Review: ‘Hannibal’ – ‘Buffet Froid’

A quick review of tonight’s “Hannibal” – which, in case you missed the joyous news earlier this evening, was renewed by NBC for season 2 – coming up just as soon as I’m officially concerned about you…

“Buffet Froid” was a mixed bag of an episode. On the one hand, the material about Will’s increasing mental problems – both the way his lost time was depicted, and then the realization that Lecter and Dr. Sutcliffe intended to keep his true diagnosis from him – was chilling. Even though the show has played with Will’s lost time before, I’m not sure I’ve ever been as disturbed by it as I was when he went from gutting the trout to being at the crime scene, surrounded by Jack and the team. (It helps that that sequence played with the usual visual device of Will standing in for the real killers.)

On the other hand, I thought the parallels between this week’s killer and Will’s own problems were laid on much too thickly, particularly the scene where Will sat and listened to the killer’s mom deliver a monologue about what it’s like to have a mentally ill loved one. The idea of our hero having some kind of emotional parallel with the killer/victim/patient/client is a standard trope in most procedurals, and “Hannibal” is on some level a procedural. But the show has generally had a more delicate hand with this stuff, even though there are often connections between the killer of the week and either Will, Hannibal, or both.

What did everybody else think? Did anyone who watched “Arrested Development” on Netflix this week have an amused reaction to the killer’s face-blindness? And is it wise of Dr. Lecter to be killing someone he has so many connections to, even if he tries to disguise it as the work of someone else?

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