HANNIBAL on NBC seems amazing and therefore deserves it's own thread!

it's a bit... off
this season feels much more abstract and campy than in the past but still excellent

I love this season so far. Really appreciate what the show has done with Hannibal's backstory. The "origin" of his cannibslism as depicted in Hannibal the book and Hannibal Rising was pretty silly and defanged the character somewhat.

I'm fine with Anderson as Verger, he seems to be having fun gnawing the scenery.

I am an episode behind but have we talked about how Joe Anderson has turned Mason Verger into Jim Carrey's Grinch

i hate it so much

― difficult-difficult lemon-difficult (VegemiteGrrl), Sunday, July 5, 2015 1:59 PM (9 hours ago)

otm.
his makeup sux too, i hate how the top half of his face is just normal handsome guy. gary oldman's verger in the movie was so grotesque and memorable and it seems like a weird lapse on the show's part to just do a pale imitation of him, especially after successfully reimagining so many other characters.

https://fkrbzm.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/7fcfd-tumblr_m1ytav39bx1r3bp1do1_500255b1255d.gif

maybe he got his skin grafts in 2015 and the technology is just better now

tbh I am going to blame people for having watched a live action Dr. Seuss adaptation if that's in yr heads :)

http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/all-in-your-head/

^ episode about the guy who does the music for Hannibal and how he's fucking with us all.

imo Brian Reitzell has a pretty impressive resume outside of Hannibal!

all the Chiyoh + Will scenes are terrible - not sure whether it's the writing or the acting that's off but either way, feels like the show is dragging its feet a bit until Hannibal gets caught. Like what was the point of throwing Will out of the train again?

lol @ Mason Verger talking about Alana sucking Hannibal's dick though. show's ability to get off-colour jokes on network tv never fails to amuse.

the Kubrick homage during the Hannibal beatdown scene was a nice touch.

such a ridiculous joke and it's like the network didn't even pay attention

i feel like i want to have gifs of about half of the exchanges in this show but with the characters adding BOOM to things at the end

This line from the most recent Previously TV recap cracked me up

Before I begin -- does anyone else think Joe Anderson's Mason Verger looks like a Greg Kinnear someone left on the radiator? Just me? Okay.

omg so otm

amazon and netflix passed on this btw.

R I P

cast released from contracts too

Not cool

can't wait until the reveal that they knew it was coming and Hannibal actually kills half the cast mid-season

lol

afaik they wrote this season's ending (as with all prior season endings) with the idea that it could be a final, closed ending. like if they'd gotten canceled last time around that wouldve been deeply awful but it sure as fuck would've been a concrete ending (i.e. "they're all fuckin dead i guess :[")

I'm really starting to wonder if there's anything to that roman diet Bedelia is on

i thought he was feeding her to eat her.

but maybe she just likes escargot

yeah, I meant I wonder if it really does make meat taste better if you feed them that diet :D

buried on Saturdays, effective immediately. that's just cruel.

Holy shit

A+ episode

why was alana helping verger??

you guys i'm starting to think this show might be a little messed up

mason or margot?

she admitted she wanted hannibal to be located and hoped the fbi/jack would beat verger to the punch after watching hannibal squirm but eventually stopped short when she realized mason was about to get his revenge

And there was also an eel.

yes, and the eel

Way to go, eel!!

Got Season 2 from the library so rewatching & catching up on episodes I missed.

episodes six and seven seemed a remarkable step up, a falling into groove, idk. haha tho that apparently next week we're doing the police procedural thing again!!

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only worked out this week that 'cordell' is the guy from the last episodes of true detective

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i really liked mason verger's appearance in this because he reminds me of stephen king. also, i have v much enjoyed the higher image qualift i chose to watch this episode in

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What To Do With Jack seems like it was a big problem this season -- like, they didn't know if fishburne was coming back, i guess? he seemed: exciseable. why did the crooked italian cop lie to mason about his death? this seemed like an artifact of an earlier draft, or something, where his return would be more crucially timed--likewise, letting the audience see how chiyoh saving him played out before going back to maryland.

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intercutting between facial transplant / pig caesarean = maybe the most death metal what-are-we-looking-at moment yet, kudos

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what's with the book of equations hannibal was looking at?

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i wondered if they were going to have hannibal surrender himself--then he did! i also saw the pig thing coming, this was all p pleasingly predictable

it's, like, the best vertigo comic ever

i got the impression that the italian cop left his posse to take care of jack while he contacted verger's people, and he probably delivered the "got hannibal and graham, crawford is dead" message not knowing his lieutenants were killed.

on twitter, fuller mentioned the equations are hannibal trying to come up with a way to turn back time. don't think that was necessarily choreographed in the show and it was just a really unrealized artistic turn that i don't know fits, but it's poetic? guess he really wanted to unbreak that teacup.

what like he's gonna eat an incidental fringe character and absorb their powers

it's, like, the best vertigo comic ever

― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Tuesday, July 21, 2015 3:39 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That is so otm.

You guys read Cleolinda's recaps on this show, right? She gets way deep into the symbolism, etc. They are so good. She had to stop halfway through last season, but has picked up this one and has the first two up. http://cleolinda.livejournal.com/

xps re equations they are him trying do determine a way, through like, astrophysics and other absurdly complicated math, for his dead sister mischa to come back to life in the world. its explicitly stated in the hannibal novel (along with the details of how mischa died and was eaten) and alluded to in much more subtle fashion here

if I really like this series should I read the books, and in what order?

red dragon and silence of the lambs are solid, and you could really read them in any order.

hannibal is...ok for the most part, but it doubles down on the overwrought prose that is always a thomas harris issue and after the climax at the verger estate, which proceeds much as it does in the show but w/ clarice starling, it has a really perverse resolution that really makes zero sense.

as for hannibal rising, don't even try. its so blatantly a boat payment book and i didnt finish it

haven't read any of them but my understanding is silence's success as a film kinda warped harris as a writer and that only red dragon and silence of the lambs are worth reading but that they are very much worth reading

like he's a great plotter, comes up with intriguing villains that have tastes in art/music prob very similar to harris's own, and clarice starling is a justly iconic character even just as her book self (in silence, at least), but in addition to his prose problems he also can't write dialogue for shit unless it comes out of lecter's mouth

xp thats basically accurate. he sold movie rights to both hannibal and hannibal rising before either manuscript was even close to finished and doesnt seem to give much of a shit about writing

Agree re: Red Dragon, which I read recently because of this series and enjoyed. I read Silence of the Lambs in college and it scared the bejesus out of me, even though I'd already seen and developed a deep and abiding love of the movie at that point.

yeah the first i heard of him was all my fellow stephen king fan friends telling me i had to read it, it was the scariest thing they've ever read, and me being all 'i don't read stephen king anymore, i only read KAFKA now'

i got the impression that the italian cop left his posse to take care of jack while he contacted verger's people, and he probably delivered the "got hannibal and graham, crawford is dead" message not knowing his lieutenants were killed.

but--verger talks as if unaware that it was his mook and not hannibal that (didn't) kill jack

i read a couple of those livejournal recaps someone linked to and man, huh, people sure put a lot of effort into watching television these days

bookwise i think red dragon is p bad -- does a poor job of handling dolarhyde's vaguely dis-associative / schizophrenic issues in a way that feels like i've seen/read it a million times -- though i think reading it in like 2014 probably influenced that, i think at the time it was maybe more novel

silence of the lambs is fantastic though

one narrow question, one broad one:

i. why was chiyoh standing there with the gun at the end of the episode, other than to make her more of a mysterious unknowable extra factor? whom might she have shot?
ii. does hannibal (the version in the show) have an ethics?

just got caught up on the last two eps, this show is so funny and fun and perverse
when they cut to a toyota ad it's just so jarring

The first time we see Margot we also see... the eel!!!

I notice that Will holds his fork and knife English/European style rather than American style.