NBC’s Hannibal ran for three seasons, but its concept called for at least twice as many.
Like Lynch before him, Fuller has shined a light over TV’s capacity for eccentric, follow-thy-master poignancy.
The dialogue is as polished, overheated, and savory as one can routinely expect from creator Bryan Fuller.
The romantic subtext is the central emotional motor of the series, what keeps it from collapsing into absurdity.
The episode is taken by “reality” as a terrifyingly fluid and elastic realm, dictated by the conditions of the fragile mind.
There’s quite a bit of accomplished, bitchy verbal game-playing in this marvelous high point of an episode.
Francis is estranged from society, destined to regard it from the outside, because he’s imprisoned like most of us within a version of life produced by his mind.
“Digestivo” is bug-fuck baroque even by Bryan Fuller’s incredibly accommodating standards, and the title is telling and apropos.
A lot of stuff happens in “Dolce,” as this is an unusually plot-driven episode of Hannibal that nevertheless maintains its surreal, mood-centric aura of erotic dread.
Repetition has inescapably set into this season’s Italian sojourn, which partially accounts for why last week’s superb American flashback episode felt so sharp.
Hannibal is so crushingly, daringly, beautifully lonely, exuding the same sense of idiosyncratic discovery that marked the best episodes of Twin Peaks.
This is all growing rather fussily symbolic, occasionally bordering on the tedious, as parallels upon parallels are affixed to the primary thread existing between the leads.
“Primavera” continues to plumb the expressionist fugue state into which the events of last season’s finale have sent the characters of Hannibal sometimes literally tumbling.
Riffing on early portions of Thomas Harris’s novel of the same name, Hannibal is similarly liberated by its protagonist’s unmasking.
More incisively and ambitiously written than the last season, and sporting the most radically expressive imagery currently on television.
For its authentic engagement with despair, Hannibal is a great, epic vision of American horror that earns its wrenching nihilism.
It’s set in a horror realm we might imagine when we indulge our worst fears of the hideous forms the civilized world is capable of assuming.
