I’d grown fairly disillusioned and even impatient with
Hannibal over the course this past season. The show seemed to lose its way somewhat in the first half: Hannibal playing house with Bedelia; Will on his seemingly endless plod through the greatest hits of Hannibal’s developing years; Hannibal going through the motions of killing and eating thinly drawn European academics with barely a shrug, and worst of all, far too much indulgence in Bryan Fuller’s partially straight-faced dictum that his directors make an arty, “pretentious” show. Even the introduction of Francis Dolarhyde and the plot of
Red Dragon in the season’s second half seemed to drag, although at least it allowed Will to become a more active character by again applying his heightened empathy to understand the mind of yet another monstrous lunatic.
