“Hannibal” Review/Recap: “Naka-Choko”

Robert Tiemstra ’16 / Emertainment Monthly Staff Writer

“I’ve given up good and evil for behaviorism.”

Hannibal is not a show that does things by halves. Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) has flitted back and forth between good and evil throughout the course of the two seasons – although Doctor Lecter would surely object to such binary descriptions of Will’s morality (as he does with his own in this episode). As its most prominent development “Naka-Choko” features Will Graham’s first step from misguided to outright sociopathic – if it isn’t clear by the time the credits roll, Will Graham is now the monster he has objected so long to being.
Whenever a show tackles a drastic character change like this, it begs the question: does it work without seeming out of character? Will spent the entire first season struggling with his vigilante-like pleasure he got from murdering serial killer Garret Jacob Hobbes in the premiere, so a transgression into full psychosis certainly doesn’t seem far off. What seems more out of character for Will is the outright sadism with which he plays the last sequence – this doesn’t feel like a genuine moment coming from Will Graham, it feels like Will Graham doing a passable impression of Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen). By the end of this scene one half expects both Will and Hannibal to sprout handlebar mustaches and start twirling them while eating their cooked human.

This drastic shift in character has to possible answers: the last scene with Graham and Lecter as eating buddies (devouring what is heavily implied to be the remains of Freddie Lounds (Lara Jean Chorostecki) – funny how the least trustworthy characters are always the ones who figure it out first in this series) is either an elaborate ruse from Will, part of the “lure” he discussed with Crawford, or it is a genuine attempt by the Bryan Fuller and company to shock the audience, in which case they have let their show get away from them in the worst way possible. If we are lucky it is the former, because the only way the show could redeem this number of didactic character switches is by having it be part of some bigger scheme.
On the whole, this episode faced the same problems that much of the latter half of season two has faced – there is a crippling lack of urgency. The perceived lack of urgency is not due to a lack of high stakes action, there has been plenty of that. What the underline problem is comes from a frustrating lack of focus. This has been a problem since season one, but from the outset Hannibal’s writing staff have always done an admirable job balancing the narrative and thematic content, and restraining themselves when the need arose to create a lean narrative. This focus has gone awry in season two, which smacks of creative overreaching. It is one thing to say Hannibal wants to have its cake and eat it too, it is another to say it is trying to have several different cakes at once. Strained metaphors aside, it is hard to leave this latest episode without a bad taste in your mouth (every pun intended).

The focus of this episode fell squarely on the shoulders of the sociopaths (Lecter & Graham) and the Vergers (Mason & Margot). Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne) and Alana Bloom (Caroline Dhavernas) are once again given the short end of the stick, although Alana has a prominent role in what must be one of the most inscrutably edited sex scenes in Television history (more about that later). The Vergers continue to intrigue, more so the new introduction of Mason Verger (Michael Pitt, late from HBO’s Boardwalk Empire), a childish psychopath with the edge of a cruel little brother to Katherine Isabelle’s Margot, who although more emotionally mature, is outright terrified of the manic Pitt. Mason’s opening scene is a fascinating one that borders on the silly, in which he describes the process by which he turns normal pigs into man-eating pigs (the name of the baby big he carries around is no coincidence either, ‘Pavlov’, named after the psychologist behind classical conditioning, the method Mason is using to train said carnivorous swine).
The scenes with the Vergers are troubling ones, not only because they are creepy people, but because they contain a plethora of homages to the more mediocre sides of the source material. The man-eating hogs come back in Hannibal (the bad book and bad movie based on said book), and a passing reference is made to Lecter’s sister, who was a prominent character in the abysmal Hannibal Rising. As with the eel and tear-drinking in the last episode with Mason, hopefully these remain simply homages rather than hints toward what is to come. If they are the former, the writers certainly are getting rather adept at raising unnecessary fears in the minds of viewers who’ve actually read the books.

But back to characterization. Hannibal has always had a dubious relationship with subtext, mostly because the entire principal cast is comprised of psychologists and psychopaths (the exception being Jack Crawford). The closest this episode gets to subtlety without analyzing itself to death – a tendency that is actually starting to get wearisome at this point – is early on when Will Graham, Hannibal Lecter, and Jack Crawford are all viewing a crime scene that Will created with his victim from the previous episode. When Will does his shtick where he “goes inside the head” of the killer, we know we are in for something different because in this case Will actually IS the killer. The show delivers on that promise and creates one of the most fascinating crime scenes Graham has investigated so far (one that is probably already garnered popularity on Tumblr more for its offhand depiction of male nudity than its chilling direction and psychological tension). You must really feel sorry for Jack Crawford during this scene, though, because between Hannibal, Will, and the Audience, he is completely out of the loop.
Now let’s talk about that sex scene. For a show that prides itself on well-written and meticulously thought out psychological depth in its characters, it needs extremely flimsy excuses to throw its characters into bed together. In the case of Will and Margot it seems the only reason they need is she brought an extra batch of whisky and psychological baggage. As far as the sex scene itself goes, on one hand one must admire the willingness to take several steps beyond a well-worn cliché to emphasize interconnected character relationships – in this case, replacing Margot with Alana when Will is having sex with her, and then proceeding to show Alana between both Will & Hannibal – but on the other hand there is the tendency to look at a scene like this more cynically.

The whole “see your love while having sex with someone else” is nothing new, but Hannibal boldly sails into uncharted territory with their take on it – another part of this episode that will undeniably be popular with the Tumblr fanbase and mystifying to everyone else At a certain point the scene, while visually striking and fascinatingly edited, seemed like a misguided attempt at fanservice, turning the relationship between Will and Hannibal (through visual symbolism) into a “Bromance”. Whether it was intentional or not, this choice does not work because it rather painfully trivializes all the complex interplay between the two characters – a fault shared by the ending scene of the episode.
Episodes like this are difficult to grade. There is a sizeable amount of good material here, but none of it exceptional by the series’ normal standards of “good”, save for the terrifically gruesome crime scene and disturbing interplay with the dead man – Will talking to the severed face mounted on the prehistoric skeleton is an image that recalls a grotesque Hamlet, and it was nice to hear the victim talk back for a change. This episode is bad where it magnifies the problems the second season has fallen pray to, and by extension the show as a whole; frantic plotting, questionable characterization, and the increasingly irritating tendency to psychoanalyze its own dialogue. And the beat at the end with Freddie Lounds smacks of a show that has no investment whatsoever in the future, instead choosing to shock the audience in whatever ways they can.
Overall Episode Grade: C +