Tag Archives: Hannibal

Re-Heating Hannibal

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When Hannibal aired on NBC from 2013-2015 it was unlike anything seen before on network television. Which is to say that the gore in Hannibal, as artistically as it was presented, seemed very out-of-place on NBC. In truth, this was probably an intentional move by the network to compete with the shows on HBO, AMC, and then-upstart Netflix who were all providing more graphically adult content. But, don’t be mistaken, as gruesome as the visuals were, they were beautifully-rendered in their own way. This artistry was just as rare on network TV as any grisly crime scene.

Heavily serialized weekly shows were also a bit of a rarity on the networks at the time This is something that Netflix ended up using to its advantage by dropping entire seasons at a time and allowing viewers to binge at their own rate, rather than waiting several months to see a conclusion to any given storyline. All told, if Hannibal were released now, as artistically bloody and serialized as it was, it would be much better served on a streaming platform such as the aforementioned Netflix or Amazon Prime. As it happens, the entire three season run is currently available on both those services. I’ve been meaning to re-visit the show for some time now, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity for me to watch Hannibal as I believe it was intended. I was not disappointed.

Fair Warning: I am going to run through the events all three seasons of Hannibal, so there will be spoilers. Proceed with caution if you are interested in watching this show for the first time with fresh eyes.

Thomas Harris’ fictional philosopher/serial killer/erstwhile cannibal Hannibal Lecter has been part of the widespread public lexicon for more than 30 years. Silence Of The Lambs was a massively-successful, Academy Award and Box Office winning film that made Lecter an icon. Though 1986’s Manhunter, which was based on Harris’ novel Red Dragon, was actually the first cinematic interpretation of the character. After Silence Of The Lambs, a sub-par sequel novel was written and movie was filmed, also titled Hannibal. After which we got a since-forgotten prequel called Hannibal Rising, and an ambitionless remake of the original adaptation of Red Dragon.

That’s a lot of source material, but here’s the good news: You don’t need to have read or seen any of those works in order to jump into Hannibal: The Series. Yes, you’ll get more out of the Easter Eggs and such if you are familiar, but the show is not beholden to any pre-existing continuity. In fact, it frequently undercuts expectations by throwing a new twist on the way events occurred in the novels and films. This both benefits and, in one particular instance, harms the show. But we’ll get to that latter issue further along.

Silence Of The Lambs is built around the relationship between Lecter and young FBI agent Clarice Starling. Their interplay is very much one between an older mentor and a somewhat reluctant protégé. But, before Agent Starling, there was Will Graham. Graham was the protagonist in the Red Dragon novel, and subsequent film adaptations. He was the man responsible for putting Lecter in that iconic plexiglass cell everyone remembers from Silence Of The Lambs. Apparently, the rights issues for Thomas Harris’ characters are a bit of a mess, so Hannibal: The Series could not make mention of Clarice Starling, even if they’d wanted to. However, they do introduce a Clarice analog in equally-young FBI Agent Miriam Lass. Things don’t work out quite as well for Miriam as they did for Clarice when she is brought into Lecter’s orbit. It’s an interesting, and tragic, dichotomy that very effectively sweeps the legs out from under the viewers’ expectations.

The lack of Clarice didn’t really bother me, since I’d always found Will more interesting than Clarice in that he was meant to be more of an equal to Lecter. The Sherlock Holmes to his Moriarty. What drew me to Hannibal in the first place was the announcement that Will and Lecter would essentially be co-leads in the show. They famously never shared more than a few pages, or a few minutes of screentime, together. So that relationship was ripe for exploring.

Hannibal Lecter is a brilliant psychiatrist, social butterfly, sociopath, murderer and cannibal. Will Graham is brilliant in his own way, but the cost of his brilliance is a near-superhuman level of empathy. That’s what allows Will to get into the minds of the killers that he profiles for his boss, Special Agent Jack Crawford, to bring to justice. For a man with no legitimate connection to his fellow human beings, as Lecter is, Will is something of a unicorn. That push-and-pull is the essence of their relationship as the show progresses.

What follows below here is essentially a summary of each of the three season of Hannibal. They won’t be especially deep dives into the episodes, but they will include major spoilers for the overall arcs of the seasons. So, consider this your final spoiler warning.

Season One plays the most like a procedural show that you might typically see on NBC, even though it did have its flourishes. Hannibal Lecter is a practicing, and renowned psychiatrist, who no one suspects is murdering and eating people – though he is very much already doing both of those things. Will Graham is coming off a case where, as we see in the pilot episode, he shoots and kills a different cannibalistic serial killer. Will is traumatized by the whole experience, and so Jack Crawford sets him up with Dr. Lecter to help manage the toll that Will’s profiling work takes on him. Needless to say, this ends up being a terrible decision.

Throughout the season, Will uses his gift to track down serial killers who commit the most atrocious and horrifying of crimes. What’s interesting is how the final result of many of these murders are presented as works of art. The production design and framing are darkly beautiful, at least until they pull back and show you the horrific entirety of what you’re looking at. A similar style is used when showing Lecter’s food preparation. Everything he makes, set to the tune of popular classical music compositions, looks more delicious than anything you’d see on the Food Network. “Food Porn” is a term I saw applied more than once, even though the viewer knows damn well that the meat used for the recipes is not the sort you could purchase at Whole Foods or Shop-Rite.

After each case Lecter spends a little time helping Will manage, while spending a lot more time trying to dissect Will’s psyche and find out what makes him tick. This is the most serialized part of the first season, Will is helping track down the elusive “Chesapeake Ripper” (aka: Dr. Hannibal Lecter) but not getting close, even though he’s sitting right across from him in therapy. Will also begins acting stranger as the season goes on, losing time, hallucinating, and otherwise losing his grip on reality. Only Lecter knows that Will is suffering from encephalitis, but he doesn’t share that knowledge as that would interfere with his curious mental experiments on Will.

Eventually, Will puts things together and realizes that Lecter is the Ripper. But, by the time he confronts him, Lecter has already framed Will as the Ripper. Will’s mental health is already so ravaged that he’s unable to effectively stop Lecter before Jack steps in and arrests him. The season ends with a twist on the popular “Hello Dr. Lecter” greeting that, to this point, was offered to Lecter in his cell. But, in this case, Lecter is the one standing outside the cell, while Will is locked up.

Season Two takes the serialization to the next level. Will spends the first half of the season, finally free of the encephalitis and thinking clearly, trying to figure out how to acquit himself while convincing all of his FBI colleagues that Lecter is the Ripper they’re hunting. It somewhat stretches credibility that everyone is so sure Will is the Ripper, and that Lecter could not possibly be anything more than he appears on the surface. This is especially egregious with the character of Dr. Alana Bloom, another psychiatrist who played a pretty important role in season one. But, in season two, she is depicted as so blindly believing in Lecter’s innocence that she begins a romantic relationship with him while wagging her finger at Will. It’s a bad character turn that is overcorrected a little in season three.

One thing that season two does better than season one is show the viewer some aspects of Lecter’s insanity that actually create a weaknesses in his armor. For one thing, he cannot stop killing and eating people, which undermines the case against Will, and ultimately leads to Will’s release. Will takes this opportunity to finally convince Jack that Lecter is the Ripper, and the two of them conspire to lure Lecter into a trap using Will as bait.

Lecter’s twisted, yet genuine, love (for lack of a better term) for Will is another of his weaknesses – eventually, this will prove to be his greatest weakness. Will and Lecter engage in a very interesting game of Cat-And-Cat as they re-engage as doctor and patient, only now with both knowing the other’s true selves. Lecter does manage to avoid saying anything direction actionable from a legal level, but he’s also no longer attempting to play Will for a fool. Thus, they finally become more like equals. This makes up most of the second half of season two, and really provides a tense and thrilling propulsion for the remaining episodes.

Lecter’s other symptom of madness is demonstrated by sharing his table with Will and Jack, not knowing that Jack is working with Will to bring him down. Lecter is happy to maintain the illusion that everything is still normal about their interactions, while providing meals and polite conversations. One might expect that, since Will openly acknowledges Lecter as the Ripper, he may have looped Jack in. But Lecter has the pathological need to believe that his mask is still fully functional. This allows Jack and Will to get close enough to spring their trap. Unfortunately, Jack’s boss shuts their plan down shortly before they could complete their sting operation.

The finale of season two is fantastic up until its final moments. I don’t recall the real world circumstances surrounding the show, though there had been some doubt cast regarding a third season pick-up. It seems likely that Hannibal received a late season three renewal or, possibly, a higher episode count for season three than they were expecting. That would account for the finale ending in a massive cliffhanger, rather than with any sort of closure. Or, it’s possible that my expectations were too colored by the source material, and therefore I was left hanging for a last moment that never came, leaving me massively disappointed.

For those unfamiliar with the events leading to Lecter’s capture in the books, and previous films: Lecter stabs Will in the gut, and goes to leave. But Will is able to shoot Lecter before he makes his escape allowing his back-up to arrive and take Lecter into custody while Will goes to the hospital. The season two finale plays out almost exactly in this manner. An added aspect is Jack Crawford fighting Lecter before Will’s arrival, and receiving a grievous injury of his own. Will shows up and gets stabbed by Lecter, who simply walks away from the scene of the crime. No gun shots. No capture. The season just ends with Jack and Will bleeding to death in Lecter’s fancy kitchen.

They do not die, however, because there is a season three. The final season has 13 episodes, and the first seven of those episodes are, in my opinion, the worst seven episodes of the show. Lecter is in Florence, Italy living the good life under an assumed identity while occasionally killing and eating his intellectual rivals. Will and Jack, both recovered, are hunting him separately. Each of these episodes are extremely methodical and dreamy. The scenery is absolutely lovely, and the production design is as lush as it ever was. But the story lacks any forward momentum whatsoever.

In the background of things, Mason Verger is seeking vengeance against Lecter after being drugged and convinced to mutilate his own face at the end of season two. Alana Bloom is by Verger’s side, as she is his sister Margot’s lover. Dr. Bloom dresses like a character from a Tim Burton movie, and is presented as much more cold and stern that in the previous seasons. As I mentioned above, I feel like this was an overcorrection from her season two arc. Regardless, the arc of these episodes involves Will, Jack, and Mason in a race with one another to see who can get to Lecter first.

Will manages to get to the same place at the same time as Lecter first, but Lecter manages to avoid a face-to-face confrontation. Jack tracks Lecter down next, just after Lecter disembowels an Italian police officer on Mason’s payroll, and beats the crap out of him as a receipt for the events of season two. But he misses out on his chance to finish the job on Lecter once and for all. Eventually, several other officers collect the bounty on Lecter, and bring in Will as well. This leads the action back stateside, where Lecter and Will end up prisoners at the Verger Estate.

Alana and Margot’s interests are in direct contrast to Mason’s, which leads to them helping Lecter and Will escape, while killing Mason. Lecter brings Will back home, where Will attempts to extricate himself from Lecter once and for all. In no condition to try to physically end Lecter, Will does the next best thing and tells the mad doctor that he is making the choice to completely remove him from his life in every way. Lecter seems genuinely hurt by Will’s words, as he still feels a powerful kinship with Will. Rather than disappearing from Will’s life, Lecter surrenders to Jack Crawford. His explanation being that, this way, Will will always know where he is and where to find him. Lecter considers this a victory but, as we learn later in season three, Will had anticipated Lecter’s response. Will later says to Lecter “I knew that if I’d kept chasing you, you would have kept running.” Instead, by rejecting him, Will allowed Lecter to seal his own fate while thinking he was getting the last laugh.

This leads to the final six episodes of season three and (as of this moment) the show as a whole. The creative team uses this opportunity to remake Red Dragon for a third time. Had season two ended with Lecter shot and captured, the logical start of season three would have been episode 8. This is why I theorize that the season three renewal and 13 count episode order were somewhat unexpected. If Hannibal had gone from the season two finale directly into Red Dragon, I would have considered it amongst the strongest 20 episode run of any TV show ever. As it stands, I do believe that Hannibal’s telling of this story is significantly better than the Red Dragon film from 2002, and even a little bit better than Manhunter – which is a movie I like quite a lot.

Episode 8 picks up three years after the events of episode 7. Hannibal Lecter is securely locked up, with Alana Bloom as his primary warden. Will Graham is happily married, seemingly retired, and trying his best to be a good stepdad. Jack Crawford is still at his FBI post, and has a big problem. A new serial killer, one who murders entire families, is at-large and he needs Will to come back to help hunt the killer, dubbed by the media as the Tooth Fairy, down. Will is reluctant, but his wife – Molly – knows that he wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he didn’t try to stop the Tooth Fairy before he kills again. So, Will comes back into the fray, and starts by visiting Lecter for the first time since he was imprisoned in order to get the scent back. Lecter is very pleased to see Will again, but the feeling is most certainly not mutual. He agrees to help, though both he and Will know that he will only help to the extent of his own amusement.

The Tooth Fairy is a man named Francis Dollarhyde, given that nickname due to the bite marks he leaves on some of his victims. He hates the name, as he sees himself more as a man transforming into a dragon. His psychosis is tied in some way to the famous William Blake painting “The Great Red Dragon And The Woman Clothed With The Sun” hence the name of the novel. We spend a fairly significant amount of time with Dollarhyde, who’s pretty terrifying but not what I’d call an overtly interesting character. Even though there is a creepy love story involving him and his blind co-worker, Dollarhyde is ultimately meant to serve as the Minotaur in the center of the labyrinth for Will.

Lecter doesn’t see Dollarhyde as a monster. In fact, a recurring theme with Lecter through the previous seasons is him encouraging serial killers to become the best, most interesting serial killer they can be. He even tried, to no avail up until this point, to make Will Graham into a murder. His relationship with Dollarhyde proceeds much along the same lines. Lecter is quite famous – more accurately infamous – by this point, having earned his new title Hannibal The Cannibal, and Dollarhyde tells him that he served as an inspiration for his own transformation. Lecter is flattered by this, and sees an opportunity to the Dollarhyde as the protégé than Will was never willing to be.

By the end of season three, two seemingly unconnected things happen: Lecter sends Dollarhyde to kill Will’s wife and stepson. But Molly is tougher than she looks, and manages to escape with her son. As Will becomes more determined than ever to stop Dollarhyde by whatever means necessary, he also accepts the shocking truth that Hannibal Lecter is in love with him. At least as much as someone like Lecter can love another person. Will decides to use this to put together one last plan with Jack Crawford: Stage a fake escape for Lecter, who will connect with Dollarhyde – who intends kill and eat Lecter to gain his strength – giving the FBI a chance to then kill Dollarhyde. The idea being to kill two monstrous birds with one stone.

Naturally, this plan backfires as Dollarhyde intercedes before they were ready for him, and breaks Lecter out for real. Lecter then bring Will along to a lovely, isolated, cliffside home. The assumption being that Dollarhyde will track them there to kill them. This assumption is correct, and Dollarhyde makes his entrance by shooting Lecter through the glass wall in the back. Will steps aside and allows Dollarhyde to proceed with his plan to kill Lecter. But then Dollarhyde – his psychic transformation into the Dragon clearly leading him to overestimate his abilities – attempts to take on Will and Lecter at the same time.

After a brutal fight that ends with Lecter and Will (again) grievously injured, the pair manages to kill Dollarhyde while atop the cliff. Lecter helps Will to his feet, and embraces him at the edge of the cliff, confessing “This is all I ever wanted for you, Will. For both of us.” It may be the only moment of pure honesty Lecter demonstrates through the entire run of the series. Will knows this, and realizes that Lecter has completely let his guard down with him for the first time. Will then takes the opportunity to wrap his free arm tightly around Lecter’s neck, and launch them both off the cliff to the raging sea below to their apparent deaths. It may have cost Will his own life, but he did accomplish his goal of ridding the world of both Dollarhyde and Lecter.

Now, there is a post-credits sequence that is left somewhat open to interpretation. Dr. Bedelia Du Maurier, Lecter’s psychiatrist who had proven to be nearly as twisted as him, is dressed up at a dinner table about to be served her own severed leg. If the show had been renewed for a fourth season, this would have seemingly been the way to confirm that Lecter – and likely Will – survived their dive off the cliff. But it was never renewed for another season, or even a standalone movie, so one could just as easily interpret this sequence in another way. Du Maurier was Lecter’s accomplice for several months after he escaped to Florence as she wished to study him in his natural habitat. She managed to escape justice through her own machinations after Lecter turned himself in. But her mind was riddled with paranoia, so it could also be assumed that – if Lecter’s body was never found – she entered a fugue state, and prepared her own leg for dinner. It’s a bit more of a stretch, but is easy enough to sell yourself on if you’re looking for a bit more closure on the story that will likely not be continued.

If you’ve read this far, then you clearly have an interest in the show. Hell, the spoilers in this article may even convince you that you won’t be wasting 40 hours on something lackluster. The devil is in the details, as they say, and Hannibal is absolutely a devil worth getting the know the details of. I’ve mentioned the lush production design at the top but, honestly, every part of the production was phenomenal. The writing is sharp, clever, and offers more-than-a-little gallows humor. The directing of each episode is top notch, and the cast is fantastic from the top billed stars, all the way down to the one-off guest stars.

In this era of endless streaming platforms, and the primary cast being pretty open to the idea of reviving the show in – even six years after the final episode aired – there is always a chance that we get more in some fashion. Hell, CBS has already delved back into the IP with their show Clarice starring – you guess it – Clarice Starling, the Thomas Harris brand is still well in-demand. Hannibal ran only 39 episodes, out of which there were only a handful that underwhelmed. Believe me when I say you can, and should, binge this series in a week. If nothing else, it will allow your imagination to run wild next time you watch anything on Food Network.

A Cannibal’s Last Supper

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To kick things off with a bit of a controversial thesis: I believe that NBC’s Hannibal is a show whose quality that I place on par with contemporaries Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead.

It’s a very different kind of show than those others, but I find it equally enjoyable. Its lush and sumptuous art design and direction make it stand out from anything else on television. As does its sometimes meditative pacing, which can be a bit of a double edged sword.

As Hannibal concluded its run this past Saturday (which was on NBC’s accord rather than showrunner Bryan Fuller’s)  I thought it was a good time to view its greatness and frustrations as a whole.

Major spoilers ahead, so consider yourself warned.

Season one revolved around Hannibal Lecter  and Will Graham (fantastically brought to life by Mads Mikkelson & Hugh Dancy) as the co-lead characters, despite only one of them having his name in the title. Graham had been portrayed without much fanfare in the 1986’s Manhunter and 2002’s Red Dragon, so Dancy had significantly less pressure on him. Lecter had been portrayed by Brian Cox, Gaspard Ulliel and (most famously by a wide margin) Anthony Hopkins.

Hopkins won an academy award for playing the role in Silence of the Lambs before revisiting it to diminishing returns in Hannibal (the movie, not to be confused with this TV show) and Red Dragon. SotL made the character an icon, but I will fiercely defend my opinion that Mikkelson plays the character better than he has been in anything other than SotL. That includes Hopkins’ two subsequent portrayals.

But I don’t want to venture too far off course here, and so I’ll bring it back to the show itself. Jack Crawford (a convincingly authoritative Laurence Fishburne) and Alana Bloom (Caroline Dhavernas, given maybe the most active character arc through the series) become more important as the show moves through seasons one. Each episode had a killer of the week that Will is brought in to profile and help the FBI catch, which sounds fairly rote, until you consider exactly how it’s done.

Will steps into the mind of the the killer, which is illustrated in dream-like sequences where the crimes are recreated with Will as the killer. The actual killer is generally revealed halfway through the episodes, so that the show can deal with its true interest: what makes these people do the horrible things they do. It’s this difference that allows Hannibal to surpass anything like the Law & Order or CSI shows.

The real neat trick is how showrunner Bryan Fuller and his team make ghastly things appear beautifully gothic. Dead bodies are positioned like magnificent sculptures, blood flows in a manner that seems to give it a mind of its own.  It’s pretty similar to something you might see from a Guillermo del Toro film, almost like the visions of a dark fairy tale.

Hannibal spends most of this first season assisting the FBI in the cases that they bring Will in on, primarily due to his fascination with the impossibly empathetic Graham. He also serves as Will’s psychiatrist, all the while continuing his killings and cooking as the Chesapeake Ripper. At this point it’s worth noting that they always make the meals prepared from human parts look so delicious that it has been widely considered Food Porn.

The developing bond between Hannibal and Will is really the driving force, as they are two sides of the same coin, and Hannibal believes he can flip Will.As things progress, Hannibal allows Will’s encephalitis (an inflammation of the brain do to infection) to go untreated, which takes a very heavy toll on Will’s mental and physical states.

Eventually, Will works through it enough to realize what Hannibal really is, and he tries to stop him once and for all. However, by that point, Hannibal has already framed Will for his own crimes as The Ripper and, in an ironic twist of fate, Jack Crawford stops Will from killing Hannibal. Season one ends with Will in a very familiar looking cell as Hannibal visits him. A full reversal of how most people were introduced to Lecter in the earlier films.

Season two is broken into two halves. The first half involves Will, fully recovered from his illness and sharp enough to take on Hannibal with equal footing. Unfortunately, he’s stuck in a mental hospital with all his allies thinking he’s a cannibalistic serial killer. This doesn’t stop Will from digging deep into his mental reserves and trying to figure out how best to bring Hannibal down.

Will manages to prove his innocence and, once freed, enlists Jack to help him finally get Hannibal. So the second half of season two has Will trying to beat Hannibal at his own game. He uses Hannibal’s curiosity and twisted affection for him to lure him into a trap. The whole game makes for fantastic television, but the finish is where the show makes its first fumble.

Season two ends with every major character, other than Hannibal, lying in a pool of their own blood from a trap set by Will and Jack gone awry as Lecter strolls out of his home. This was a mistake – not only because they didn’t have a season three renewal at the time, but because they missed out on a great opportunity to finally bring about some catharisis for the viewers after two years of Hannibal putting Will through the ringer.

It should have ended the exact same way, but with one major change. Will should have retrieved his gun, and emptied it into Hannibal as he tried to leave. The last shot of the season could have been Will and Hannibal lying across from each other with their blood mingling between them as they watch one another through dying eyes. It would have been a greatly poetic shot for a show that rarely passed on the chance to break out some gory poetry.

Which brings us to season three, the current and final season. Fuller had said that he wanted to do the Red Dragon story for season three, which was previously adapted to varying degrees of success the the 2002 movie of the same name and the 1986 movie Manhunter. For the second half of the season, which ran its series finale just last night, they did a fantastic job of running with that story. Since they kicked it off, the show has been every bit as good as it was prior to the season two finale gaffe.

The problem was with the first half of season three. The pacing of the first seven episodes were meditative, even by this show’s standards. In fact, the first four episodes were spent catching up with all the primary characters some months after the bloodbath at Hannibal’s home.

This would be perfectly fine for a show on Netflix or Amazon, where all episodes were released at once and you can blow through the first couple episodes to reach the point where things really ramp up. But asking your viewers to spend a full month getting back up to speed is asking a lot. Which is probably why they ended up hemorrhaging viewers, and got the cancellation notice passed down at this point.

The story they were telling was perfectly serviceable. It shows Will, Jack and Alana all tracking down Hannibal to Florence, a chance to roll out some gorgeous scenery, using their own methods. In episode five, they ramp up the momentum again by giving Jack his long awaited rematch with Hannibal, which is actually an joyously one sided beating laid down on Lecter. The next logical step was to have Will finally find what was left of Hannibal after the fight with Jack and lock him into that all-too-familiar cell.

But they didn’t give us that. After three years of build up, they didn’t give us the showdown between Will and Hannibal that many viewers were craving. The most frustrating thing about it was that there were two perfect setups in as many episodes for such a clash: one in Florence, and the other at the estate of Mason Verger (originally introduced in the SotL sequel Hannibal, but brought in earlier for the shows purposes).  Instead, Hannibal carries a wounded Will Graham home, and then turns himself in.

The next episode jumps three years ahead to kick off the Red Dragon story. Running it over the course of six episodes, rather than a two hour movie, gave the story more room to breath than it previously had been given. These episodes got the show back on track, and may have even been better than any previous story arcs. Going with one killer, Francis Dolarhyde A.K.A the Tooth Fairy A.K.A the Red Dragon (played with the conflicted ferocity by Richard Armitage), for the home stretch allowed the show to open up avenues of greater character depth than it had before.

So, the driving narrative of season three was essentially a three way courtship of sorts between Graham, Lecter and Dolarhyde. The season, and series, wrapped up with another of planned trap going sideways, as Dolarhyde helped Hannibal escape during what was meant to be a fake escape that would lure Dolarhyde in with Hannibal as bait. Hannibal and Will ended up at the former’s secret cliffside home as they awaited Dolarhyde’s arrival.

In the end, Will and Hannibal had to team up to kill Dolarhyde – even though they were both motivated to slay the Dragon for different reasons. Hannibal always wanted to share a kill with Will, while Will wanted to stop Dolarhyde before he massacred another family. The two shared a blood soaked embrace – the blood being their own, as well as Dolarhyde’s – on the edge of the cliff before Will tightened his grip on Hannibal and pushed them both off the into the abyss below.

Graham’s reasons for taking this course of action are complex enough to deserve their own post, but part of the motivation was that he knew this might be the best chance he’d have to finally stop Hannibal. He’d unsuccessfully used himself to bait Lecter in season two, but this time Hannibal steps right into the trap. The trap, unfortunately, was Will himself. This is not exactly the direction that I would have gone in but, after painting themselves into the corner with the season two finale and the season three mid-season finale, it was about as fitting an ended as possible.

The biggest overall misstep that I feel they made was making the subtext of the twisted bond between Will and Hannibal into actual text. That ended up driving the show into a place far less accessible for most viewers. It’s  always admirable when creative people do something different, but they still need to leave enough common ground to fit more than a handful of Fannibals.

Don’t get me wrong, I still think this is a great show and I’d highly recommend watching the entire run to anyone and everyone. But the rough patch that ran from the end of season two through the first half of season three has dampened my affection a little bit.

I will no doubt remember the show very fondly, and revisit it again in the future. Mostly, though, I hope to find something to fill this vacancy in my complex, prestigious television viewing slot. Much like Hannibal himself, I’ve developed an appetite for something a bit hard to come by through traditional means. Although, since I’ve never seen anything quite like it on TV before, I’m not sure I’ll see something like it again.

TeeVee Morghulis Or Why Game Of Thrones Must End

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Valar Morghulis – All Men Must Die – and the same can be said about every show on TV. Moreover, for a TV show to be considered truly great, I believe that it needs to have a strong beginning, middle and (perhaps most importantly) end.

HBO more or less just announced that Game of Thrones will run at least eight seasons. It had previously been suggested that they would wrap after seven seasons while, at the same time, HBO execs have said they’d like to see the show run ten seasons. I was personally very happy with the idea of seven seasons, that way they could ride out the momentum they’ve built without losing steam in the same manner that George R.R. Martin has several times in his Song of Ice and Fire novels.

A last season needs to be settled on sooner rather than later, so that the showrunners can set the home stretch in motion and deliver a conclusion on the highest level possible. Seven made sense to me, as that would give them twenty more hours after this past season to get to where everyone already knows the story is going. That being an army of nightmare creatures breaking down The Wall and laying siege to Westeros.

Already in this past season’s episode “Hardhome” we got a good look at the terror waiting to be unleashed once winter eventually arrives. After seeing that episode, I know I’m not the only one who cared considerably less about all the other storylines that were still dealing with political positioning, and smaller personal skirmishes. Assuming there were only two seasons left, I was ready for season six to be the last time winter was coming, and season seven being the madness that ensues when winter finally arrives. All-in-all, I’m just not sure how you can wedge another ten episodes in between there.

Game of Thrones shares DNA with something like Breaking Bad in that it is all clearly leading somewhere. There were events set in motion early on that would lead to a inescapable reckoning. In Breaking Bad, Walter White was diagnosed with terminal cancer and then rose to power as Heisenberg . It was therefore inevitable that either the cancer, or the sins he committed as Heisenberg, would kill him. Everyone knew this was coming, which is why everyone was excited when an end game was promised for season five. If they had tried to milk two or three more seasons out of the story, it would have diminished the legacy of the show.

I can also reference Starz’ Spartacus. They did a great job of going full speed ahead through the entire run of the series. That run lasting only three chronological seasons and one prequel season. Spartacus is a well known legend, and you’d have a hard time finding someone who didn’t know how it ends. With that in mind, it was important to make the journey to that ending as effective as possible, without any sort of lag time. Spartacus is one of the very few TV series that I own on blu ray, so you can draw your own conclusion about how I feel they did.

Lost is a cautionary tale on the flip side of this. I loved that show, even though I remember a couple of the middle seasons being a mess. The problem was that they had promised answers, and waited too long to lock down a time of resolution. The same could be said for another show I loved that suffered from stretching itself too thin over too many episodes – Battlestar Galactica. This show was also had what was, essentially, a single large story arc that required an ending. Part of the reason why both of these shows have sat in my Netflix queue for years with the unfulfilled intention of rewatching them is because they are both at least twenty episodes longer than they should have been.

Episodic shows like Mad Men, or The Walking Dead, or The Flash can run as long as they please. This is because they don’t need to worry about momentum building up over multiple seasons. When done well, an episodic series will build up momentum and deliver a measure of resolution at the end of each individual season. Game of Thrones does not have that luxury. Any time spent not leading towards the finale feels extraneous. In fact, you can feel this sort of stalling in many episodes of Game of Thrones that fall in the middle of each season.

Maybe eight seasons of Game of Thrones will be fine. I certainly hope they manage to pull it off, as it’s probably my favorite continuing series on TV (fare thee well to the already canceled Hannibal). That being said, I know that my attention will still waiver during scenes that don’t push the story towards its inevitable climax. I’d like to revisit Game of Thrones again once it ends but, if they keep driving it until it’s running on fumes like Lost or BSG, then it will likely end up sitting on my HBOGO watchlist as unwatched as those other shows in my Netflix queu.