the theme of the season, spreading outwards from destroying just Will in the first season) is corrupting both the FBI investigators
and the murderers of the week. However Lecter seems less interested in helping kindred spirits and more about stocking up his larder!
Then we get into the section of the show revolving around the Beverly Katz character (which is by far the best section of this series), approaching Will to bring his investigative skills to bear on cases from his cell, which is a wonderful premonition (or, better, a reinterpretation) of Lecter in his cell from Silence of the Lambs. This is perhaps the first indication that the TV series wasn't just going to be doing the storylines from the novels and films again with a bit of Rob Zombie in Halloween-style prequel baggage added in beforehand, although I had not really cottoned onto it yet, as instead I noted to myself at this point that: "if Lecter ends up doing this very similar kind of scene with Clarice Starling later on would that add weight to the idea that Hannibal was still obsessed with Will, down to copying his actions here?" Now with the Verger material from the second half of the season added in, I think this series isn't going to be anything as simple as just a remake of the pre-existing material, but instead a re-interpretation in the best sense of putting different characters into different roles and seeing how events play out that way. So in season 2 we get scenes of characters eating themselves here, and characters trapped in jail sending proxy killers out to do their bidding there; someone, or something, crashing through a glass window in one scene; a firery corpse in a wheelchair rolling down the ramp of a parking garage in the next. The iconic elements are getting pleasingly scrambled up to mess with the audience's expectations as much as with the those of the characters.
This is more of an issue with the second half of the series, particularly with the introduction of the Vergers, and in a way I'm unsure about how to feel about it. This series (perhaps consciously?) appears to be strangely working to demythologise the Hannibal Lecter cult as built up in the novels or films. The power of the shocking moments has been divorced from their original context, and is replaced with a sense of iteration. What should be horrific punctuations to entire dramatic arcs gets played out as a joke
(such as the flaming death of Freddie Lounds being retracted, or someone having themselves for dinner with no third party there to act as an audience surrogate)
or just as televisual cliffhangers, that are crucially important one moment, and hastily forgotten in the rush to the next one. I think that this is shown most obviously in the Verger mini-arc in the second half of the season, which seems to delight in swapping events around so that the opening situation that Mason is in in Hannibal becomes the denoument instead.
I must admit though that I hadn't even considered Will's dogs as factoring into the climax! That was a great twist that completely blindsided me!
Where is there to go from here except into repitition? Can Verger really try feeding Hannibal to his pigs again after this, or would he have to find a newly imaginitive way of getting revenge? So what to do, now that the climatic imagery has already been used up? Will the series go into fresh and newly horrific imagery to try and top the imagery which Thomas Harris used in his novel? That could work, but it could just as easily end up coming across as a TV producer's idea of extreme imagery, less baroquely imaginative and potentially more derivative than the source material, and looking worse for the comparison. This might seem a harsh pre-judgment, but I think it is more of a warning, particularly as this second season also at various points seemed to be stealing imagery from The Cell while thinking that no one was looking:
The early murderer of the week turning his victims into doll-like figures. The murder of Beverly Katz, cut into pieces and mounted in plexi-glass like a Damien Hirst exhibit. And even Mason Verger at one point is playing jajouka music at his pigs in order to rile them up into a killing frenzy!
So if the Thomas Harris novels and The Cell have been plundered so far, all that is really left is the Saw series to provide future extra material to weave into the narrative!
I was also a little bit less interested in the guest stars this time around, whilst still being glad to see the actors in the roles. I just guess that Amanda Plummer and Jeremy Davies (along with Katharine Isabelle and Michael Pitts as the Vergers from a younger generation of actors) are perhaps a little
too obviously a 90s-era casting director's actors of choice to portray mentally unstable characters! Though it was great to see Plummer and Davies on screen again after not seeing them for a while! It was also nice to see Martin Donovan pop up for a single scene too, as Laurence Fishburne's confidant!
And unfortunately the episode in which Anna Chlumsky's character appears again ends on such a sour note I understand why her character just disappears from the series again at that point. Which was a shame.
However there are still a lot of flashes of interesting stuff in the series: I'm much more interested in the Will Graham character in this series than I had been in the first,
and although I kind of predicted that he wasn't going to have killed Freddie Lounds and crossed the final rubicon to stand with Hannibal, I did like that the series pushed things to that edge to such an extent that it was kind of disappointing that it pulled back to spare Will again. In those few episodes I'd gone through a cycle of "what the hell are you doing, you idiot?" to headslapping "not again, he's gone nuts" to suddenly realising that Will was so determined to bring Hannibal down after all of the betrayals that he might potentially have been willing to become a murderer himself. If it meant sacrificing himself to prove his loyalty, which itself would taint Hannibal with guilt, I could see Will doing that. But then of course it got retracted to some extent to turn Will back into a flawed antihero again rather than a man willing to sacrifice others to ensure he caught his bigger fish.
Unfortunately the Alana Bloom love triangle bit wasn't that great:
though this did allow for Vincenzo Natali to do a few excellent abstract sex scenes in his episodes, including one in which both of the two couples appear to be engaged in an orgiastic foursome of fluid, melting bodies and identities! That was perhaps worth the whole Alana Bloom subplot in itself!
That plays into the way that I loved the occasions where Will and Hannibal were intercut performing similar actions, as if they were doubles of each other. Such as Hannibal preparing a meal while the asylum slops stuff into a tray for Will; or both getting formally dressed up to go to Will's trial.
Oh, and the cookery scenes were just as great as usual. Is it wrong that I usually like to have a plate of bacon sandwiches to hand whilst watching? I still think though that, in terms of sheer outré weirdness, that in a world in which a jawdropping game series like
D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die has redefined my notions of investigative nuttiness, Hannibal still has some work to do!