OK, I have now seen the pulled episode, “Ceuf.” (It’s available online if you know where to look. The creators were almost blatantly *telling *people to seek it out online from airings in other countries.)
And my reaction? Wow, there really was no reason at all to pull it. It was not similar at all to Newtown. There have been sooooo many worse things shown on TV, hell the Hannibal episode that actually aired in it’s place was way more graphic.
The plot was
Two families have been killed, and the shooters are each family’s missing children who disappeared a year earlier, having been kidnapped by Molly Shannon and brainwashed into thinking that they had to kill their own families. No adults killing little kids, nothing to do with school, no kids are even *shown *being killed.
It really was rather tame, “Law & Order” has done much worse. Hell, kids being killed and/or rape cases are almost all you ever see on SVU!
I opine the real reason they pulled the episode was the overall weakness of the episode especially its concept and focus. It was half spent on character development between Hannibal and the Hobbs girl (good), a quarter on Will’s mental gymnastics (standard) that led nowhere until he finally pulled the mother aspect out of his ass (ok, whatever), with no development of Molly Shannon’s character or really why any of this was happening other than to show a few two minute shots of her acting motherly/cult-leadery.(Useless) And a bit of Jack Crawford character development which is important for the following episode.
I just think this show is just too abstract for a visual medium (especially one shown on network tv) and to try to contain a cohesive storyline while battling your villain of the week is completely the wrong way to go. Make it one serial killer and let the investigation and the characters develop over the course of a full season. They try to cram too much into a 44 minute time period and then you’re left with plotholes and repetitive storylines. I can appreciate that they’re letting Hannibal’s motivations for his actions develop slowly, but there’s gotta be some hint of his reasoning behind his interest in the Hobbs girl, Crawford and with Will. Right now he’s a puppetmaster who is pulling individual strings just to watch them jiggle around a bit. I get that he’s toying with them, but I can’t see how that would very interesting past a few days.
Ugh, this had all right parts to be good and instead its just a confusing mess. Like a blind guy driving a Ferrari. Yet I’ll still watch every episode.
I’m confused about this week’s episode. Eddie Izzard claimed to be the Chesapeake Ripper, which was backed up by saying the Ripper’s inactivity corresponds to Gideon’s incarceration. But earlier in the season, didn’t someone deduce that a recent killing (the copycat to the killer in the pilot) was done by the Ripper? I could be misremembering; I can’t recall when the Ripper was first brought up.
They briefly brought up the Ripper in the previous episode as a possible suspect, but then discounted him because there weren’t any trophies taken. I’m pretty sure that was the only mention before this episode.
This show really needs to give Hannibal some sort of goal or motivation besides just fucking with people to fuck with them (well, that and occasionally eat them). Having him just arbitrarily screw with the other main characters isn’t really that interesting.
I enjoyed this episode, although it was a bit weird how many callbacks to the movie there were. But one thing totally baffled me… Dr. Gideon told Jack that he had killed Miriam. Didn’t Miriam go interview Dr. Gideon in prison, meaning that that was totally impossible? Also, seems like there were some important forensic bits that were left out… did they test that blonde hair? Whose arm was it holding the phone at the end?
Still, I’m enjoying this show quite a bit overall.
A test evaluator at work-kind of sort of a counselor, I do not believe she had a degree in psychology, had her office in my building, which once was a dorm, old and creepy. We used to talk and joke, I would pretend to be entranced by an ornate letter opener of hers. We both enjoyed the film.
One morning, I stood at the top of the creepy stairs, and as she set foot on the stairway, said in a low voice, “Hello, Clarice.” She freaked for a minute, but was amused by it a moment later.
Not sure I’m thrilled with this. It works as a limited run series, which is what I thought was originally intended. I figured it would end either with or right before Lecter’s arrest & become the immediate prequel to RED DRAGON.
That said, I would not mind seeing the Lecter Trilogy (RD, SOTL, H) remade with this cast, with Part 3 using the book conclusion.
