"Cherry tomatoes, they amuse me so."
As with most things, I arrived late to the series Hannibal, which ran from 2013 to 2015, and shared a very vague timeline with the actual books by Thomas Harris on which the characters and events were based. I devoured the series in full earlier this year, and was pretty amused by the author's take on Hannibal (the Cannibal) Lecter as the character's popularity grew: Red Dragon (He's a pretty evil guy.) The Silence of the Lambs (He's a bad guy but also very smart and has a soul.) Hannibal (Well, ok, he's not so bad as this child molester with no face who drinks martinis made from the tears of children.) Hannibal Rising (Look, THE NAZIS MADE HIM EAT HIS SISTER, WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM HIM?) The next step for me was obviously the beloved NBC show.
It's really good. I mean you have to kind of understand that investigator Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) and Hannibal (Mads Mikkelsen) are in love and all the things that they do in the show are just reactions to either receiving or being denied this love, but once you do that, man, it's a real blast.
It's really good. I mean you have to kind of understand that investigator Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) and Hannibal (Mads Mikkelsen) are in love and all the things that they do in the show are just reactions to either receiving or being denied this love, but once you do that, man, it's a real blast.
This forever.
There's a lot to love here, even outside the Hannibal/Will Graham thing. Like, from the minute we meet Hannibal, as a doctor helping the FBI, he's a creepy weirdo. Like, he's never not a creep; he talks weird shit and acts suspicious af and is always narrowing his eyes and tenting his fingers. Had he a mustache, he'd be twiddling it. In certain scenes he almost seems to be amazed to have gotten away with his terrible and elaborate murders. The characters around him, including Lawrence Fishburne as Jack Crawford, the head of Behavioral Sciences, walk grimly around with guns at their belts saying things like "we're so close to catching whoever is doing this!" while Hannibal stands there figuring out his menus.
Which is another thing- Hannibal eats people pretty constantly in the series. Like, people will go missing and then he'll throw a big dinner party for his friends filled with organ meats and no one suspects anything. They're all just like, "lol, I can't wait until the next Eyeball Bake at Hannibal's house."
Which is another thing- Hannibal eats people pretty constantly in the series. Like, people will go missing and then he'll throw a big dinner party for his friends filled with organ meats and no one suspects anything. They're all just like, "lol, I can't wait until the next Eyeball Bake at Hannibal's house."
"Gentlemen, to evil."
Somethings are disappointing: Gross Tabloid Scumbag Freddy Lounds is now a beautiful woman in her thirties; the older forensic psychiatrist Alan Bloom is now a beautiful woman in her thirties- but even these small asides have been forgiven by the third season, when Hannibal is truly cracked open into the big telenovela pinata it is. To binge this series two years after it went off the air felt like a hidden joy, and upon completion I fed immediately to Twitter demanding that Netflix facilitate a meeting with creator Bryan Fuller to discuss a fourth season, not knowing ofc, that this meeting had happened in vain fully two years ago. If a fourth season never happens, though, i'll always have the memory of this strange and beautiful show, sometimes a hit, sometimes a miss, always shocking, brazenly original.
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