TV Review: ‘HANNIBAL Season 2, Episode 8: SU-ZAKANA’

First off, I just want to say “Thank you America!” Thanks for finally starting to watch this show. The ratings for this wonderful show are looking to turn around and a season three pickup isn’t in the bag yet, but it seems to be much more likely. Now for the review.

After the “Chesapeake Ripper” is “caught”, Jack and Will finally have time to enjoy a day of relaxing, metaphor filled ice fishing, having conversations that could refer to catching fish or bad guys. Jack remarks “You hook ’em, I’ll land ’em” which then segues into Hannibal cutting up the fish that they just caught. The three of them decide it is best to look back on the past incidences as a black mark on their friendship and push on towards a brighter future, although we all know that’s not going to happen.

We then come across our murder of the week. A woman found stuffed into a dead horse. Found by two stable workers, one of them asks “It feels like it’s still pregnant… Who performed this C-section?” and the other responds “It didn’t have a C-section” I knew what I was gonna see next: A corpse and a bunch of horse guts. Jack and Will interview the previous stable attendant about the crime but he denies it. The attendant, one Peter Bernardone, was kicked in the head by a horse and left with severely impaired speech and motor abilities. Back at the BAU, an autopsy reveals soil in her throat and a bird in her chest. This episode isn’t filled with a lot of big scares, but I have to admit when the bird flew out of her body I was pretty startled. Peter tells Will he placed the soil there to lead the team to a mass grave and the real killer: his social worker Clark Ingram. Clark implements Peter for the crimes which causes Peter to let loose his inner crazy and sew Clark into a dead horse, while still alive, to make him suffer. This storyline isn’t the best, and it wasn’t always super clear to me, but it culminates in a great scene with Hannibal trying to prevent Will from shooting Clark. I honestly thought Will was going to do it, it was pretty tense.

While the main plot isn’t super great, the side plot sets up a story arc a lot of fans are excited for. We meet a new patient of Hannibal’s: Margot Verger, who is being abused by her sadistic brother Mason. Fans of the films will recognize that name as Gary Oldman’s horribly disfigured character in the Hannibal film. We don’t meet Mason today, we only meet Margot, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t have me excited for what’s to come. The performances in this episode are exceptional. Chris Diamantopolous who is usually well known for more comedic roles plays Clark with a psychotic restraint and one of my favorite faces, Jeremy Davies, plays Bernardone by doing what he does best: acting like an alien and twitching a lot. This is a minor episode of Hannibal, but has enough visual flourish and intrigue to show that even a bad episode of this show is heads and tails above most other shows. I should also point out that tonight’s episode was directed by ‘Cube’ and ‘Splice’ director Vincenzo Natali, so that probably has something to do with it.