Hannibal – Season 1, Ep. 9

Although this is my second favourite show at the moment (Game of Thrones being the first), there is one thing that I found rather bothersome. When Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) attends a crime scene and goes into one of his “trances”, however, it has lessened a great deal of late, and seems to be just as annoying to Will as it is to me. The crime scenes appear to be taking a heavy toll on his sanity, with the blackouts gaining in frequency and intensity. He is missing a great deal of time in this episodic version of Red Dragon, and is beginning to tell on his police work because, in the blink of an eye he goes from ‘crime scene’ to Lecter’s office with no notion on how it happened.

The inventiveness of the writing team is to be applauded, as time after time we see a form of grotesque one-upmanship with none being a clear winner (so far!) but this one has me thinking, it can’t get any worse. A totem pole built of human bodies await Will Graham’s attention, so we see him approach the crime scene with Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne) who orders the crime scene techs to clear out to enable Will to work. Graham then removes his glasses in a manner that was reminiscent of some the old Superman movies, when Clark Kent reveals his true identity, but ‘our’ Superman is fallible, as we learn from almost the outset of this episode.

This episode was not on the same level as the previous one, but to expect such things all the time is not being realistic. I’ll settle for ‘good’ with the occasional ‘great’, so keeping this show ahead of the others, happy in the fact that it can even rise to greatness in the first place. A solid episode that will definitely keep fans (or more importantly ‘me’) happy.

Highly Recommended