“Hannibal” Recap: Tiger Tiger, Burning Bright

TMI time: As a TV critic, you see enough sex scenes to get desensitized. Whether it’s the pneumatically thrusting buttocks of a pay-cable drama or the “let’s show them getting all breathy and frantic as they start tearing at each other’s shirts because that’s basically all we can show” approach of your average commercial-network affair, the stuff just hits a point of diminishing returns after a while. For me, at least, it takes something special to elicit that telltale sign of effective televised sexmanship: a long, low murmur of “fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuudge,” but, you know, not actually the word “fudge.”

So, yeah, the bit where Rutina Wesley’s Reba McClane reenacts holding her face to the power and heat of the sleeping tiger on the lap Richard Armitage’s Francis Dolarhyde instead? Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuudge.

Hannibal’s sex has been sublimated throughout most of its run, with an atmosphere of generalized intimacy and sensuality substituting for the act itself. On the occasions where characters have actually gotten it on, the show has tended to go poetic, fracturing bodies in a kaleidoscope or morphing them together like wax. On this week’s episode, though, Francis and Reba just straight-up do it, in the culmination of a sequence where Reba experiences the physical power of a dormant beast in as palpable a fashion as possible. All the charge built up during their trip to the zoo, where Francis takes her to experience a tiger through every sense available to her — the rumble of its heartbeat, the touch of its teeth, the imagined hazy glow of its orange fur — gets released in a scene that’s preposterously erotic for a network show, or any show at all really. “And the Woman Clothed in Sun” was hot stuff.

It was also as visually audacious and well-acted as ever, and often the two elements went hand in hand. Take the opening sequence, in which Francis imagines himself as Hannibal Lecter’s patient while they talk.

Armitage plays Dolarhyde’s responses to Lecter’s words of understanding with crushing, tremulous joy — a sensation familiar to anyone who’s lived a whole long time before finally finding someone who actually gets it. And as a reward for stating his true nature out loud for the first time ever (is there a serial-killer closet one can come out of?), he is granted a vision of apotheosis greater than any he’s experienced before.

Cribbed from one of the William Blake paintings that gave him his name — one of which he’ll later physically consume, proving once again that on this show you are what you eat — it’s the most over-the-top monster-movie image the show has served up yet, and it’s frankly freaking awesome. It’s also echoed, naturally, in Dolarhyde’s vision of Ruby as they have sex: the Woman Clothed in Sun to his Great Red Dragon.

Elsewhere, Zachary Quinto is heartbreaking as the polar opposite of Ace, his apocalyptically obnoxious Girls character: Dr. Bedelia du Maurier’s ill-fated patient Neil Frank. We’d long been led to believe that Hannibal goaded the guy into assaulting Bedelia, but that’s only barely true; mostly he’s a normal guy suffering from mild depression who’s become fully aware that Dr. Lecter has basically driven him insane. Lecter recommended Bedelia when Neil broke off treatment not to watch him endanger her, but because he knew she would endanger him, with his vulnerability bringing out the monster in her. And sure enough, when given the opportunity to save his life when he swallows his tongue mid-rant, she…well, doesn’t.

As far as I know that’s the first time a show has depicted death by esophageal fisting.

Yet even amid the high-stakes confrontations and high pulse-rate sex scenes, the show maintains its arch and wicked sense of humor. Hannibal’s fake phone call to Dr. Chilton’s office in order to procure Will’s address, for example, becomes cheekily funny when compared to Dolarhyde’s earlier call to him. While the Red Dragon painstakingly practiced the consonants in the name he’d need to use when posing as Lecter’s lawyer, the Cannibal cold calls the office of a man who literally wrote the book on him without disguising his unmistakable accent in the slightest. As was the case when he posed as Roman Fell, a ruse doomed to fall apart the moment someone checked the late professor’s Facebook page, Hannibal is simply too delighted with dissembling, with the process of using his superior grasp of the situation against others, to be bothered to put much effort into it. His ego is fed better when he half-asses it and people fall for it anyway.

Dr. du Maurier’s material delivers the yuks (and the yucks) as well. Still far blunter and brasher than he was while under Hannibal’s direct influence, Will Graham insults her complicity with the Cannibal in no uncertain terms: “You didn’t lose yourself, Bedelia. You just crawled so far up his ass you couldn’t be bothered.” And in the flashback to her fatal confrontation with the patient Lecter drove mad, then placed in her care just to see what would happen, he offers an equally blunt assessment of her skills: “This is why Scientologists hate psychiatry.”

But the single most striking aspect of “And the Woman Clothed in Sun” is one of absence: The final scene, in which Will stumbles across Dolarhyde at the Brooklyn Museum and gets tossed like a ragdoll when the killer makes his escape is easily the least “artsy” pivotal scene since Will shot Garrett Jacob Hobbs in the pilot. No sculpturally gorgeous gouts of blood, no hallucinatory visions of dragons in the sky—just a tightly edited series of moves, glances, and ultimately an assault, unadorned and suspenseful as hell. It reads as an homage to the classically crisp cat-and-mouse sequences in Michael Mann’s Manhunter, the Red Dragon story’s excellent earlier adaptation (though this sequence was not featured in the film). And given the baroque way in which such things usually operate on this show, it hits like a punch in the face or a blow to the head, leaving us with the same “Goddammit, almost had him!” feeling Will himself must experience as the killer flees. Man, imagine how much worse it’ll feel when the whole show disappears.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) is a freelance writer who lives with Diet Coke and his daughter, not necessarily in that order, on Long Island.
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