TV Review: ‘HANNIBAL Season 2, Episode 1: KAISEKI’

The premier episode of this new season of Hannibal starts off with a Breaking Bad-esque flash forward twelve weeks into the future. We the viewer are treated to an expertly crafted, dialogue free fight scene between our famous flesh eating fiend Dr. Hannibal Lector and Lawrence Fishburne’s Special Agent in Charge Jack Crawford. For a show about a villain famous for using his mind games, he sure is very adept at hand to hand combat. Between this cold open and the handful of combat sequences in season one, the fight choreography is some of the most impressive I’ve ever seen. If you’ve never seen one of the Hannibal fight scenes, it’s almost Jackie Chan like in it’s use of improvisational weapons, the only difference here is that Jackie Chan was playing for laughs and in Hannibal, everyone involved really wants to kill each other. Now, why Hannibal and Jack are at each other’s throats will remain a mystery that will reveal itself to us in twelve weeks. My guess is that Jack finds out that what the good doctor was serving him wasn’t squid after all…

At the end of season one our disturbed protagonist Will Graham is put behind the bars of the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally insane under the pretense that he committed the gruesome murders that were in reality all Hannibal’s doing. We’re treated to some really excellent visuals in the institute. It seems the director of tonight’s episode copped just about all of my favorite directors styles for tonight’s premier. The scene with Frederick Chilton attempting to talk with Will in the aptly named “Dunk Tanks” seems very Terry Gilliam and the various scenes with Will’s antler horned “wendigo” seem very “Brazil”-ian. Also the sequence with Will choking up the severed ear is incredibly Lynchian (which isn’t far off as Hunter did direct a few Twin Peaks episodes. God bless you IMDb!). Hannibal has always felt like an blend of all of my favorite things, a little bit of David Lynch/Cronenberg body horror and the occasional flash of Terry Gilliam/Wes Anderson surreality that creator Bryan Fuller has come to be known for, and tonight’s episode definitely didn’t disappoint in that department.

The gruesome killer of the week comes in the form of a serial killer who is doping up his victims, seemingly gluing them together, and preserving them for some kind of grotesque art piece. Judging by the previews for the upcoming season, this might not be a killer of the week kind of thing but rather something with an arc. I’m interested to see how it plays out because it definitely didn’t have a resolution in tonight’s episode. I’m also interested to see how the Hannibal-in-the-field thing plays out. Hannibal taking Will’s place at the crime scenes with the rest of the FBI team is going to be a very interesting angle this season.

As far as season premiers go, you really can’t do much better. Since this is the season premiere it is a little bit slower paced than the better Hannibal episodes, but it’s definitely setting itself up for what I hope will be a hell of a season.