“To catch Hannibal, Will is going to have to throw himself back under Hannibal’s influence and hope that this time he can escape intact.” —Jonathan Raeder

“I don’t want to kill you, Dr. Lecter, now that I finally find you interesting.”

Whether you believe it’s right or not, most of humanity makes a clear distinction between humans and other animals. Technically, we’re animals ourselves, but killing and eating other humans? Always wrong, whether because we’re advanced enough or because eating your own kind is so much of a taboo we can’t process it.

Hannibal’s vileness, in contrast, stems from how he treats humans as slabs of meat, just like the rest of the animal kingdom. “Su-zakana” drives home the animal nature of Hannibal’s actions, even as it falls into the category of one of the few episodes in which we don’t see Hannibal eat human flesh. 

The bizarre killing this week is a woman with a live bird in her heart, sewed up inside the womb of a dead horse. For once, it’s just purely creepy without really any beauty in it. Eventually we discover that Peter, the damaged man who sewed up the body, is not the killer, but rather, yet another parallel for Will.

Will and Peter are both socially awkward loners who prefer the company of animals and have been manipulated by their psychopathic therapists to believe that they are killers. However, Peter’s therapist and manipulator is a far cry from the highly stylized killers of Hannibal lore. He’s a pure psychopath, emotionless — strangling women and burying them. No artistic “reverence” for their bodies, nothing but pure, banal, evil. He deserves to die, just as much as Hannibal deserves it, but we hate this guy even more because he’s not even an interesting person. We stand with Will in that barn, holding the gun, willing ourselves to shoot him because if anyone deserves death, it’s people like him. It feels good to do bad things to bad people. Is that not why we watch serial killer shows in the first place? To see that, at least in the fictional worlds we create, the bad guys don’t get away. They’re brutally killed themselves, or tortured, or left to rot in prison, or at least have the decency to kill themselves in the final few minutes out of remorse.

But Will doesn’t kill this proxy for Hannibal, this therapist who’s abused his position of power so completely. It’s hard to tell whether Will would have gone through with it if it wasn’t for Hannibal standing there, his dark guardian angel. The relationship between the two men has always been complex, fraught with perhaps every emotion possible. Hannibal truly wants Will in his life; perhaps he’s intrigued by Will’s empathic abilities. Regardless, he probably won’t kill Will unless there’s no other option.

Will, despite knowing for sure what Hannibal truly is, despite even having Jack almost completely on his side, despite using every opportunity to remind Hannibal that he knows, still can’t completely hate him. He’s his therapist, he knows him better than anyone. There’s a kind of love between the two, yes, a corrupted love that neither would call love, but it’s there. Will tells Peter that he’s envious of his hate, his ability to know for sure that he wants this other man to die. Will isn’t so sure. Hannibal still has his hooks in him, even if they’re loosening.

Hooks. Baits. Lures. Will is a fisherman, and finally he returns to the river where he spent so much of his imagination earlier this season. It’s frozen, not exactly the picturesque place he hoped it would be, but still, it offers him and Jack a chance to bandy some fishing metaphors about their hunt for Hannibal. Hannibal is on the defensive, having just essentially killed his alter-ego, the Chesapeake Ripper. He wants things to return to normal, before he was a suspect. He’s not going to take any bait that Will offers unless it’s Will himself. Will needs to have Hannibal convinced that Will is back under his thrall, that even if he knows that Hannibal is a killer, he’s unable and unwilling to do anything about it. To catch Hannibal, Will is going to have to throw himself back under Hannibal’s influence and hope that this time he can escape intact.

“Su-zakana” isn’t as memorable as a lot of the episodes this season for a number of reasons. The killing is strange and horrifying, but it’s not visually mesmerizing in the way that the bee man or the eye of corpses or the tree killings were. The other killer has no overt connection to Hannibal, and the main plot doesn’t progress a great deal. There are only four episodes left until the end of the season, and it seems likely that the last episode will pick up where the flash-forward fight between Jack and Hannibal left off. That’s only a few short episodes to have Hannibal make whatever mistake puts the FBI finally on his trail. He’s going to stick his neck out too far to reel in Will, and that’s what will prove his downfall. Of course, this is all speculation. Leave it to Bryan Fuller and the rest of the writers to conjure up something none of us are expecting.

Finally, we meet the show’s newest character, someone straight from the Hannibal books: Margot Verger. She’s one of Hannibal’s patients, and like so many others on this show, has a strong desire to kill someone who wronged her. In this case, it’s her brother, Mason, who will no doubt feature heavily in the remainder of this season, and possibly, series. Her introduction is somewhat sudden and a bit confusing, but we can hope that once the creators show their hand, everything will fall into place.

The second half of Hannibal‘s second season has almost morphed into a new season altogether — Will is out of his cell, back with Hannibal. In a way, it recalls season one, but this time, the power balance has shifted between the two men. Will’s not more powerful than Hannibal, but he’s wary — he’s become an agent instead of passive receiver of Hannibal’s manipulation. Now he has Jack on his side, and he’s wriggling in the ocean, delicious bait, just waiting for Hannibal to try to reel him in.

Tidbits:

  • I didn’t discuss it much in the last recap, but Chilton’s death marks a major departure from the canon of the books. If he’s dead, almost anyone could be on the chopping block. This is pretty exciting for me; no longer will I assume that someone is safe because they were in Red Dragon or Silence of the Lambs. While I don’t think Jack will die, the possibility now exists. Alana’s also in even more danger.
  • I’ve harped on this a lot, but I’m a bit disappointed in how they’re using Alana this season. She has the potential to be a much better character, and the show lacks women to begin with. Without Beverly, Alana needs to be taking a stronger role in the show, and now she’s almost another damsel in distress.
  • “In a way we’re all Nietzschean fish.” “Makes us tastier.”