I have had literally no feedback about last week's inclusion of a mini-recap for the movie Manhunter. So I can only assume it was a huge success! Naturally, this week's mini-recap is for the movie Red Dragon, the second adaptation of the novel that forms the source material for this series. There's a lot more Hannibal Lecter in Red Dragon, because it's the Anthony Hopkins version. We even get to see Will Graham (Ed Norton this time) realize that Hannibal is the serial killer he's looking for right at the beginning of the movie. There's also an extra visit between Will and Hannibal and a crazy exercise room for Hannibal, where he gets to walk in a circle while he's chained to the ceiling. Another part of the way this movie highlights Hannibal is that Francis Dolarhyde is a little less crazy. Don't get me wrong; he's still very, very crazy. But the version in Manhunter was very "Buffalo Bill." The nickname "Tooth Fairy" no longer has the slur in it, which makes the movie slightly more sensitive. And because this is a Brett Ratner movie, there are a lot more explosions. That about covers it. Okay, on with the TV show.
A clock is at 12:05, but it's running backwards. So we're starting on a particularly artsy note tonight. Will is in his cell, wearing a suit. The camera rotates around to see him also getting killed in the electric chair. It's happening in reverse, which means that the smoke is going into his body. Don't think too hard about that, because it might be the grossest thing in the episode. When the clock rewinds to 12:00, a prison guard takes the mask off the Will in the chair, which represents him putting the mask on him at midnight. Suit-wearing Will watches and then throws the switch. He watches chair-Will get electrocuted, this time in forward motion and not wearing a mask.
Then Will wakes up in his cell.
In alternating shots, we see Hannibal and Will putting on shirts and ties. Because they're parallel characters, get it? Do ya? Huh? They're so parallel that by the time this series gets to the events of Red Dragon, there won't be much left to do because Will is spending this whole season doing the things Hannibal does in the source material. Hannibal spends more time getting dressed, because he has to put in some work adjusting his tie and vest.
We're already in Will's trial. I thought the place would be full of reporters, but this world has so many serial killers that maybe they're all burnt out. Still, an FBI profiler who's accused of being a serial killer? That's news! The prosecutor in the case talks about the Minnesota Shrike, claiming that Will Graham understood how the Shrike thought, but his profile was so vivid that he couldn't escape it: "And in an unconscious state, he killed four more women." You probably remember them from the first season, but for the record (this recap counts as an official trial record, right?), they were Cassie Boyle, Marissa Schur, Georgia Madchen, and Abigail Hobbs. According to the prosecutor, Will wasn't able to save Abigail from himself. So he ate her ear. Also, he has remarkable visual memory and is so smart that he made up a profile of an imaginary murderer to be his alibi.
Jack paces in the hallway. Kade strolls up to say she's impartial, and that's why she knows that Will is guilty. She digs at Jack, saying that he's trying to avoid being the guy who's the head of Behavioral Sciences at the FBI who "missed a killer standing right in front of him." He's going to be pretty annoyed when he finds out he was right about Will but still missed a killer. I mean, I feel bad for him being accused of being bad at his job, but he actually is pretty bad at it, right?
Jack is on the stand. He recounts his first meeting with Will, in which he found him intelligent, arrogant, and "very likely on the spectrum." I'm pretty sick of the phrase "on the spectrum," except when it's applied to colors. I don't want to get into the business of diagnosing fictional characters, you know? Jack says, "He can think like anybody." The prosecutor says, "Sounds like a supervillain." Does it? That's a weird power for a supervillain to have. I'm not sure how you'd blow up the Eiffel Tower with it. Jack disagrees with the prosecutor about Will being guilty, because Will hated going to crime scene, but Jack kept making him do it: "I had been warned by more than one person that if I kept pushing Will, I'd break him."
At the end of the day, Will complains to his lawyer about Jack calling him crazy. The lawyer likes it, because he's more concerned about getting a Not Guilty verdict than in sticking close to what may or may not be the truth. Someone brings a letter addressed to "Leonard Brau", which is a pretty slick way to tell us the lawyer's name. Mr. Brau feels that he can sell "unconsciousness in a pretty package." He pours out the envelope, and it appears to have contained red powder and an ear. He's completely unfazed as he tells Will, "I think I opened your mail."
Hannibal pours out some liquor for Jack, saying it was a good and brave thing he did for Will. Jack thinks it could cost him his job, but he hasn't felt better in weeks. It wasn't entirely intended to be a resignation, but Jack is content to let the chips fall. This seems like an opportune time to report that Hannibal's suit is kind of a red plaid. It's basically what you'd see on a 1920s vaudeville comedian. Now they talk about Bella's cancer or whatever it is. I barely remember that Jack has a wife, but I know she's dying of something, and it's causing marriage problems. He's been thinking of taking her to Italy, where they met. That sounds fun, until his reason is "She could die there." Hannibal tells Jack he's not the one who's sick. And when Bella's gone, he could still have the FBI. He recommends against forcing an issue for the short-term emotional satisfaction it could have.
The lab. Everyone's talking about the ear, but Jack is zoned out so we can't hear the dialogue. It's either an artistic decision or they didn't feel like coming up with a bunch of science words. When Jack starts paying attention, we learn that the ear was cut off a corpse less than 48 hours ago. It clearly wasn't Will, but it was timed for the beginning of the trial. Hannibal suggests that maybe someone other than Will really did commit those murders. Brian is very skeptical.
Hannibal visits Will's cell. By the end of the season, I hope to figure out the rules for when Will has to be in the little cage and when he just stays in his cell. Hannibal says he wants to help Will, although he claims that it hadn't occurred to him to send Will an ear. Will says, "I'm grateful someone has." Hannibal claims to have new thoughts about Will, because "There may very well be another killer." Will would like that. He no longer knows what anyone is capable of, even himself. He admits there's no evidence against Hannibal, and accusing him makes Will look insane. But, he insists, "I'm not insane. Not anymore." Yeah, buddy. You are. You didn't kill those people, but you still have an awful lot of hallucinations for someone who's entirely sane. Hannibal says the ear is an opportunity. Maybe the real culprit wants to be seen. In fact, maybe the culprit cares what happens to Will. Are we supposed to think that Hannibal sent this ear? Because so far, I don't.
Back to the trial. The prosecution calls Freddie Lounds to the stand, and this is where I say how great Philip Seymour Hoffman was in Red Dragon. He was a really good sleazy tabloid reporter. And I guess that saying anything more would probably be spoilers for the season of this show? Ms. Lounds is wearing a hat with a very wide brim, and she has it pulled low over her face in a way that she probably thinks makes her look like a femme fatale in a film noir. She says she was close with Abigail (in that she was pumping her for information for a quickie memoir), and Abigail said she believed Will wanted to kill and eat her like her father. The prosecutor asks, "Do you blame yourself for her death?" She answers, "I blame Will Graham."
The defense asks how many times Freddie been sued for libel. It's six times! And she settled all of them out of court. There are no further questions, because apparently all you need to do is call the witness a liar, and that discredits their testimony completely.
Court. Jack and Kade are talking to the judge. I don't know what the legal justification for this is. Jack says the murder of the bailiff casts serious questions on Will's guilt. Kade says Will's legal defense is insanity, not "I didn't do it." The judge would prefer the defense lawyer be the one saying these things. Seriously. You guys are just witnesses at best.
Will is fishing in the stream in his mind. But he's really at the trial, where Dr. Chilton is being an enormous jackass. Seriously, dude, don't bring a silver-tipped cane to the murder trial. It's just weird. According to him, Will claims to be "Somewhere between Asperger's and autism. But he also claims an empathy disorder." Basically, Dr. Chilton is annoyed that Will won't let himself be diagnosed because Will is too smart to engage with any of the standard tests. You know, like Hannibal Lecter does in Red Dragon. So Chilton claims that he's "objectively examined" Will, which I think means he's just making up his diagnosis. According to him, the murders were measured and controlled, and the allegedly confused Will couldn't do it, "because that man is a fiction." The prosecutor asks, "Is Will Graham an intelligent psychopath?" Chilton answers, "There is not yet a name for what Will Graham is." It'll be fun to watch him eat his words when Will turns out to be innocent, but he'll just get to transfer all his comments straight over to Hannibal.
Chilton is passed over to the defense, who asks if a cold-blooded killer catch killers. Chilton answers, "He caught the other killers merely to prove he was smarter than all of them, too. Saving lives is just as arousing as ending them. He likes to play God." Normally, I'd talk about how this is the exact motive that Hannibal's given in Red Dragon, but I'm distracted by this cane. It's so ridiculous!
Hey, there's a third place for Will to receive visitors! This time he's chained to a table. This is where Will had that repressed-memory scene with the metronome, I think. Hannibal goes in and shows Will the picture of the bailiff all burnt up. Will asks, "My admirer?" He also gets all the forensic reports from the crime scene. Hannibal asks what he sees, and Will's eyes close.
Whoosh. Whoosh whoosh. The yellow light saber in Will's mind starts erasing things from the room. Hannibal vanishes. The cell vanishes. Now Will's in the room with the stag head, prior to the fireball. Sykes walks in and also sees the stag. Will narrates, "I shoot Mr. Sykes once," and then goes into unnecessary anatomical detail about the damage the bullet does to various internal organs. He picks up the story with "He will die believing we were friends. It is his last thought." He picks Sykes up and throws him onto the antlers. The writers of this show drastically overestimate the strength of a taxidermy mount. Will starts channeling the killer's mind, or possibly writing angsty junior high poetry about the corpse: "He is merely the ink from which flows my poem." He cuts off the ear and announces, "A tribute. This is my design." See, Hugh Dancy doesn't have to spend the whole season either in jail or fishing. He gets to do plenty of killing-by-proxy in these scenes.
Will says it's not the same killer. This one murdered Sykes first, then mutilated the body. But everyone else was cut apart while still alive. He thinks Hannibal may have ignored these facts, hoping no one else would notice. Hannibal says he was hoping to dispel Will's doubts about him: "I want you to believe in the best of me, just as I believe in the best of you." These characters are very close. When we get to Hannibal being locked up and Will coming to him for help, I hope this Hannibal is more helpful than the movie versions. Hannibal says that this copycat is Will's path to freedom, since even Jack is ready to believe it. Will doesn't want to lie, and Hannibal pushes him: "This killer wrote you a poem. Are you going to let his love go to waste?"
It feels even less like Hannibal now. Of all people, surely Hannibal wouldn't screw up the details of these murders, right?
Dr. Bloom is confused about Will abandoning his entire defense strategy. But his lawyer likes it. There's a killer on the loose that is similar to the crimes Will's accused of, which he thinks will provide plenty of reasonable doubt. And a mistrial is as good as a win. Is it? I don't think it is. He's throwing out Bloom's diagnosis because they have a better play. And someone else will be taking the stand in her place.
Hannibal takes the stand. Will sees him as the man with antlers, which I still think is a bad sign for his mental health. Hannibal says he was asked by Jack to monitor Will's well-being, although he was never officially his psychiatrist. He was meant to provide stability to Will, but he admits, "I failed him in that." He claims he couldn't tell if Will's deteriorating condition was due to stress or insanity. But he never considered the possibility that Will might be innocent. He was called in to profile the murderer of the bailiff (which I still think is weird, because it seems like Jack never does any profiling of his own), and he believes there are "alarming similarities." The prosecution objects, and is overruled. Hannibal doesn't blame Will for going into denial. He says, "Will Graham is, and will always be, my friend." We'll see about that.
Cross-examination. The prosecution has also noticed that the bailiff died from a bullet, but the deaths that Will is accused of were due to mutilation. The prosecution says there were two different murderers. The judge rules this whole defense inadmissible, and testimony on the matter will be stricken from the record. The court record, not this recap. That would be confusing.
Montage! Jack drinks and looks at the picture of Sykes. Hannibal sits in his office across from an empty chair and thinks. Will sits in his cell and thinks. The camera wanders off from Will and eventually finds a janitor with a floor buffer. He backs into the courtroom while listening to an iPod. When he turns around, there's one of this show's characteristically unlikely crime scenes. The judge has been hung from the ceiling with the top of his head cut off.
Now the scene is examining. The judge was killed in his chambers, then posed like the painting of Justice behind the bench. His scales hold his brain and heart, so he's blind, brainless, and heartless. Just like Sykes, he was shot, although the entry wound was obliterated when the heart was taken out. Jack says the trial will start over. Hannibal opines that psychopathic violence is goal-oriented, and this is an elegant solution for the trial. But he doesn't think this is the same killer as Will's: "I feel like St. Peter, ready to deny Will for the same time."
Kade stumbles on the scene. Wait, they're just leaving the doors to the courtroom open, and the building is still in use? That's just going to upset passersby. For example, Kade seems upset. Jack tells her there's very little evidence so far. She was apparently hoping the trial would end the parade of ridiculous killings. Yeah, the rule of law is kind of taking a beating when someone can sneak into a judge's chambers, kill him, then spend a few hours stringing him up as a tableau in a courtroom. Kade says the trial was going wrong because Jack wanted to believe Will Graham. Now he has to cut Will loose, or he'll be the one who gets left behind.
Will lies on his bunk in his cell. Alarms go off and all the cell doors open. This happens a lot in fiction, and it's usually a trap Will walks out of his cell and sees the stag. When he turns around, Hannibal's back at the cell, and gestures for him to go back in. Then he's lying on his bunk again.
Bloom meets with Will at the table (as opposed to the cage and the cell). Will says he's been misdiagnosed. That's boring, so he also says he could hear his own blood, "like a hollow drumming of wings." That's more like it. And he thinks the killer walked out of the courtroom with him. The killer will reach out to him because he wants to know Will. He asks Bloom what she wants, and she wants to save him. He puts his hand on hers, and she doesn't pull away.
I think it's the defense attorney. My evidence is pretty flimsy, but he didn't seem surprised by the ear, and he was saying he wanted a mistrial. And now there's a mistrial! Case closed.