Hannibal Recap: Amuse-Bouche

by Veronique Medrano:

Hannibal Recap: “Amuse-Bouche”
Original Air Date (NBC): Thursday April 11, 2013
Season 1 Episode 2

Hello shiny-ball of internet wonder! I’m back to another wonderful episode of The Hannibal. If you haven’t watched or read-up on the show go ahead and take a look at our recap of the PILOT episode here. Also, earlier this week Kimmie, Michele, and I (all writers here at DarkMedia) got together and rehearsed for our upcoming episode of Dark Coffee Chat. Check it out this Sunday 4:30pm (Pacific)/6:30pm (Central). The link can be found on DarkMedia’s FB page, so send us your questions/comments.

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

We start off this week’s episode of Hannibal with another carefully put together shot of gunshots. After the events from the last episode we see Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) in the shooting range blowing off steam, but  failing to hit the target. Graham is retrieving the target to see were his shots landed, obviously didn’t hit too much, when he starts to see the body of Hobbs floating towards him instead. As it draws near, he fumbles with the empty chamber and reloads. He shoots the Hobbs zombie-corpse over and over, actually hitting it, until he wakes up.

Jack Crawford (Lawrence Fishburne) taps on the window and wakes him up.  Graham exits the car, and we are brought into their upcoming case that takes place in Chippewa National Forest, Minnesota, and enter the cabin of Garret Hobbs. Scattered through the first floor of the cabin are different animals that are in process of taxidermy, as Graham and Crawford go upstairs they are met with antlers covering the walls and ceilings.  Only two of the antlers on the wall have blood on tips, Graham is snide and mentions to Crawford that the antlers should be a permanent installation in his ‘Dark Minds’ exhibit.

Crawford ignores the remark and tries to deduce where Hobbs left the other seven bodies that are still unaccounted for. Graham quickly replies, “He ate them.” and continues to look around the room all bug-eyed. Crawford feels that he had to have saved some part of them, a part he couldn’t eat, or he was working with someone else; because getting rid of an entire body would be too much work for one man to do on his own, given the three day time-frame of the murders.

Graham continues to be a butt-hole and is determined on the idea that he hunted alone, and when Crawford mentions that Hobbs daughter is involved in the murder, dismisses it. That is…until Graham notices there is a woman’s hair that he snags behind an a set of antlers on the floor and says, “Someone was here.”

We are then taken to the FBI Headquarters, in a class seminar setting, as Graham tries to control himself before he walks into the room with FBI trainees/agents clapping for him. He doesn’t take this well, and cuts to the point of the ‘clue’ that helped him catch Hobbs, which he states was, “Bad bookkeeping and dumb luck”.  Of course the whole point of this seminar, despite him tripping out on the events that happened that day, is to stop someone from looking up to these killings. As he says this, the slide changes to the woman we saw in the last episode, pinned to deer antlers out in the field. Someone wants to continue Hobbs work.

Dr. Alana Bloom, Graham’s ‘girl’ friend, walks in as the agents/students/trainees leave the room. She asks how he is doing since shooting Hobbs. Graham doesn’t quite know how he is doing. She warns him that Crawford will be coming in to ambush him about what occurred and try to convince him to go back out on the field.  Bloom and Crawford enter this whole ‘devil/angel on my shoulder’ conversation. Bloom asking if he feels ready to go back to the field, while Crawford says that the review board has approved him to be active on the field and furthermore that he WANTS him on the field. Honestly this whole conversation seems a bit forced, but it leads us to Hannibal, who they both agree should conduct a psych eval to help him better cope with killing a perpetrator for the first time.

There is a back and forth on “Oh, well that stuff doesn’t work on me.”, and the final nail in the coffin from Crawford on the subject when he says, ” You never let it work.”

Graham is then in Hannibal’s study/office pacing around in the upper notches, like a child avoiding the dentist. Hannibal, tells Graham that he pushed the paperwork through so that they could talk more freely without the weight of paperwork looming over their conversation. Graham is still visibly distraught over the whole situation from the episode prior, and states that his ’empathy’ took him to a dark place in which he brought something back with him. Hannibal interrupts him and says that he came back with a ‘surrogate daughter’. Both of them expand on the idea of the overwhelming sense of responsibility they feel towards Abigail Hobbs. Graham fells this because he for tracked Abigail’s father down and in his subsequent paranoia almost killed her; Hannibal, if we are to believe he feels this, because he warned the father of his upcoming doom and caused him to go into his homicidal rage.

We leave angsty Graham for a bit, and follow some boys who are just walking around the woods. They happen upon an irrigation system and a multitude of mushrooms and greenery. One of the boys says that is probably weed, the other mushrooms, and as one of the pushes the leaves away with his handy-dandy stick they realize that it isn’t illegal substances, but bodies in the ground. Honestly another great ode to a classic horror film, Motel Hell, when they use the bodies to grow the plants the same way the film used people to baste their marinades. If you haven’t heard of the film click the link on the film name.

The missing bodies are found, all of them in different states of decomposition due to the mushrooms that are growing from them. He meticulously set up the systems of irrigation and left them in a high nutrient compost to allow for rapid decomposition, with help from the mushrooms to make it harder to identify them. I know it may be in bad-taste, but they all look like something out a Lady Gaga music video, dirty covered in some crazy mess and hard to distinguish.  Of course the best joke comes from Beverly Katz, who asks if any of the other forensic guys found any ‘shitake mushrooms’.

Now it’s ‘Swinging Lightsaber Detective Power’ time, and Graham is on display. He sees Hobbs burying the bodies, one in particular is still alive, but as he enters Hobbs mind-frame he realizes that Hobbs doesn’t care whether the man is still alive because he believes he will never be able to awaken. Of course, this is where it stops. Graham can’t see anymore because the man lying in the shallow grave in front of him is very much alive. Mr. Zombie Man, what I will call him, grabs Graham’s arm and scares the living shit of him. The creepy  red-head from earlier in the show is back, obviously leaning us towards believing she is the copycat killer, and she watches Graham having his moment like a predator trying to catch every movement from her prey.

Back in Hannibal’s office, Graham continues to be conflicted with the whole situation. The case itself is more complicated then it seems, but Hannibal strikes on a nerve through their conversation on connection of people to one another. The reason that Graham cannot clearly see the crimes is because he can no longer empathize with the kill of the person he’s profiling now that he himself has drawn blood.

Graham leaves and in enters our little red-headed wonder Eddie Lounds, the murder-tabloidist, and damn is Hannibal pissed that she not only recorded their conversation, but persisted to lie about the fact that she recorded his and Graham’s conversation. We are left with her and Hannibal staring each other down, as he asks rhetorically how she will make amends for her rudeness. In other situations I’d think that was a lead in to a dirty scene, but here, I’m worried it is a lead in to a very very murderous situation.

Hannibal and Crawford sit down for dinner. I swear every time I see food on his table I never think it is an animals. As they sit and chat about Crawford’s wife, and getting a bit of small talk on him. Hannibal hits on a little hidden nugget with Crawford, he deduces that the reason he is so careful with Graham out on the field is because he himself lost someone out on the field. I don’t agree with Crawford’s degree of worry over Graham, it feels as if he pushes him out into certain precarious situations that can hurt his delicate mental state only to care afterwards. But hey, I’m not the doctor, he is.

Graham on the other side of wherever the heck they are, is watching the forensics team take apart how the did or better yet, continued to live so long after being buried. Graham figures out that the all have the same reaction to sugar the way diabetics do (after all the fancy mumbo jumbo medical terms that is what I got) and that once their body craved sugar they would then be fed mushrooms which would grow like mad. They all realize that this was a farming project and that disturbing the crop would mean that the ‘farmer’ would start another very soon.

In comes the Farmercist…ok that failed. The creepy Pharmacist filling out prescriptions for his victims  leads the FBI to finding him, but only to get to him a little too late. The body of the victim is in his car and alive, but he is no where to be found. Why? Well, red-head Lounds let the information out at the wrong time, and despite her snarky attitude toward the situation, she is stepping into a rabbit hole that has a very nasty animal inside. Lounds has not only pissed off Hannibal, but she also has the FBI on her too.  Of course we find out that one of the guys on the forensic team did blab to Lounds, but at this point its just more bridges she’s burned.

Graham is back at the hospital watching over Abigail. He has another creepy vision involving a moose, and wakes up to find Bloom reading to Abigail.

Lounds is happily drinking her coffee, leaving her apartment for another day of mischief when one of her informants, the cop we saw earlier, leans on his car and waits for her to descend the stairs. The whole time telling her that his life is ruined and she continues to smile not giving one FLIP. The officer realizes, when Lounds says that she can get him work in the private sector, that she has done this before to other cops, but he doesn’t have the luxury to respond. The Farmerci…ok I’ll stop. The creepy pharmacist shoots him in the head and leaves a nice little blood splatter all over her shocked mousy face. He then asks Lounds to give him more information about Graham.

The FBI are on the scene at the scene of the shooting and while they drag the cops body away we see a flustered Lounds trying to piece all that is happening together. She keeps asking where Graham is and Crawford doesn’t understand why until Lounds divulges to him that she told the Pharmacist everything about Graham and his methods. The pharmacist sees this as a way to connect with someone who will understand him and so he decides to go after Abigail to help Graham understand him better.

The chase is on!

Once Graham is told that the pharmacist is going after Abigail, he goes on a full out hunt for the man. Graham finds him exiting through an unknown hallway and manages to not miss, and furthermore not kill the person he is trying to shoot. The pharmacist explains that if he’d been able to bury Abigail they would have connected. Graham doesn’t feel that way and as we see him in Hannibal’s office recounting it to him, Graham is struggling with the idea of whether the killing of Hobbs was just or whether he enjoyed it.

Hannibal: “Did you really feel so bad because killing him felt so good…Killing must feel good to God too. He does it all the time and are we not created in his image. God is terrific. Last week he dropped a church on 34 of his worshipers while they sang a hymn…”

Graham: “Did he feel good about that?”

Hannibal: “He felt powerful.”

This week’s episode left me excited to see what would come of next week teased wake up from Abigail Hobbs and her possible implication in the murders, but at the same time I was not feeling the whole overly sensitive Graham acting like a little kid. He threw a fit every couple scenes, that is until the end when he finally got some ‘cojones’ to save her.

I am interested to see where they take Lounds this season and if she will continue to meddle in the Hannibal/Graham’s dirty laundry. Seriously need to see more meddling from Hannibal though, and I hope to get in the coming episodes because as we saw in the beginning they are opposite coins of chaos that need to be put in the same room for more than just philosophical talks about the world.