Hannibal Recap: “Apéritif”

by Veronique Medrano:

Hannibal Recap: “Apéritif”
Original Air Date (NBC): Thursday April 4, 2013
Season 1 Episode 1

Hello shiny-ball of internet wonder! I’m back to reviewing and I have a wonderful treat for ya. The Hannibal pilot is interesting, and the first half of the show’s twists and turns make for a very intriguing look at profiler Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) and head of  FBI Behavioral Science Unit Jack Crawford (Lawrence Fishburne).

Please make sure to not read this if you haven’t watched the show. If you complain you’ll be pegged on deer antlers…eh eh see what I did there?

This episode starts out with a great amount of detail as we watch Will Graham break down a crime scene where a husband and wife are shot and the murder is ‘by design’, he repeats the phrase over and over. Everything about the murder is calculated, from tapping the phone to record and replay the wife’s response to a false alarm on their house’s security alarm and the placement of the shots fired on both the husband and wife. The husband gets a shot through jugular so he bleeds to death, while the wife is shot through the throat causing her paralysis that makes her unable to react to the intense pain she feels.

Graham breaks down, and before he explains any further it leaves it up to the audience how it could get worse for her. Nasty shivers abound, but they are assuaged by Lawrence Fishburne’s entrance to the scene.

Fishburne’s character, Jack Crawford, comes to Graham’s class bearing an difficult puzzle to solve involving missing girls who are assumed dead. This leaves us to just focus on the most recent one abducted. When Graham is asked to define the one thing connecting between the girl he pulls out this doozy of well written dialogue, “He’s like Willy Wonka. Every girl he takes is a candy bar, and hidden in amongst all those candy bars is the one true intended victim which if we follow through on this metaphor has your golden ticket.”

We then jump to the parents of the recently missing girl, Elise, and at first I think the mom is hiding something. Distraught/Caught in the act face are kind of hard to distinguish on that lady. Then we get dialogue and actions from the father that continue making me believe that he did it; won’t let him open the door, insisting people have been in and out of there all day, getting all weird about her possible issues in college. My murderer radar is BLINKING!

Cat is freaking out in front of the door. I say dead body is in there or the cat is weird. Now this is where the plot-hole kind of stares at me straight in the face and says, ‘What just happened?’ If people were coming in and out of here all day how did they not notice she wasn’t missing, but just dead in the house. All ‘Rose for Emily’ style, but probably done for effect than for actual realism. Just saying it is a bit dumb no one noticed.

Moving on!

We once again get to see Graham’s magic stick of murder-solving power break down the crime scene only to get interrupted by a forensic analyst who walked in the room. After Graham nervously freaks out, and the forensic analyst talks about deer velvet resin, we move on to a moving scene with Graham and dogs. If you are neurotic like me you’ll be wondering if they’re going to kill the dogs later on in the series, and swear angry vengeance on the show if they do or you think ‘Awww doggies!?!’

Graham has another little neurotic episode where he sees Elise’s dead body. Creepy.

Best scene in the show has to be when Lawrence Fishburne tells some dude to go pee in the ladies room about his progress on the case. We continue on with another dead girl daydream….creepier.

Now after that weirdness they notice during Elise’s autopsy that someone took out her live and then put it back. Why? Because she has (cue dramatic music) LIVER Cancer! Oh my, and to top it all off Graham realizes that the person who killed her may be eating his victims. Classical music plays and we see our first glimpse of Hannibal (Mads Mikkelsen).

Small talk between Hannibal Lecter and Crawford go through a little bit of small talk, and weird little ticks, but it all leads to Lecter being asked to psychoanalyze Will Graham. Lecter does this in the guise of small talk, but then asks deeper questions that completely show what he’s doing. Graham pulls a Hulk when he says, “Please don’t psychoanalyze me. You won’t like me when I’m psychoanalyzed. Now, if you’ll excuse me I’m going to give a lecture on Psychoanalyzing.”

We leave that scene to be rewarded with dead chick mounted on a deer as Graham assumed may have happened with the girl before. There is an opening for removed lungs that were done when living. Might sound sick of me, but I love the contrast between Lecter slicing up the lungs he harvested earlier with the bright-harsh lighting of the afternoon. Lecter sits there happily eating his fea-du-ladylungs. They shrug it off a copycat not of little importance, but managed to shed light on the case further. As Graham describes to Lecter, whoever did the copycat killing did it with the intention of showing him the things he couldn’t see in the case before. They gave it to him like a gift in a neat little bow.

We skip forward on the forensics and head to one of the metalwork sites, Graham gets a lead on a guy and what does Hannibal do? He calls the lead, Garret Hobbs, and warns him that they are on to him. That pretty much freaks the guy out.

Little lightsaber sound with a bit of waving returns and we see Graham playing back the scene as it happened when he got there. The mom, whose throat is slit, dies on the doorstep. Lecter walks by the body as he enter the house after Graham looking at the woman, almost saddened by the wasted food, as he walks past.

Graham confronts the killer who holds his daughter by the throat with a knife. The killer tries to slice his daughter’s throat, but only gets partway as Graham shoots him. Graham tries put pressure on her wound and in comes Dr. Lecter to do the right thing compared to Graham who flails insanely.  The girl lives and Lecter watches sleeps by her bedside at the hospital.

This pilot episode really gave us a very well-thought out start to what I hope will be a riveting story about Hannibal Lecter. I  Only things I’m wondering is whether the young woman mounted on the antlers was Lecter’s conveniently missing ‘secretary’ and if that might come to play later on in this season. Also, while I love the unique breakdown of the crime scene and how it shows the murders in such a way that it keeps you guessing until the last moment, I seriously do not want to see lightsaber murder-solving  powers every episode.

Make sure to keep up with our  recaps and don’t eat any human parts by accident. (Oh my god such a great scene, but I’ll be quiet before I squee!)