Going into week three, I have to say that “Potage,” the third episode of “Hannibal,” was the strongest episode of the season yet. Rather than investigating another killer with artistic panache, the episode focuses on Abigail Hobbs — daughter of the serial killer from episode one whose death and crimes still haunt Will Graham — as she’s finally out of her coma, and her possible involvement in the crimes of her father.
This episode finally found the balance between overall development and the heightened horror imagery that I’ve been wishing for from the start of the series.
The episode was much more dialogue heavy, which served to help develop a lot of the more secondary characters that until recently had been pushed to the side, and only featured a few surreal, art-horror scenes which acted as good backdrops for the action. We get to see a lot more of Dr. Alana Bloom (Caroline Dhavernas), a consulting psychiatrist for the FBI and Graham’s friend, and see how much she butts heads with head of the Behavioral Analysis Unit Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne) and Dr. Hannibal Lecter.
We get to see how much Fishburne’s Crawford is more concerned with rooting through the evidence until he finds something that supports his beliefs — in this case, that Abigail was an accomplice to her father’s crimes — even to the point of throwing other people and their wellbeing under the bus.
You get the sense that as Crawford continues to carry on like this, he’s only going to succeed in alienating Graham and push him and his unstable mental state right into the waiting hands of
Dr. Lecter. In this episode, we also get a lot more of Mads Mikkelsen’s Dr. Lecter. With Abigail Hobbs awake and the possibility that she remembers that Lecter called her father to tip him off that the FBI was coming for him, Lecter’s cool façade starts to shake as he rushes to cover his tracks. While Abigail, brilliantly played by Kacey Rohl, is disturbed over her father’s crimes and her own shaky mental state, she proves herself to be clever and savvy, immediately catching onto Lecter’s game and giving us some of the best snarky, underhanded banter on the show (Abigail: "Are we gonna recreate the crime? You be my dad, you be my mom and [pointing to Lecter] you be the man on the phone”).
On an interesting note, while many shows have decided to delay certain episodes due to the recent bombings in Boston — the show “Castle” has postponed an upcoming episode involving a bombing — NBC has decided to pull the next episode of “Hannibal” from the air and go straight into what would have originally been the fifth episode of the series. This decision came after series creator, producer and writer Bryan Fuller phoned in and asked that the episode — featuring Molly Shannon as a killer who brainwashes children to kill one another — be pulled.
While the episode is not really related to recent events in any way, Fuller said his intent was to be sensitive to the current state of the nation. I found this decision slightly ironic, considering that the full trailer for the eagerly awaited “Catching Fire”— focused on a world were kids brutally murdering each other is a form of entertainment — was released this past week and met with loads of excitement.
