Season 2 of NBC’s Hannibal premiered tonight and it was every bit as dark and brooding as its previous season, complete with a very appropriate viewer discretion warning. This show gets away with so much and in this first episode we already get uncomfortably close close-ups of raw meat and organs and graphic depictions of preserved water-bloated corpses. Yay, NBC.
Last season ended with Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) in custody, taking the blame for murders actually perpetrated by the most suave and well-dressed guy on television Dr. Hannibal I-swear-I-don’t-eat-people Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen). The second season beings with a fight between Lecter and Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne), ending in the latter’s near or implied death. After the beautifully choreographed fight with its unclear result, we jump back twelve weeks to pick up where season 1 really left off. Will Graham is in jail, Alana Bloom has adopted all of his dogs, the science/medical people are still boring, and Hannibal Lecter complains to his psychiatrist (played by the luscious Gillian Anderson) that he misses his friend Will. Boo hoo.
Hannibal manages to slide into Will’s old role as a profiler for the FBI while the two go back and forth, each trying to manipulate the other. Will finally gets a grasp of his memories and tries, without immediate success, to get his former colleagues to believe him when he says that Hannibal is responsible for all of his crimes. Meanwhile, we are introduced to the season’s first serial killer mystery: a killer who collects and preserves bodies, and arranges them into a macabre sort of pinwheel shape.
The episode is a strong start to what I hope will be a strong season. I admit that I lost interest in Hannibal the first time around, viewing it as a promising show visually but with dull pacing and so-so characters. The dialogue can be almost painful at times, and slow to boot, with all of the characters carrying the same cadence to their speech. Like they’ve got taffy stuck to the roofs of their mouths. Aesthetically, the show knocks it out of the park. When we delve into Will’s mind, the shots take on a quality similar to scenes in The Cell, bizarre and frightening but somehow utterly realistic, particularly Will’s subconscious image of Hannibal: an oily angular faun with sharp antlers.
Mads Mikkelsen’s nuanced performance alone is worth a watch, and the painstaking attention to detail in each scene is rather beautiful. Dancy’s performance unfortunately always takes on a forced and tremulous falseness that I can’t get into. I’m hoping that the addition of Michael Pitt as Mason Verger will spice up the cast but his introduction isn’t slated until late in the season. We’ll just have to see how things progress.
But still, a strong start to a unique show.