Because people on this board often ask for opinions, then get all pissed off when you express them. Can’t win, it seems.
I’m so confused. If the pharmacist was planting the bodies in the forest, what was it that Hobbs did? Or were they partners?
A few things:
- Graham closes his eyes and in a few seconds sees things that he can’t possibly have knowledge of. So, basically, he’s a “psychic.”
- He can’t function well enough to be a cop but he’s an FBI special agent/consultant/instructor/whatever who gets to carry a gun and track down and capture/kill serial killers.
- Is the show going to have a bunch of “serial killer of the week” episodes like The X-Files “monster of the week” episodes?
- The focus on the food Lecter cooks is a bit heavy handed.
- Seeing Scott Thompson sometimes makes me feel like I’m watching a Kids in The Hall parody of an FBI show.
The pharmacist and Hobbs had nothing to do with each other, they were totally separate cases. Graham just kept seeing visions of Hobbs everywhere.
It’s funny, for a show called “Hannibal,” he’s barely even it in. It’s really just Will Graham solving bizarre murders.
So, have they pretty much abandoned any thought to modeling what actual serial killers tend to do, i.e. visit the sites of body dumps repeatedly to masturbate? When Thomas Harris created the character of Jack Crawford (portrayed in this series by Laurence Fishburne), he supposedly based him on pioneering FBI profiler John E. Douglas, who could make startlingly accurate offender profiles based on his experience and that the pathologies of serial killers fall into a fairly small number of types. Douglas wasn’t relying on an autistic-psychic for crime-scene analysis (though I suppose if he’d had such a person on staff, they would have been useful), nor were the killers so organized and focused that they were compelled and capable of turning people into mushroom farms - as opposed to just raping and torturing them to death and repeatedly fantasizing about it afterward.
Heck, Douglas was pretty upfront about the limitations of profiling - they wouldn’t give police a suspect, but could whittle down a list of hundreds of possible suspects to a manageable handful.
Compared to what actual serial killers do, the fungal pharamacist is practically a comic-book supervillain, with plans that are absurdly complicated yet entirely asexual. Heck, I’m mildly curious about his magical methods - give a diabetic tainted insulin, be on hand at the exact time they privately use it (it would be rather inconvenient if the diabetic went home to be among family members when slipping into a coma, prompting them to call an ambulance, check out the insulin, reveal the sabotage), bury them in the trunk of his car in compost, get back to work still wearing a clean white lab coat, etc… A lot of the killers’ methodology is being left unstated (the episode’s airtime mostly eaten up by Graham’s personal problems) but I guess that’s okay since it spares the writer the effort of trying to think them up.
So, how many entendres related to eating or cooking will Hannibal Lector manage to work in per episode? I figure at least three, othewise what’s the point in having him around?
The pharmacist didn’t decide to switch insulin on the woman until he learned that she lived alone due to a divorce, and then confirmed his address. I found this episode especially sick, even compared to the last one. The teaser for next week suggests that the daughter of the killer was in on it with her father and that they knew Lector. Very Horror Comics style.
Really? So there are two serial killers operating at the same time in Minnesota both with eight or nine victims?
Well, it is a TV show…
I was surprised how much I enjoyed it. Mikkelsen was much better than I anticipated as Lecter, the introduction scene where he first met Crawford was well done - you could almost see him trying to decide exactly how to debone Crawford until he politely complimented Lecter and the tension diffused. The actor playing Graham did well too, even looks a bit like Petersen in Manhunt. Very nice visually as well. Lecter was just the right level of total dick, too.
That said, it had its problems. Rewriting Graham from a bright young FBI agent with a gift for crime scene observation and getting into the minds of serial killers into a dysfunctional, borderline Asperger’s whose abilities are essentially psychic was an eyeroller. The had some misses with Matthew Gray Gubler’s character early on in Criminal Minds, so I’ll give it a chance.
Oh, and the whole scene of Graham’s shooting of Garret Hobbs/the Minnesota Shrike and saving his daughter was fun to see - the story comes straight from Graham’s reminiscense in “Red Dragon” but I don’t think anyone has ever filmed it.
Minnesota’s got nothing on Miami.
Land of 10,000 sinkholes.
“Minnesota: The Shallow Grave State”
Really loving this show. The writing is good and the actors are compelling. I’m surprised at how graphic it is considering this is network tv. Really liked the mushroom people. That was cool.
Hannibal is well acted and fun to watch.
Most of the women are lookers.
I get bugged by minor things though. For instance they find the girl buried in dirt in the car trunk and the killer is getting away. So what do they do? They crowd around a laptio in the pharmacy to surf the web about some article. WTF?
I also don’t have much patience for his mystic mind reader stuff where he seems to be able to pin point personality traits of the killer with little to kno real evidence.
Otherwse the show is great. We love i.
OK, I have a theory…
You know how some people have a butcher, a dairy, a produce mart, etc.-
Perhaps, when Hannibal isn’t hunting for himself, Hobbs is his meat guy, the pharmacist is his mushroom guy, and every week or so, we’ll meet another food provider for Hannibal.
I shudder to think of the dairy provider!
I’ve considered this too, but it would seem that they would turn on him very quickly once they found out that he was on the team that caught them. I thought that this might be what the “courtesy call” to Hobbs was about. Perhaps HL wanted Hobbs to kill all the witnesses and then himself.
Until I read this, I did not know it was possible to laugh and retch at the same time.
Well played.
Finally watched the mushroom pharmacist episode. Odd how they changed the Freddy Lounds character into a woman. Maybe later in the series she’ll undergo gender reassignment surgery and look more like Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Would this show be any different if it were one of those “psychic solves crimes” shows? We’re not shown any sort of real detective work - essentially the lead character - who is tortured by his special abilities that separate him from normal people and burden him - basically magically picks up on the vibes of an area to magically solve the crime.
Now I know it’s more of a character piece than a straight detective procedural, and yet it seems like most of the things driving the plot will be detective procedural, so would it kill them to actually put some thought into that part of the show to make it more interesting than magic?
Anyone catch the episode last night? I thought it was pretty decent, although it seemed a little off that Lecter would let such a major secret as his involvement in the copycat murder be kept by a (probably) mentally-unstable girl. Doesn’t seem to vibe with what we know of him from the books, but I’ll let it stand for now - maybe he’ll dispose of her in a later episode or something.
The show continues with Graham’s torturedness and, it seems from the preview, is going to launch into it full throttle next week. Magical/Asperger’s crime-solving abilities too (which, IIRC, is not far from how the book represents it), but it’s really not all that different from Sherlock Holmes/Psych/Monk/Mentalist-type stuff, is it? - except that those stories bother to draw tenuous, but superficially convincing connections between clues and conclusions that, really, are completely pulled out of a writer’s ass. In TV Tropes terms, a lot of the time these are supposed to be Sherlock Scans, but are, really, Bat Deductions.
I think they’re trying to make the centerpiece of the show the relationship between two very strange people - Graham and Lecter - and if they explain either one too much, like Thomas Harris already did with Lecter, or by making Graham too much of a conventional detective, explaining his methods and everything, the story and its relationships would suffer for it.