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

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.

i mean, hugh dancy is english, right

man i do not like will's family much

oh well, 50/50 they're dead by the end

that was sort of a letdown, much as i enjoyed the 'three years later' title card

was hoping for a nonsensical 'we have got to stop meeting like this' at the end, tbh

yeah this was a really beautifully executed version of a much less interesting version of this show, I miss the complete batshitness of the first half already, though I'm sure there's great stuff to come

agree w/that. this is back to the semi-procedural format of the first season, almost, though still weirder in style than those early episodes. and the guy playing dolarhyde is really good.

I am glad Scott Thompson is back

Scott Thompson funny but terrible wooden actor. I'm glad they're in "Red Dragon"-land now :)

I'm watching some of the season 2 commentary, and the social worker in the horse is also the voice of Mickey Mouse???

hahaha what

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0224565/?ref_=tt_cl_t9

He was very funny in Silicon Valley

found this week's a bit boring tbh

Red Draggin'

honestly this whole back half has been pretty meh to me after the insanity of the European half. I guess it doesn't help that I just don't find Dolarhyde that interesting, at least in this incarnation. And the flashbacks seem really pointless - answering questions I didn't really care for getting the answers to.

it just makes me want to watch Red Dragon again. the sets/staging of the dolarhyde stuff is very similar. they even got a guy that looks like ralph fiennes' stunt double to play him.

i think i'm that movie's biggest fan. so watchable! a ridiculously overqualified cast having fun in total trash, like The Paperboy but not boring.

nah rewatch Manhunter

red dragon is shockingly ok for a brett ratner movie, like it lacks all the things that make his movies awful w the exception of a few dumbing-down moments (the "sweetbreads" note that hannibal would never put in a book in the opening scene), cast is solid, even the blatant padding of hannibal's role in the story ain't bad

like I almost wonder if it was ghost-directed somehow

that said manhunter is obv a better movie just not as in sync with the hannibal canon such as it is

I like how this is going.

I forgot how freaky it is that the dude ate the painting. He ate it up! Also I remain weirded out by Bedelia.

I miss Alana's dresses.

Yeah, but her new hair style, though.

Also she looks pretty fabulous in pant suits.

it's a travesty how much they've thrown this away. 10pm on saturday with no advertising or even next week previews.

confession: i got 5+ episodes behind & gave up

every episode I watched this season made me feel like i had suffered a head injury, i couldn't follow what was happening :(

i will circle back eventually

The second half of the season is completely different from the first, fwiw. Much more straightforward. (I vastly prefer the first half but I seem to be in the minority on this.)