John Lucking reviews the tenth episode of Hannibal….
It’s one thing to say that Will Graham is undergoing some kind of mental trauma, but how far in this direction can Hannibal really go? It’s a fragile subject and unless you’re going to do it justice one best left untouched, but this week’s macro-level focus on Will’s psychosomatic undoing made it clear that this is not a subject they will be avoiding. Instead we are given an early scene between Lecter and Will in which the reality of an actual mental illness is proposed. While heavily telegraphed this is a somewhat bold step as nearly every brilliant detective comes saddled with various character flaws, but very few possess anything other than alcoholism, mild drug abuse or any other tropes of the urban anti-hero.
Vices are often portrayed as something our heroes choose to engage in, but mental illness is a lifelong affliction that very few understand and one from which there is no ‘cure’. It can sometimes put an audience at unease and inadvertently stifle attempts to elicit empathy, and so nine times out of ten television will take an unwashed alcoholic over a person with any kind of mental illness. The tail end of Homeland’s first season is one recent and somewhat similar high-profile instance, with Claire Danes’ FBI agent Carrie Mathison temporarily succumbing to a bout of depression during an attempt to find and prevent a suicide bomber from detonating on American soil. This was not an arc restricted to one episode at the end of which she jumped out of bed, put on her Ray-Bans and decided it was time to kick some terrorist ass – it was a story spanning weeks of television before ending with her voluntarily submitting herself for electroconvulsive therapy. If that sounds incredibly dark then that’s because it was, and while it did perhaps swing too far in that direction its treatment of a person crumbling before our eyes was pretty spot on because of its dedication to that story thread.
This is all to say that I’m happy with Hannibal’s decision to travel down this path; I trust them to do it justice, and it isn’t done enough. It’s a potentially dark and off-putting approach, but then again so is Hannibal. It’s during a discussion with Crawford that Lecter notes Will’s problem as being that he does not reflect the people he chases, but instead absorbs. What exactly he absorbs or how much of it is left open, but it’s clear that if nothing else it’s enough to make him lose trust in himself and his actions. We’re literally shown as much when Lecter asks Will to draw an object as something to anchor him during moments of stress, and while Will draws a standard clock once he hands it to Lecter it’s revealed to be an almost incomprehensible facsimile of a clock. Jack later shares a scene with Will in which he announces himself as bedrock (Jack tells you, he does not imply), and it is perhaps true; that for all the damage his work does to him it does provide him with a routine, and he does catch his killers.
The procedural element comes about after an urban legend-inspired opening in which a woman is dragged almost Evil Dead-like under the bed before having her face split. There are a handful of similar moments within this story that would have been much more egregious any other week, but in an episode that skews towards the visually experimental via the harsh reality of mental illness it’s made much less troublesome (except for her cavewoman-like brow, even that was a push too far). This killer turns out to be Georgia, a girl who suffers from Cotard’s syndrome (the delusion that you are dead) and is unable to perceive faces, which to her appear as nothing more than a blur. Georgia has been living feral for some time now, and as her murders are not the result of a search for a deeper connection the show has trained us to understand this makes them unimportant. Her actions are the result of a psychotic break, and thus Georgia’s purpose and parallels are laid out as she follows Will home and gives him a chance to preserve his own sanity by saving that of another. Despite her descent into madness Georgia is pulled back from the brink as Will utters her name, location and even the time. These are the anchors that help moor her in reality, and while Will attempts to duplicate this his brain is lying to him as his perception is twisted by the memories of every crime scene he has investigated.
Lecter offers Will the services of a neuroscientist friend who finds there to be nothing physically wrong after an MRI scan. Before this scan can even take place Lecter informs his friend that Will suffers from encephalitis – he could literally smell it on him. This is the root of his blackouts, hallucinations, sleepwalking and various other problems which are working together with his existing fragility and leading him to believe he might be capable of something terrible. Will proves to yet again be a temptation for another academic as Lecter and his friend Dr. Sutcliffe debate the merits of having a ‘pig’ to toy with – unfortunately that specific phrasing on Sutcliffe’s part causes Lecter to take great umbrage and is just one factor in his decision to semi-decapitate his old friend in his office. This scene deserves points for style as Lecter pries apart Sutcliffe’s jaw in a transparent suit before handing the scissors over to a confused Georgia who has wandered into the office. With Sutcliffe out of the picture Will is all Lecter’s now, and while his phrasing would be sufficiently articulate and polite, it’s clear that he’s going to be toying with him significantly more in the coming weeks.
John Lucking
Originally published June 4, 2013. Updated April 11, 2018.
