I disagree that the food thing is well handled. It’s the defining characteristic of the title character. So layer that stuff in slowly. Pick your spots to highlight that. Because the audience will anticipate it, waiting for it. And the longer you hold it back, the more interesting it becomes. It’s like Sam and Diane getting together in Cheers. The longer you wait, the better the payoff.
And the serial killer thing… They don’t have to be tracking a different serial killer each week. They could be looking for random one time murderers. Or tracking a single killer for multiple episodes, that maybe turns it to be Lector. The writers are trying to have multiple villains that are equally repulsive as Lector which undermines his uniqueness. It minimizes the horror of him when you already have 2 other guys that are just as bad as he is. I mean, they’re referring to Lector right now as “The Copycat” which is totally wrong. Lector is his own brand of insane. It’s just one of many poor choices that this show is making. I want to like it so badly, but they’re making it really hard for me to do so.
One, these killers aren’t all in the same town. There’s the Shrike in MN, Lector and Mushroom guy from somewhere else.
Also, the writers aren’t referring to Lector as the copycat, the copycat is an invention of Lector’s being used to mess with Abigail, Will and the police.
And it is the unscrupulous blogger who is responsible for spreading suspicion about the daughter. Aside from writing about it, she literally found a grieving family member, lit his fuse and aimed him at the girl.
I’m not saying you’re wrong or bad, but practically every thing you said in that entire paragraph is something we’ll just have to agree to disagree about.
They already aren’t tracking a different killer each week. The third episode was all about them questioning whether the daughter knew about what her father was doing while looking for clues about the copycat murderer, who as Brad just pointed out is something Lector purposefully made up for Will.
I feel like the whole thing with Abigail is pretty tenuous at best as a story. I’m not quite feeling what they are trying to do with this show yet, it feels forced overall and not at all like a natural progression for the narrative.
I am rather impressed how the cinematography and music combine to make even relatively mundane moments/conversations deeply unsettling. On the other hand, that same sort of thing started to drive me crazy the further I got into There Will Be Blood (Dramatic music swell leading into. . . a seven minute panoramic shot of empty desert! DUN DUN DUN!!!), so we’ll see whether or not the actual tension begins to match the mood more regularly–obviously the end of this ep was pretty solidly scary/intense/whatever, but the first third to half wasn’t, necessarily.
Still loving Mads, though. That man is utterly creeptastic in a very wonderful way.
I caught up on Potage, and I have to admit that I’m a little confused: How many girls did they find? I know there’s the one that was returned, and there’s the fake one that Lecter killed, but was the returned girl the only body they found? Did the “Shrike” / impale thing just come out of that one body and all the rest were just disappeared? How did they know they were all the same killer? I may not have been paying enough attention to the first episode, but I can’t reconcile the “use every part of the body” with what I thought I knew about the previous killings. I’m assuming that I just missed something.
That being said, I’m still enjoying it. Every aspect of the show is so…deliberate. It all feels very intentionally weighty: the sparseness of the dialog, the generally subdued performances, color saturation, etc. There’s really nothing else like it on TV.
I do also think they’re having the right amount of fun with the audience’s knowledge of who Hannibal is. They aren’t over-doing it, but his very slight smile when Will says things like “Can you imagine what it is like to be Garret Jacob Hobbs?” is darkly hilarious.
Also, I feel like this show really benefits from a cultural background that includes the Law And Order psychiatrists like B.D. Wong. When Hannibal talks to Abigail (or even to Will), you can see a dark reflection of that same kind of searching, probing attempt to get the victim / suspect to open up, and you can see how Hannibal’s questions are leading in a different direction using the same techniques.
The Shrike killed a number of victims. Somewhere in the ballpark of 8-10, if I recall. The last–the one returned to her bed–was only returned because he was unable to use her utterly thanks to the cancer that was theretofore undetected in her liver (or was it kidneys?). The copycat (Hannibal, we can relatively safely assume) would have used data from previous killings that he had access to, as well as the immediate and more firsthand investigation of the latest, returned victim, to stage his own scene in the field later on.
The Shrike’s other victims were not found, so yeah, the nicknaming definitely came from the one that they did find. Given his meticulousness with all the others and the clear patterns linking them (phsycial attributes), my guess is that the cops/FBI assumed they all underwent the same stag-mounting treatment as the returned girl–and that they weren’t lucky enough to be returned mostly intact afterward.
Yeah, this is mostly what I was wondering about. I guess the cops just figured a bunch of girls with similar age / appearance disappearing = serial killer. So I guess all the information came from Will and the 1 girl who was returned. I guess there was physical evidence of struggle / abduction in the other cases, just no body turned up.
Honestly, “Minnesota Shrike” is one of the least believable things about the show. Like the media would work hard enough to think of a bird that impaled it’s victims.
Show has been so fantastic , I hope it gets renewed. Casting , the pace of events and the camera angles they use to capture scenes are just so amazing.
Episode 4 is on the internets, apparently the episode aired in its entirety in other countries.
I think I officially love this show. I like that Lecter is such a low-impact, quiet, reasonable-sounding guy, and then in the one scene where he’s alone reading the tabloid article they made him look so alien and creepy tapping his fingers and thinking about how to make sure Izzard can’t take credit for his handiwork. I also like how there’s no action soundtrack and the violence is just a little creepier for it.
