Hannibal Recap: “Savoureux”

by Veronique Medrano:

Hannibal Recap: “Savoureux”
Original Air Date (NBC): Thursday June 20, 2013
Season 1 Episode 13

After a season of buildup, Will Graham and Dr. Hannibal Lecter come face to face and leave so much promise for the next season. If you haven’t watched this show yet I’d suggest that you  take a look at our recap of the PILOT episode here.

Please make sure to not read this if you haven’t watched the show.

Downfall of a Hero

Will opens up the episode, gun in hand, in pursuit of the stag that has plagued his sleeping and waking dreams since the first episode. When he finally catches up the stag, it isn’t the animal that he finds, but a dark-figure that is clad with stag antlers. Will wakes up from his dream only to discover his hands and feet covered in dirt, and vomiting up an ear.

Dr. Lecter’s comes by Graham’s house trying to help him piece together what happened, and as he continues to deduce what happened the night before, Hannibal interrupts his train of thought. He convinces Graham to call Jack Crawford so that he doesn’t make the situation worse by running. Graham concedes and the man who helped solve soo many cases now becomes the suspect.

Graham is trying hard to remember what happened, but it isn’t coming to him. With his mental deficiency, and the shock of the whole situation he can only deduce that he did kill Abigal Hobbs. Alana Bloom is completely distraught over the current turn of events. She sits with Graham in the interrogation room, and even though Will feels that she’s dodged a bullet by rebuking his romantic advances. Alana expresses that what is happening right now doesn’t make her feel like she dodged anything.

The evidence just keeps piling up on Will. First it was the ear he vomited up, and now its fishing lures. The forensic team happen upon his fly-fishing lures, during an off-camera search of his house, and notice something odd about the them. After taking them apart, they find bits and pieces of each copy-cat victim in different lures. They arrest Will for murder and while he is being transported he manages to escape.

Crawford, Bloom and Lecter deduce that despite the Clock-test administered to Will earlier in the episode and a couple episodes prior, but Lecter’s clock looks different from what Will drew. It is suggested that Graham faked the test so as to appear that he is mentally unstable.

Graham sneaks into Lecter’s house, and asks him to take him to where Abigal Hobbs died. They go over to the house where it all started. Fresh blood is on the floor and there are glimpses of possible recognition that Lecter had a hand in it this entire time, and as Lecter continues to feed him information so that Graham believes he killed those people. In that moment, Graham experiences clarity. He knows himself, its something he’s been repeating the entire episode, but now it takes on a different tone because he adds on to that sentence he’s been repeating to himself that he doesn’t know Dr. Lecter all that well.

Graham deduces that Lecter was the one who called the house that day and warned Abigal’s father that morning, and as the pieces fall into place, Jack Crawford enter the house. He follows the sound of Graham’s voice, and is caught in a precarious situation, seeing as he has a gun pointed at Lecter and about to shoot him. Crawford shoots Graham and as he lays in the same spot/position Jacob Hobbs did when Graham shot him all those episodes ago, he finally sees what Hobbs whispered for him to see.

Monster or Redeemer

Dr. Lecter on the other hand is very conflicted. He talks about Abigal Hobbs death with his psychiatrist and sheds some tears over the fact that he has tried to coach and train people to go on the ‘right’ path only to fall short. Lecter talks about Hobbs as a protegé that just never took to the lessons, but feels that Will is not a lost cause. Lecter’s psychiatrist does not wish for him to participate in Will’s rehabilitation.

Of course, there is Dr. Lecter again trying to ‘rehabilitate’ Graham, but at this point it is clear that the rehabilitation isn’t to help him gain an idea as to how/why he can’t remember these murders or diagnose what is truly wrong with him mentally. Instead it feels like a well executed set-up. Lecter convinces Graham that if he plans to disprove the murders happened it would only work if he imagines how he could have committed the murders. (sounds like a set-up to me)

Dr. Lecter watches as it begins to dawn on Will what is going on, and Will is captured red-handed trying to cause his beloved doctor harm. We fast-forward to Lecter dropping by his psychologist’s house and sharing a meal with her. He describes it as veal, that has the animal killed at quite a young age. His psychologist sniffs at the meat and for a second we wait with bated breath that she might realize it isn’t veal,but she says nothing and continues to eat. As they talk about Graham and Lecter’s plan to bid him farewell, Lecter’s psychologist warns him that he needs to be careful. The FBI might catch on to his pattern of ‘befriending’ those who are mentally unstable. Lecter acknowledges the heads up, but asks her if her ideas about who he is have begun to unravel the truth. We are left at a stand-still as they both sit in a silent stand-off.

The episode ends in an overture of classical music, as Lecter walks towards Graham’s cell and instead of the aforementioned ‘Farwell’ we get a ‘Hello’.