First, Do Lots Of Harm

My feelings about Hannibal, now that we have come to the end of its first season, are complicated. I mean, I'm happy that when you Google "hannibal," the show is the first thing that comes up, and that it has therefore displaced the shitty 2001 Silence Of The Lambs sequel that was so shitty. On the other hand, the gore. For someone like me, who loves TV so much that I freely admit I could do without running water more easily than I could cable (how clean I gotta be? I'm just sitting here watching TV!), it's hard to get entirely on board with a show I have to watch considerable segments of through my fingers lest I get an entire eyeful of a man who's had his head Pez dispenserized.

In terms of the philosophical underpinnings of the show's premise, I understand and kind of agree with critics like friend of the site Richard Lawson:

Look, I love SVU and all that. But shows that make murder elegant, like The Following and Hannibal? Go home, jerks. Really, who needs it.

— Richard Lawson (@rilaws) April 5, 2013

For me, Lawson's hair-split is germane to the discussion, and came up in a conversation about Hannibal in our house, when Dave pointed out that I get creeped out by the incredibly graphic, baroquely displayed corpses that appear in every episode, yet love action-movie bloodbaths where cars fly off bridges and heads explode and stuff (which I do. I really do). But for me, a movie like Rambo (the late '00s sequel where bad guys are not just blown up but turned into fine mist) is so cartoonish that it can't possibly be taken seriously; on Hannibal, a corpse turned into a grotesque angel is the most serious thing that's ever happened; and the camera lingers on the murderer's work as though giving due respect to a master craftsman. When you consider how many other kinds of people aren't lucky enough to be represented in scripted TV dramas as often as incredibly precise serial killers are -- virtually all people who aren't white, for example -- it does feel like there might have been more productive things NBC could have been doing with this hour every week.

All that said, though, the reason I continued watching Hannibal -- and after Hugh Dancy's chewy American accent in the pilot, it wasn't certain that I would -- is that it puts characters into situations that would traumatize any normal person, and then shows them processing that trauma. To paraphrase Lawson: I love a good Lennie Briscoe "tell that to my ex-wife" gag delivered over a corpse as much as the next guy, and probably more. And from what I understand, gallows humour is one way actual criminal investigators deal with their obviously difficult work. But on procedurals, the corpse is often treated as nothing more than a prop -- the impetus for the hero cop or cops to show off how brilliant they are (particularly if their methods are unorthodox!). On Hannibal, dead people have backstories; their deaths continue to reverberate for several weeks after they've been dispatched; and the people whose job it is to solve their murders get pretty fucked up about it. At this stage in our desensitization to violence -- and as I said above, I'm probably more guilty than most in this department (I mean..."Pez dispenserized") -- maybe the only way to make the audience believe that Will Graham (Dancy) and Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne) would get so upset over murder victims, when people on Bones (for instance) just bustle around corpses as officiously as if they were piles of paperwork, is if those victims are so hideously mutilated that we get upset about them.

It would be harder to accept this mode, and mood, if Dancy were not so effective as Will. In the pilot, showing him reconstructing the process of a murder by mentally projecting himself into the killer's position seemed overly gimmicky. But as the season continued and Will's strange empathy grew increasingly hallucinatory (of which I must add that though I think dream sequences are generally cheap and silly, they really work well here), it felt not just logical but inevitable: of course this is what would happen to anyone who had to show up at grisly crime scenes and do this horrible job. When his mental and physical symptoms are revealed to be caused by encephalitis, it's partly a relief -- he could be treated for it and recover -- and partly a shock. Maybe it would be better for Will if he just thought he was an FBI washout and got a job at a dog rescue or something instead.

But as good as Dancy is, the show is still Mads Mikkelsen's. I still like Silence Of The Lambs and everything, but Mikkelsen's Hannibal Lecter is so much more interesting to watch than Anthony Hopkins's. A characterization like Hopkins's wouldn't have worked in a context this solemn and ponderous; Mikkelsen doing that tongue-slither thing Hopkins does in the movie is kind of unthinkable. But Mikkelsen's Lecter is so courtly and sophisticated that you can understand how he will continue to escape detection for a while longer; it's much easier to trust the judgment of someone so coolly unflappable than that of a twitchy mess like Will. Plus who would dare to accuse this Lecter of anything? How gauche.

And as Lecter wept in last night's finale, what was the cause? Fear that Will might be diagnosed correctly, treated, and put onto Lecter's trail? Or regret that he used Will in his private science experiment and possibly twisted him up beyond all repair? All the times Lecter's said that Will is his friend, was he being sincere? If so, what does that mean to a Hannibal Lecter? The season ends with Will in prison -- possibly unable to assist in his own defense? With Will successfully framed, who will be unlucky enough to become the next "copycat" patsy? After this antler-heavy season, what telegenic impalement motif will possibly top it next year? I'm scared to guess.