Star Wars: The Force Awakens: Further Thoughts

I don't think it should be a big surprise that I have more thoughts on this latest of Star Wars movies. The film has only been out for a few days, and some of my friends who have not yet had the chance to watch it are already having major plot points and elements spoiled by, frankly, pretty inconsiderate people. I know that there's a whole investigation into the idea that spoilers are even a bad thing - that there are studies that say people enjoy a movie or other piece of media if they already know where it's going. But my philosophy is that, while that might be the case, every subsequent watch of the movie will be "spoiled," so even if the "unspoiled" version is worse, viewers should still be given the opportunity to have that one unique experience. So that's why I'm being careful to provide a spoiler warning here and also give a nice big block of text dedicated to spoilers in case someone catches the first part of this post on the mobile version or something like that.

Right, are we good? Ok.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

As I said in the previous article, I was at the target age when the Star Wars prequels were released. And in fact, my initial reactions to them were positive. But as time went on and I reexamined them (and, yes, had things pointed out to me,) I realized that they were really mangled movies - with some inventive visuals and a sweeping score by the consistently excellent John Williams, but flawed deeply in both writing and direction. I don't want to go too hard on George Lucas, because ultimately Star Wars is his thing, but it's clear that without collaborators who could really challenge his decisions and force him to re-work elements that weren't working, we wound up with probably the most disappointing (not worst, disappointing) movies ever.

So when Lucas sold Lucasfilm, with all its properties, to Disney, there was actually a kind of hope in the air. Disney, for all its corporate greed (and make no mistake, they are going to make an obscene amount of money on Star Wars merchandise now that they can make as many Star Warses as they want,) does actually have a good company feel for strongly-made entertainment. We've seen it in their Marvel movies (some better than others, but even the least impressive of them - I'm looking at you, Thor-centric movies - are still a good watch,) and now they're trying out the ultimate blockbuster franchise - a series that people feel deeply passionate about.

So, before I get into HEAVY spoilers, I'll just give a very simple opinion of Episode VII: The Force Awakens. It was good. If you like Star Wars, this is a worthy addition to the series.

Now let's jump behind the cut so we can talk about things in private.

SPOILERS AHEAD.

The Perhaps-Impossible Task of Evaluating the New Star Wars Movie Accurately

The Star Wars prequels came out pretty much when I was almost perfectly in the age-bracket for maximum impact. I was in 8th Grade when The Phantom Menace was released, and the other two prequels came out when I was in High School. The thing is, at the time, I thought the prequels were good. Over the years, though, I've reevaluated them. There's definitely a kind of pop-culture mob mentality, and I can't claim that I haven't been influenced by it. But the criticisms of the prequels do hold water - there are some serious story structure flaws, some strange choices about the arc of that story, etc.

The thing is, why do we care? There are plenty of bad movies that come out, and we usually just kind of forget about them.

Star Wars is the object of a cult-like worship. I bet that if you counted all the people in the world for whom Star Wars provides a real emotional response, you'd have enough to count as a major world religion. I won't really go into why that's the case, though it's clearly got something to do with a combination of iconic story-weaving and some of the most relentless marketing and merchandising the world has ever seen.

Alex Guinness, one of the greatest film actors of all time, famously disparaged the movies as being silly and frivolous, and while he was smart enough to know that they'd be a success (rather than take a normal paycheck for the firm movie, he opted for a percentage of its profits, and thus made more money than a normal person would be able to spend in a lifetime.) It's true that the original trilogy was not terribly nuanced, and when you look back at some of it - mainly the twists of Darth Vader being Luke's father and Leia being his sister - it doesn't really hold up that much. Guinness managed to sell his "from a certain point of view" excuse for flat-out lying about Luke's father, but only because, as I said, he was one of the greatest film actors of all time.

The thing is, Star Wars has become such an ingrained part of pop culture that it's passed on from generation to generation. My dad, though not nearly the film nut that I am, was the age I am now when the original Star Wars came out, and despite usually turning his nose up at a lot of low culture and post-modernist spins on it, he was the one who got me to watch those movies when I was little (my mom, on the other hand, is much more willing to dirty her hands in pop culture's underbelly. She's the one who like Tarantino.)

The thing is, because it's so built up in our minds, one of two things will happen - or, more likely, both. The first is that we might see what we want to see - just as a 13-year-old me was convinced that Phantom Menace was going to win Best Picture at the Oscars. There's a ton of positive-response bias in a lot of media these days because there's a massive marketing machine to encourage it. We're in an age where hype is all that matters, and to a great extent, the fans are capable of drumming it up on their own, but I suspect there's a ton of money behind making it look like people are excited about things - if you see someone excited about a piece of media you have some interest in, you're probably going to get more excited about it.

The flipside, though, is the kind of "hipster credentials" where thinking something is bad is the way you prove that you're better. Sometimes this will come in the form of a backlash against the aforementioned ultra-hype, but it soon becomes its own self-reinforcing beast that is just as capable of obscuring the truth about a piece of work.

Now, the huge caveat to all of this is that "truth" when it comes to opinions about art is obviously subjective (and yes, I consider anything from experimental variations on filmic form to big blockbuster popcorn-sellers art - something can be crass and still art, it just becomes crass art.) No matter how good a movie is, some people will genuinely hate it, and no matter how bad a movie is, some people will genuinely love it.

After the premiere, there have been a lot of people saying favorable things about the movie, but you have to take all of this with a grain of salt - when it comes to celebrities, for example, they've got to tow the line, as it helps their personal brand if they don't alienate or anger a super-powerful film studio that could make or break their careers. Film critics I might pay more attention to, but critics are often wrong about things, and while they are more practiced at maintaining perspective on these things, they are still human and subject to the biases that can come with the media landscape.

I can only speak for myself, but here's what I'm looking for out of the Force Awakens:

A simple story that makes sense. Lucas tried to add political intrigue to his prequels, but while that can make for really good drama, it does naturally lead to complicated plots that a good writer needs to communicate cleverly. Shocking twists can be great, but they suffer from diminishing returns. You need some big turns throughout a plot, but a reversal and a twist are not the same. You can only upend the reality that audiences thought they were living in every so often, or they'll never get invested enough in the status quo to be shocked when that rug is pulled from under them. 

Smart Character Work: Each character needs to be protagonist of his or her own story. Those stories should be rich, but they don't need to be complex, and we don't have to show their entire stories. A villain often works really well if we only get brief glimpses of his or her story. Characters can have simple goals - basically, a goal "I want this in my life" and a clear objective to achieve that goal "I will go there and do this."

The right aesthetic: this I know they can pull off because I've seen the trailers. While I think the role they played in the prequels' failings has been overblown, it's true that episodes I, II, and III didn't really look like Star Wars, given how they were filled with all that slick CGI and environments that had none of the "used future" feel that we associate with the series. But yeah, I'm not too worried about this.

Make these movies count: Probably my biggest worry about JJ Abrams directing the movie is that it might be too reverential to the source material. Star Trek Into Darkness purported to be a new Star Trek movie, but in practice it felt more like a bunch of fan-remakes of scenes from Wrath of Khan. We're going to know it's Star Wars - it has X-Wings, TIE Fighters, Star Destroyers and Light Sabers. This should be a new story, and not just a repeat of the old ones. If you want to build on the legacy of the series, you have to go somewhere that the older entries don't already occupy.

Rewatching Batman Begins and the Dark Knight

The other day, I had a lot of free time and was fairly bored, and found myself craving some Batman. Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy has been hugely influential. Pairing with the James Bond reboot in Casino Royale, it was a big part of the popularization of the "dark and gritty reboot" trend that has been so popular the last ten years. Batman Begins also helped to kick off the trend of superhero movies that the studios take seriously, though it worked alongside Bryan Singer's X-Men movies and Sam Raimi's Spiderman ones. I watched Batman Begins and the Dark Knight. I didn't watch the Dark Knight Rises because we don't have it on DVD (I didn't hate it as much as a lot of people seemed to, and actually thought it handled Catwoman and Robin about as well as I could expect the series to do so.)

The funny thing, of course, is that Batman had already sort of had its "dark and gritty" reboot in the form of Tim Burton's 1989 film, coupled with his follow-up Batman Returns. As a kid who was born in 1986, the strange swept-back Batmobile with a jet engine turbine at the front is the definitive version of the vehicle (despite the fact that: confession, I haven't actually seen either of Burton's Caped Crusader works.)

Burton's Batman movies were darker and grittier, but only in comparison to the previous on-screen version of the character - the absurdly campy 60s TV show and movie starring Adam West.

Of course, Batman is such an old and established character as well as being incredibly iconic that he's gone through some very different incarnations. Batman is sort of the official #2 most quintessential superhero, and the general pop culture consensus is that he's more interesting than Superman, thanks in part to the limitations on his powers (he's a mere mortal, albeit a very rich, very smart, and very skilled one) and also due to the fact that many of his villains are as iconic as he is (the Joker has got to be the most iconic supervillain, with apologies to Mr. Luthor.)

Tim Burton's Batman movies were kinda-sorta continued with two additional movies by Joel Schumacher (to my great shame, I have actually seen these ones.) But while Burton inevitably gave us a heightened Gotham that borrowed from German Expressionism and his own whimsical visual styles, Schumacher's movies were garish and campy in a way that, in the ironic 90s, might have seemed self-aware at the time, but are generally just remembered as awful (the latter of the two had Arnold Schwartzenegger making tons of ice puns as Mr. Freeze.)

There's a much larger discussion about how pop culture changed so tremendously between the 90s and the 00s, but much as we saw a transition from campy invisible cars in the later Pierce Brosnan Bond films (ok, that was technically 2000, but I think we can think of a major event in 2001 that marked the clear line between the decades, culturally) to the Bourne Identity, a campy Batman was not what audiences wanted. (Re: Brosnan as Bond, I actually thought he made a great James Bond, it's just that only the first of his four Bond movies, Goldeneye, was good - largely because it was a direct reaction to another massive cultural shift, i.e., the end of the Cold War.)

In the 00s, audiences weren't really content to take campy stuff and care about it. The conception of Batman Begins was that it would take the basic outline of the Batman comics and build something that functioned somewhat more along the rules of the real world. Realism might be a stretch, but the movie tried to justify things in more concrete ways. One interesting consequence of that is that some very important, iconic villains only brush against their more over-the-top comic book inspirations. Scarecrow never really identifies himself as such. The only time we really see him looking like a full-on supervillain is while a little boy who is suffering from his hallucinogen (actually Jack Gleeson, who would later brilliantly play the detestable Joffrey Baratheon on Game of Thrones) imagines him as something far scarier than he is.

In the Dark Knight, this goes farther. Harvey Dent is mostly heroic through the majority of the movie, but after he suffers the horrific burns that make him into Two Face, he goes on one rampage before he dies. Not every villain has your standard supervillain schemes in these movies, and while his in-universe status as a villain only lasts a day or two, he still largely lives up to the legacy of his character.

It is interesting, though, watching the two movies back to back, and seeing how different they are. The Dark Knight Rises is often singled out for being disappointing compared to the first two, and the Dark Knight is typically held aloft as the pinnacle of the series. It's true that Heath Ledger's Joker was a revelation, and there's a certain added mystique to the role given that he died so soon after (and it's possible that his preparation for the role is what indirectly led to his untimely death.) But I actually think that my opinion of the two movies is more even than I would have previously thought.

For one thing, Gotham in Batman Begins feels a little more otherworldly. Granted, part of the mission statement for the series was to take the comic book universe and make it feel more like the real world. Gotham of the Dark Knight feels very much like a modern American city. I believe it was mostly shot in Chicago, and you could even imagine simply saying that's where it was and not really changing the plot all that much (though clearly Gotham is meant to be New York. Actually, as a side note, for a long time I thought of Gotham as DC's version of New York while Metropolis was its Chicago, but a couple years ago I found out that actually, they're both supposed to be New York, and on some maps they're even right next to each other, across the Hudson from where the real New York City would be.)

Batman Begins has a lot of action that takes place in The Narrows, and Arkham Asylum within there. This strange and twisted shantytown is perhaps not what you'd expect to see in a modern American city, but it sort of acts as the platonic ideal of urban misery. Arkham Asylum is a crumbling, rotting building that seems squeezed into its surroundings, and adds to the spookiness of the movie (appropriate, given that it's the only one in which Scarecrow shows up for more than just a brief fun cameo.)

By contrast, the Dark Knight's Gotham is slick. The streets are straights and wide, and the skyscrapers are made of glass and steel. There are a couple reasons for this, one being that it deals more with high society. Far more of the major players in the second film are members of Gotham's elite and government. But it also creates a starker contrast with Ledger's Joker, who is far grungier and grimier than any previous incarnation we've seen. Not only does he have threadbare purple jackets, messy, only partially-dyed green hair, and make-up that it looks like he put on once and simply never washed off, allowing it to gradually rub off as the movie goes on, but his wide grin is accomplished not by showing a bunch of teeth, but by having horrible-looking scars on his cheeks (that painfully remind me of the eczema I used to get on my upper lip when I was a kid.)

But one of the other strange things to note about the series is how things have changed since then. Batman Begins is now ten years old, and the "dark and gritty reboot" ran its course into ridiculousness. X-Men, Spiderman, and Batman Begins opened the door for Marvel to become its own studio (that was very swiftly and probably wisely bought by Disney.) The Marvel films have managed to take the best of both worlds in comic book stories. "Nerd Culture" has become mainstream, and thanks to that, not only are there more talented artists willing to work on these projects, but the studios can push farther into the realm of heightened sci-fi and fantasy without the fear of losing the audience.

Mind you, the Dark Knight trilogy is not without a sense of humor, but it does take a very serious attitude to the subject matter, carefully dancing around or slicing out anything too ridiculous from the comics. But the Marvel films have leaned in, abandoning the campiness that ruined the Schumacher era Batman and replacing it with earnestness.

But the consequence of this is that a lot of films still following in the Dark Knight's footsteps are now teetering off of the edge of ridiculousness, not because of quasi-self-aware camp, but absurd bleakness. The Dark Knight can get away with being a bit angsty, given that angst over his parents' death is basically the primary motivation for Batman to be a superhero. But when this dark and gritty quality was used for Superman in Man of Steel, it seemed like a betrayal of his character.

DC is trying to create their own consistent cinematic universe, and certainly their company has some very important properties that could work. After all, as good as any of the Marvel superheroes are, Superman, Batman, and arguably Wonderwoman are the triumvirate at the top of the iconic superhero list.

But I think that it's clear that we're at a point where people want to and largely have moved past the Dark and Gritty era. Even Marvel is going to have to evolve if they want to keep this train rolling. Batman Begins opened a big door for these sorts of movies to enter the cinema, but I think that we're evolving past it by now.

Jessica Jones, Post Binge

Well, apparently I liked it, because now I've finished season one of Jessica Jones, the second of Marvel's Netflix shows, which will form the kind of "street level Avengers" group, the Defenders. Much like the preceding Daredevil, Jessica Jones is very much about the rough, more grounded and gritty world of superheroes. It's a lot darker, certainly more violent, and less gee-whiz-fun than the movies tend to be. In fact, there are clear lines of distinction drawn between the movies and these shows that almost feels like a class division. The Avengers are the 1% - they have a massive battle in New York City with tons of explosions and bark witty one-liners at each other while fighting aliens. But Daredevil and Jessica Jones don't have the fame or the resources that the Avengers do. Their fights are not to save the world, but are more about cleaning things up in their immediate areas.

Spoilers are going to come after a cut, but for now I'm going to keep things broad.

Daredevil's story was a much more classic superhero story - Wilson Fisk is Lex Luthor writ small - he's another bald crime boss, but while he has a lot of power in his neighborhood, he's definitely not going to be taking over the whole world any time soon. While Fisk is certainly strong, it's not really a superpower - he's ultimately just a charismatic gangster who runs a tight ship.

Jessica Jones spends the entire season in a struggle to stop someone who absolutely has a superpower. Kilgrave, the "Purple Man" is utterly horrifying thanks to his ability to force people to do things simply by asking or telling them to, combined with an utter megalomania and lack of empathy.

David Tennant is of course beloved for his portrayal of the Tenth Doctor on Doctor Who, and what makes that prior casting so interesting is that in many ways, Kilgrave is sort of a villainous take on that character. (Just for the record, that isn't my original idea - I read it in some AV Club comment and was fascinated by it.) Tennant's Doctor often masterfully talked his way out of problems, averting disaster through sheer force of charisma. In the Waters of Mars, the Doctor begins to wonder if he should just embrace how powerful a person he is and use it to simply get what he wants - to become the "Time Lord Victorious." We never really got to see him fall into that on that show, but in a sense, we see that in the Purple Man.

Ok, let's make this officially spoilers:

Jessica Jones

Having been a fan of Marvel's Daredevil, the first of its Netflix shows, I was eager to take a look at Jessica Jones, their next foray into the kind of "Marvel at Night," darker stories.

The star is Jessica Jones, a hard-drinking private investigator. Jessica is hardboiled as they come, a depressed loner who claims not to have friends and works pretty hard to push people away from her. There are people in her life, like an old friend Trish who has a popular talk-radio show, or Hogarth, a lawyer contact who provides her with some of her leads. Then there's Luke, the bartender who she photographs despite no one hiring her to do so.

But there are two very big details that set her aside from your typical Sam-Spade type (apart from her gender,) and that make the show Jessica Jones a Marvel story rather than your standard neo-Noir. The first is that Jessica has superpowers, namely incredible strength. She easily lifts a summons-dodging strip club proprietor's car to prevent him from avoiding getting served his papers, and she easily jumps multiple stories to a fire escape in order to take pictures of Luke.

The other big detail is that she is haunted by visions of "Kilgrave," the monstrous man who, for some period of time, had her under his complete mind control.

There's very little ambiguity that her experiences are allegorical for rape, unless her time under his control also included that more literally (which the show strongly hints may be the case.) Jessica is literally a strong woman, and the memory of this violation has gnawed at her - we can probably interpret her current lifestyle as the result of this trauma.

When she investigates the disappearance of a college student whose midwestern parents come to her with a referral from the police station (but as we discover later, not from the police themselves,) she realizes that, contrary to what she had thought, Kilgrave (whose more comic-booky name is "The Purple Man," which is alluded to with the appearance of purple lighting signaling that she is having a vision of him,) is alive, and has kidnapped this girl.

Jessica manages to rescue her, but she doesn't realize that there is one last compulsion that Kilgrave has left her with, and as Hope rides down in the elevator, reunited with her parents and instructed by Jessica to get the hell out of dodge, Hope pulls out a gun and kills her parents, only to collapse and burst into horrified screams once she realizes what she has done.

The arc of the season, I imagine, would be Jessica's attempts to track down Kilgrave and kill him. That's obviously tricky, given that he has the incredibly powerful ability to force anyone he talks to to do whatever he asks of them.

We're left with a bunch of questions after two episodes. We get glimpses of Jessica under Kilgrave's thrall, but we don't know exactly what she did under his control. Given her super-strength, I wouldn't be surprised to find that she did something very bad indeed. We don't know where her strength comes from, or how long she or Trish has known about them. We do find out, however, that Luke is Luke Cage, himself super-powered with, as far as I can tell, complete indestructibility (I'm not a big comics guy, so forgive me for not knowing this already.)

Jessica Jones follows very much in Daredevil's Netflix footsteps, being a much darker, more brutal story than you see with Captain America or Iron Man. It's on a smaller scale, obviously, with villains hiding within the urban landscape instead of razing said landscape to the ground, but it also has the luxury of being on what has sort of become a premium-cable-style service, without the obligation to keep things all soft PG-13 or easier (isn't it funny how movies and TV flipped some point in the last ten years?)

Though while it's similar in tone, I'm finding the distinction between the headlining villains of both shows to be kind of interesting. Wilson Fisk, aka Kingpin, was the most humanized, sympathetic Marvel villain we've seen (with a little scene-chewing for flavor.) In contrast, we haven't even really gotten a good look at Kilgrave's face (a face that most nerds would recognize as possibly the second-most-popular person to play the lead role of Doctor Who.) There's nothing sympathetic (so far) about the Purple Man - instead he seems to just be a specter of terror that haunts the show.

Anyway, I'm two episodes in, and so far I'm liking it.

iZombie (TV)

I had heard good things about iZombie a few months ago and decided to give it a look. It was only then that I realized that Rob Thomas, who was behind Veronica Mars and Party Down, was one of the show's co-creators.

iZombie is based on a comic book of the same name, though it apparently takes great liberties with the source material. As someone exposed to the show first, I'm willing to let it exist as its own thing.

The premise is this: Promising medical resident Olivia "Liv" Moore (yes, it's a kind of dumb pun) has her life perfectly on track, with a promising career, good friendships, and a pretty ideal fiancé, with the again, improbable name of Major Lilywhite (the names on the show are kind of ridiculous, but you get used to it.) Deciding to finally unwind, she accepts an invitation to a boat party, which is unfortunately where an outbreak of zombies goes off and she gets scratched by a zombie drug dealer named Blaine.

Now, zombies work very differently than your Romero-rules version. Liv finds that she has a powerful need to consume human brains, but doing so maintains her human mind, preventing her from becoming a ravenous fiend. Her hair goes white, as does her skin. When she eats a person's brain, she starts to adopt some of the person's personality traits and can get flashes of memories from the days before the person died. Also, they're nearly-indestructible (as always, the brain is the weak-spot) and they can go "full-zombie," which gives them super-strength and makes their eyes go red.

Liv gets a job working at the morgue as a Medical Examiner so that she has a fresh supply of brains, conveniently avoiding the need to rob graves or, of course, kill people.

But zombieism mostly ruins her life. She's afraid of giving the condition to Major, so she breaks off the engagement and loses a lot of motivation in life.

However, she gains that motivation when she realizes that she can use her brain-eating powers to, that's right, solve crimes! She helps out a detective who just joined Seattle PD's homicide division named Clive Babineaux, who she explains her visions to as being the result of her being a psychic, which... is almost true.

There's also Ravi Chakrabarti, the senior ME and her boss, who figures out what her condition is when he sees her eating brains but, refreshingly, immediately becomes her ally in trying to cure her of the condition and get to the bottom of what caused the outbreak in the first place.

Finally, Blaine (no last name given) is the main-cast villain character, who basically tries to turn his zombie status into the basis of a pyramid scheme to make money off other zombies desperate for brains.

Still with me?

The show feels very similar in tone to Veronica Mars, complete with charming blonde (though to be fair, the blondeness in this case is caused by zombieism) female protagonist who maintains a mostly friendly relationship with her ex and narrates every episode through Voice Over. Both shows have a mostly-light and humourous take on their premises but occasionally goes into very dark and disturbing places. And of course both come at the crime procedural format from a very unusual angle.

Veronica Mars was clearly heavily influenced by Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In a sense, iZombie is the Angel to Veronica Mars' Buffy. The Buffy spin-off extracted the premise of the original show from its "High School is Hell" setting an made it more about fighting against the ugly truths of adulthood. iZombie has no High School portion - its characters are fully adult by the time the show starts, now dealing with some of the frustrations of adulthood, like the potential for aimlessness and the shocking cruelty the world is capable of inflicting on people.

The show has a great cast, and Rose McIver makes for a very fun person to watch episode to episode. Sometimes the show's procedural and episodic format can skew a little cheesy, but the show employs the trick of usually teasing out the master arc-plot at least a bit with each episode to keep us whatever-the-opposite-of-ADD-is havers interested.

It remains to be seen if the show will truly do anything really ground-breaking, but it's a show that's solid on fundamentals and also fits that weird niche for me of doing something unusual with old monster tropes to make the monsters more sympathetic.

Lovecraft, Science Fiction, and Horror

Kind of a late Halloween post, but here are some thoughts I had about one of the most influential horror writers of all time.

H. P. Lovecraft is, I would argue, more important for his influence than what he personally wrote. His influence can be felt in fantasy, horror, and science fiction. He tremendously expanded the idea of what an "alien" could be, and also blended genres in interesting ways, which has made it easy to incorporate "Lovecraftian" influences in other writing. He also had a kind of novel concept of a mythos that he allowed, and in fact encouraged other writers to help build (Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, was among them.)

He was writing at a time when the field of Physics was undergoing tremendous changes. Moving forward from the clockwork, familiar predictability of Newtonian physics, thinkers like Einstein were redefining the way we thought about time and space, and though Einstein himself was never satisfied with it, his work brought about the probabilistic science of Quantum Physics, which suggested that the universe was, at a fundamental level, not only subjective (that he was fine with, and was the basis of General Relativity) but also chaotic and unpredictable.

Lovecraft was certainly not the first writer to imagine alien life as hostile. While other examples could surely exist, H. G. Wells really codified the “alien invasion” trope with War of the Worlds. The book depicted a terrifying alien threat that devastated an unprepared humanity, and Earth’s victory comes not at the hands of smart and brave people, but of virulent microbes that we had only recently even discovered.

But while the Martians of War of the Worlds are truly horrific – liquefying the dead to feed themselves and existing as mushy, formless brain-things that require mechanical exobodies to do just about anything (something that had to be an inspiration for the Daleks of Doctor Who) – their threat is really a physical one. A human who saw such a creature would respond with fear, but a rational fear of a physical danger.

Lovecraft blended genres to create an amalgam that felt very much his own. Aesthetically, we often combine Lovecraftian stories with the trappings of Gothic Horror, such as that pioneered by Edgar Alan Poe. Poe’s stories are almost all horror of the mind, dealing with madness. The Casque of Amontillado is not so much terrifying because of the horrible murder that Montresor committed, but more the casual, blithe manner in which he readily confesses his sin. The Tell-Tale Heart has the killer become convinced that his victim’s heart is still beating, which we see through his mad perspective.

The Adventure genre, which flourished thanks to 19^th Century Imperialism, was also a great progenitor of Lovecraft’s style. Adventure stories suggested that the world had many hidden places – cultures that, in the “civilized” world, had never been heard of. With all these cultures came strange religious beliefs and superstitions.

Unfortunately, this also came with a lot of racism. The idea that there was such a thing as a “superior race” was still a quite-popular idea at the time. Lovecraft extended his fears about these foreign cultures to foreign people of all sorts. Despite a kind of contempt for the very notion that humanity is anything special, he still fell into the common contemporary idea that "White, Anglo-Saxons" were basically humanity at its most human and therefore best.

Fear of the Other is central to Lovecraft’s stories. But typically, this Otherness goes beyond mere foreign cultures, and extends rather into the vast cosmos.

Throughout the Enlightenment, but particularly in the Industrialization of the 19^th century, rationalism came to be the default mode of thought for the Western World. Diseases were caused by microbes rather than demons, people born with deformities might have had genetic disorders rather than curses. Alchemy gave way to Chemistry and Astrology gave way to Astronomy. We began to understand that the sun was just a big ball of hydrogen gas and the stars were the same sort of thing, just much farther away.

But Lovecraft feared that rationalism was just naïveté. Our conception of the universe had grown tremendously – from a geo- and then helio-centric universe that was really just the solar system to the concept of a galaxy and then multiple galaxies… and things have just gotten larger and stranger, with real scientists today coming up with theories of multiple universes and far more than the 3+1 dimensions that we experience day-to-day.

In a universe so vast, a few possibilities presented themselves. The first was that there could be, and perhaps it’s so likely to be almost inevitable that there are, other species, alien species, that are more complex and advanced than we are as much as we are more complex and advanced than a bacterium.

Not only is the universe so enormous that, in Lovecraft’s eyes, all of human history is essentially irrelevant, but if some greater species were to come here, they would not even destroy us out of cruelty, jealousy, or avarice, like Wells' Martians, but perhaps out of simple ignorance or apathy. Even a vegetarian cannot prevent his or her white blood cells from killing foreign bacteria. A vegan might accidentally step on an ant.

But as far as we’ve gotten here, there still isn’t a real distinct difference between Lovecraft and Science Fiction. The Xenomorph from Alien is so deadly (at least in the first movie) that it’s almost hard to believe anyone at all survived. But even though it’s faster, stronger, and maybe even smarter than the people on board the Nostromo, it’s still something that can be rationally understood.

Where Lovecraft goes farther is the idea of incomprehensibility. One of the conceits of the whole endeavor of Rationalism is that, with enough study and cleverness, any mystery is solvable. But if we are, biologically, physiologically finite in our intellectual faculties, that means that we will, at best, eventually just reach a point where our minds cannot handle the complexity of a being that is greater than we are.

And so, Lovecraft’s horror is largely about seeing the failure of rationalism.

We have learned enough to look into the cosmos, but what Lovecraft's heroes find there is so vast, powerful, and fundamentally mysterious that we must fall back on our superstitious terminology – referring to things as gods and demons and magic.

The horrors of Lovecraft defy rational explanation, not because there is no such explanation, but because the explanation is so complex, so fundamentally unlike our familiar experience of reality, that human brains cannot handle them. Ironically, or perhaps appropriately, this calls back to Biblical ideas about how humans cannot look on the face of God without being destroyed.

Lovecraft does not have much to offer in the way of comfort. Ignorance is best, and cultish superstition is essentially your best-case scenario if you do wind up wandering into these truths. But a Lovecraftian hero who embodies the modern values of relentless curiosity and intelligence is doomed to a tragic end, often going beyond the event horizon into insanity – a brain that has cracked from the pressure of knowledge that cannot fit within it.

Rick and Morty

I watched Rick and Morty first some time after the first season had ended. In all honesty, I was sort of turned off by it to begin with. The animation is very similar to that of Family Guy - a show that I kind of liked in its earliest years, but got sick of a good while back. It's also a bit of a gear-shift to handle just how dark and messed-up the show gets. I realize there was a time when the Simpsons was shocking, but Rick and Morty is willing to descend to some dark, stygian depths.

Yet somehow, it mines this darkness for comedy. And it works.

Given the people behind it, I guess that shouldn't be such a surprise. The show was co-created by Justin Roilland and Dan Harmon. Roilland was behind the excellent Channel 101 series House of Cosbys, and though I got to know Harmon through Channel 101 as well, he's obviously more closely associated with Community (and the behind-the-scenes drama thereof.)

Much like Community, Rick and Morty dares to have a solid emotional core rather than being satisfied with safely shallow characters. It defies science fiction comedy television conventions (if such a narrow category exists) by making the one-off gags leave longterm scars. It never shies away from the kind of morbid scenarios to which an episode's premise would extend.

Ok, so what is the show about?

The show centers around Rick Sanchez and his grandson, Morty Smith. Morty's big sister Summer, his mother (and Rick's daughter) Beth, and his utter disappointment of a father, Jerry, round out the main cast. Rick is a super-scientist - while the show is set in contemporary times, Rick travels through space and across dimensions having adventures with bizarre and often disgusting aliens, and he brings Morty along with him, despite the fact that Morty is a just a dweeby, anxiety-ridden kid.

Rick's clearly the star of the show, with Morty serving as the audience surrogate. Rick is an asshole, an alcoholic, a drug-addict, a genius, and clearly acts the way he does because of a deep depression.

Like many a good science fiction show, each episode has a premise that takes a hypothetical science fiction concept and runs with it to its logical extremes. Typically, the show will have parallel plots with Rick and Morty doing something and the rest of the family doing something else - these "rest of the family" plots do sometimes drag (there's a subplot in one episode that involves a vacation on a replica of the Titanic to allow people to experience the events of the movie that feels really out of place next to the bizarre and otherworldly stuff the show excels at) but at its best, the plots complement each other, and expand on a meditation on the kind of frustrations and unhappiness of life.

The show gets dark in multiple ways - from shocking violence and the kind of existentially terrifying scenarios that only science fiction can really put a person through, to the more mundane stories of a family trying very hard to be happy with each other.

This all might make you wonder how the hell this show could be a comedy, and to be fair, some might just be totally turned off by it. But for those of us who live with those dark thoughts occasionally bubbling through our minds, Rick and Morty is refreshing in its brutal honesty.

Wet Hot American Summer: First Day At Camp

Recently, Netflix released an eight-episode mini-series that was a prequel to the 2001 cult comedy film Wet Hot American Summer, from State alumni Michael Showalter and David Wain (with other State alums in the cast.) While the film was not a success in the theaters, it has become a beloved cult film, particularly among my own circle of friends.

When we were in High School and during the summers between years at college, my friends and I would make what I like to call "negative budget" movies - stuff shot on a camcorder and with essentially no production value, though I like to think we had enough self-awareness to make this lowest of lo-fi productions part of the charm.

Wet Hot American Summer was definitely an inspiration in terms of tone and eagerness to point out our own inconsistencies. Many of our earliest productions were parodies of individual movies - the first really big one being "Battle Royale with Cheese," a parody of the Japanese movie Battle Royale (which you might have heard of as the story that the Hunger Games ripped off.) To give you an idea of the level of creativity we were working with, we at one point worked in essentially the whole training montage from WHAS into the middle of a parody of a movie about a group of high school kids killing each other by government mandate.

The purpose of my telling you all of this is that Wet Hot American Summer holds a dear place in my heart. And now, the movie's creators have made a prequel fourteen years later, stretching to even greater absurdity the fact that they're all playing teenagers.

And holy crap, it works.

The tone of the series fits completely with that of the movie. Some of the absurd elements of the film are given origin stories - a move that might be controversial, but the origin stories themselves are quite entertaining. But overall, enough new absurd elements are introduced that none of the illogical spirit of the original is lost.

Excitingly, essentially everyone form the original cast is back, and it's kind of fun to realize how many of them have become far more recognizable stars. Elizabeth Banks, for example, had a fairly small role in the movie, but here she's given an beautifully bizarre backstory and arc.

Several new characters are introduced as well, and we have the fun of finding out why they aren't there on the last day of camp (the setting of the movie.)

WHAS might embody the epitome of the comedy subgenre I like to call "Delightfully Self-Indulgent," where the excesses of the work are part of its charm (though not quite at the same level, Hot Rod would be another example of this. Also, much of Will Ferrel's movies like Anchorman would fit in this category.)

As such, some are sure not to like it as much, but I think those people are probably too pretentious or serious for their own good. This is silly, silly fun.

The Great Red Dragon on Hannibal

In this last half of the last season (barring some last-minute reprieve,) Hannibal has finally caught up with the books (well... setting aside the Vergers.) This season began with a certain "where are they now?" set of reveals, but this mid-season transition is a far larger one, taking place three years after Hannibal was arrested.

Also, for the first time, the show breaks with its cuisine-focused theme-naming. Hannibal Lecter is no longer the serial killer whose crimes are at the center of the show, and so instead of cuisine, we now have episode titles that appear to be the names of William Blake paintings related to the new killer's fixation on Blake's Red Dragon.

So where do we find everyone? Hannibal is in the mental institution that once held Will Graham, using his imagination to transport him to his mind palace, though even what seems to be his real cell is rather fancy (it's not the bare-bones cell Will was stuck in during the first half of season two, and seems to have fancy wainscoting and such.)

We get a bit of a fakeout, but Dr. Chilton is no longer in charge of the institution, instead Alana Bloom is (and before you complain that that's a huge conflict of interest for Alana, remember what show you're watching and how it all operates on dream logic.) Alana and Chilton have successfully convinced the courts that Hannibal is insane, even though in private they agree that he's not insane, but something essentially impossible to categorize.

Alana and Hannibal are relatively civil with one another, even having wine together as she congratulates him on avoiding the death penalty - a favor that Alana is perhaps foolish to have done, given that Hannibal assures her that he keeps his promises, and will kill her eventually.

Chilton has written a book about Hannibal, but in a fairly meta moment, he tells Hannibal (while sharing a chocolate-and-cow's-blood dish Hannibal has made - this time with a literal cow, rather than a derogatory one) (also, Hannibal's allowed to cook? This sounds like a pretty cushy prison sentence) that he's writing a new one, this time about the "Tooth Fairy."

This brings us to the new killer - Francis Dolarhyde, aka the Tooth Fairy, though he'd prefer the Great Red Dragon.

We don't hear him say a single thing the entire episode, but we watch as Dolarhyde undergoes his transformation, inspired by a Time article about William Blake's Great Red Dragon. Dolarhyde kills entire families - apparently choosing those that seem happiest - killing them in their sleep and then adorning their corpses with mirror shards in their eyes and mouths (and other parts - the show usually avoids sexual violence, and so it does not dwell on the mention of where the other shard was found.)

Hannibal is clearly fascinated and perhaps envious of the Tooth Fairy. While a bit arrogantly dismissive of him, he definitely has an interest in finding out what he can about this new killer. Chilton warns Alana after speaking with him that "the young turk might inspire the old Lithuanian to become more interesting," which of course would be dire indeed.

The symbolic relationship between Lecter and Dolarhyde has a great deal of potential. The show has always portrayed Hannibal as a kind of Lucifer-by-way-of-Dracula figure, but with a strong emphasis on the "fallen angel" aspect of the devil. Lecter's devil is a profane imitation of God. He's devout, in a sense, because he thinks that God is just as much of a cruel sadist as he is. And thus it is that he views his corruption of people like Abigail or Will as a kind of blessing - granting his Grace to them. Hannibal represents a devil that is deluded into arrogance.

Dolarhyde, on the other hand, is bestial. When we first see him, he stretches his muscles and holds himself in such a way that it seems he is trying to break out of the human form that he is bound to. While Hannibal identifies (or rather we can identify him) with Lucifer the Fallen Angel, Dolarhyde is the beast of Revelations - the Great Red Dragon who is a rage-filled destroyer, feral and with no pretensions.

Of course, what's also kind of interesting is that the works of William Blake were part of a kind of reimagining of conventional Christian religion. Blake created his own mythology in an attempt to deconstruct and then reconstruct the idea of religion. So while the painting Dolarhyde obsesses over is meant to represent the Beast from Revelations, it's not strictly the traditional interpretation of the monster.

With two families confirmed dead by the same killer, both more or less at the full moon (though according to Fuller, the very first scene of the pilot episode was also one of Dolarhyde's kills, suggesting he's been at this much longer,) Jack approaches Will once more.

Will is hesitant, not only because of the pain that working for Jack caused him (see: seasons one and two) but also because he's moved on. He has a wife now and a stepson. We don't get to see much of Molly or the kid (I don't remember his name,) but it's clear that he's happy with them, and the idea that Will Graham could have some semblance of a normal, happy life, sounds so miraculous that you kind of want him to tell Jack no.

But Will can't stand the thought of not helping and letting another family die, so he goes back, and for the first time in a long time, we get one of the disturbing "This is My Design" scenes.

Still, Will is rusty, and he's worried that he can't provide enough help. He goes to Jack and confesses that he doesn't think he can get back into that mindset on his own. For this, he'll need Hannibal. Roll credits.

Though the Verger story was drawn from the book Hannibal (with many liberties as I understand it, especially given that the book takes place after Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs,) we're now fully in established territories, albeit with a lot of creative license taken by Fuller & Co. However, I have not read the book (or seen the movie,) so what key events are to take place, I do not yet know.

But the best news is Pryce and Zeller are back!

The Prologue Ends in Hannibal's Digestivo

The show Hannibal has, until the end of this episode, been a vast expansion of the backstory to Thomas Harris' Red Dragon. A reinterpretation, certainly, but given that these events largely did not take place in the book (To be honest, this is really more speculation given that I haven't read them) there's a certain air of legitimacy even if it's pretty clear that this is a work of very liberal adaptation.

Digestivo is the climactic episode perhaps of the series. By far, the most important event here is what happens at the very end - Hannibal finally gets "caught." I put that in quotations because, well, it's complicated. Let's start with the more immediate issues.

Mason Verger is disgusting and awful enough for you to root for Hannibal. Yes, Hannibal's the Devil, but at least he has class. Hannibal, despite his cruelty and the pain he inflicts on others, does what he does in a constructive way. Yes, Hannibal is still a sadist, but he's always seeking some higher understanding and higher expression. It's the reason why, despite the horror of what he is, there's something disturbingly compelling about him.

Mason is pretty pissed off about the whole "compelling him to feed his face to a bunch of dogs" thing from last season, and using the corrupt police of Florence (the Florence Police Department does not come off well in this show,) he kidnaps Hannibal and Will, inadvertently saving Will from having his brains sautéed.

Mason's plan is to take revenge against Hannibal and Will, the latter of whom he considers also responsible for his condition. He'll have Hannibal slowly butchered while still alive, Gideon-style, and eat the good doctor after Will's face has been transplanted onto his own. Mason's certainly got a sense of irony.

We find out early on that despite Mason's plan to have Jack left as if he were the "last victim of the Chesapeake Ripper," Jack is saved by Chiyo with a couple of judicious sniper rounds to some corrupt police officers. Jack is allowed to exit the picture for now.

Of course, Mason and his goons are not the only ones at the Verger estate. Margot and Alana are there as well, and Mason lets this bombshell drop - that he has given her the double-Verger child she needs to inherit the fortune and has a surrogate.

But Alana, naturally, can't abide letting Will get killed. She's fine with Hannibal dying (maybe not fine, exactly, but ultimately ok with it,) but Will is, relatively speaking, innocent, and certainly not deserving of the fate Mason has in store for him.

And ultimately, Alana decides that Mason has crossed "the Godzilla Threshold." Someone needs to stop him, and the person most capable of doing so, giving Margot a satisfactory patsy to blame Mason's death on, is the Chesapeake Ripper.

Alana and Hannibal have a last conversation, Alana asks "Could I have every understood you?" Hannibal replies, honestly for a change: "No." Of course, he also reminds her that he keeps his promises, and I think he promised at one point to kill her, so... beware, Alana.

So for the first time in a while, we get to cheer for Hannibal as he saves Will from a one-sided Face/Off situation, leaving Mason with his creepy doctor/butcher/henchman's face simply placed over his own (Silence of the Lambs reference?)

Alana and Margot track down the surrogate who is to give birth to the Verger heir, but just as Hannibal predicted, Mason found a particularly cruel way to deny her what she wanted - not only is the surrogate a pig, but the child died in utero.

Of course, while under for the face-transplant, and after Hannibal did in the henchman, they were able to... harvest Mason's seed, giving Margot the opportunity to have her heir after all (man, I feel bad for that kid.)

And as they struggle over the vial of sperm (NBC's S&P people must just go full blue-screen of death for this show,) Mason falls into his eel tank, drowning and then dying as the eel swims in through his mouth.

Holy shit that's a lot of fucking insane stuff that goes down.

Hannibal carries Will apparently all the way to his house in Wolf Trap, Virginia (the Verger estate was in Maryland. Maybe both were near the state lines?) and sets him down, and Will finally puts an end to their dysfunctional friendship. He's no longer interested in chasing after Lecter, to catch him or join him. He's ready for Hannibal to just be out of his life forever. Knowing that Hannibal's staying around would get him caught, Will is confident that he can finally put this all behind him.

And in that sense, Hannibal's actions are actually another act of sadistic cruelty. When the FBI show up, Will tells Jack that Hannibal has disappeared again. But he's wrong. Hannibal stayed and waited for them. He surrenders to the FBI, kneeling and allowing them to cuff him.

Jack's not fooled. When Hannibal congratulates him on catching the Chesapeake Ripper, Jack understands that the only person in control of this situation was Hannibal. Will said he didn't want to know where Hannibal was or what he was doing. Now he can't help but know.

What a monster.

And with that, the long story of "how Hannibal wound up in prison" has been told. The remainder of what is looking more or less confirmed as the final season will be the Bryan Fuller version of Red Dragon.

Ant-Man

Ant-Man is the latest of Marvel's cinematic endeavors - a kind of odd epilogue to the massive Phase Two. This is the first movie number one since Guardians of the Galaxy, introducing a storied member of the Avengers that is, perhaps, embarrassingly comic-booky - it's relatively easy to sell a guy with a powered armor suit and a super-soldier with an infallible moral compass, but a guy whose power is shrinking requires a certain ironic detachment - something the film uses to great comedic effect.

So how good is it?

While the movie has some real strengths, it's kind of a middle-of-the-pack flick for the Marvel movies. The film drags in the middle, spending a lot of time setting up the big action of the final act, remaining largely confined to Hank Pym's admittedly cool house. Once the action does get going, though, it's a lot of fun. Paul Rudd is, as always, a pleasure to watch - a leading-man guy with a great sense of comic timing and also the uncanny ability to NOT AGE.

The movie straddles the idea of an origin story - Scott Lang's tenure as Ant Man gets its start here, but the tech has existed for a long time, with inventor Hank Pym serving as the original Ant Man (a contemporary of Tony Stark's dad.) Michael Douglas is technically the mentor figure in this movie, but he gets plenty to do - though this is partially due to the fact that the entire middle act is essentially Scott's training montage.

While the film does eventually devolve into your standard one-on-one fight between the superhero and the main villain (though this fight is, like I said earlier, very fun and humorous, especially when they have a train-top fight over an electric Thomas the Tank Engine train set) the structure up until that point is that of a heist movie - Pym's old protege has built a prototype using similar technology to the original Ant-Man suit, but of course he wants to sell it to freaking Hydra (who are apparently still around. Oh hell, nothing stays dead in these movies.)

The film is somewhat problematic in a couple of ways. Most notable is the problem that the movie itself struggles to address. Pym's daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly) is more familiar with the technology, more familiar with the facility, and has essentially trained to be Ant-Woman her entire life. Pym drags Scott Lang into the role partially because of Lang's experience as a cat burglar, but mostly because he doesn't want anything to happen to Hope.

I get that the comics had Scott Lang take over the role, but Marvel's got a bit of a problem with its lack of female superheroes (seriously: do a Black Widow movie. There is no good reason not to. Scarlett Johansson wants to do it. She's awesome and popular, and you could do a fun spy film.) There's a tease in the post-credits scene that she will take over her mother's role as the Wasp (her mother is "dead" in the sense that she's just waiting to come back in the sequel) but... yeah, I think we could probably use more female superheroes.

The other problem is Lang's team of fellow thieves. He's got a group of three guys who help him out in the heist, and while there are some fun jokes that come from Luis (his old cellmate,) the guys are walking ethnic stereotypes. Luis maybe gets a pass, given that he is the impetus for some of the funniest sequences in the film - as we watch the chain of people giving him leads all lip-synch to what is clearly Luis' paraphrasing of what they said - but the other guys are pretty much "funny deadpan Russian guy" and... uh... "black getaway driver."

The other disappointment of the movie is the question of what might have been. The aforementioned lip-synching sequence feels very Edgar Wright - one of my favorite comedy directors working today - scratch that, favorite directors. Wright is incredibly inventive pushing the medium to the limit in terms of cramming as much cinematic brilliance onto the screen as possible (I just re-watched Hot Fuzz, and even if you consider it the worst of the Cornetto Trilogy, it's still a brilliant and hilarious piece of filmmaking.)

Marvel's movies do have something of a brand to them, and I get that that has been one of the key's to their success, but it does mean that they had to iron out some of the interesting wrinkles Wright must have introduced to the movie.

Still, if you like the Marvel movies (and I think most people who see them do,) you'll get a kick out of this one. It's funny and fun, and it's a nice change of pace to have a superhero movie where the fate of the world isn't at stake (well, one could argue it is, but they're putting a stop to the threat before it's on the level of an enormous city-meteorite that's going to wipe out humanity.)

And with that, we find ourselves at the conclusion of "Phase 2." Next up, starting phase 3, is Captain America: Civil War, which I have high hopes for mainly because I've really liked both of the solo Captain America movies (particularly the second.)

Revenge Ain't So Sweet in Hannibal's Dolce

Let's start at the end here. Hannibal (the show) has plunged deep, deep into dreamlike abstractions. While I think it could maybe stand to come up for air, I'm still blown away that a network like NBC could show something as strange as this. Granted, they won't be showing it much longer. Hannibal was cancelled by NBC, but it looks like some other potential venues for it have passed as well, meaning that we're more likely than not watching the final season at the moment.

The final pair of scenes in Dolce show us the seeming ultimate defeat of Will, but also a bizarre switcheroo that dramatically changes the status quo of the season, and, if the show is actually heading to the situation from the books, will result in a Hannibal behind bars, but not before Mason Verger is taken out.

Will comes very close to having his brain pan-fried in front of him, in a nod to the infamous Ray Liota scene from the film Hannibal (I can't remember if that came before or after Red Dragon, but it's clear none of the other big-screen adaptations really lived up to Silence of the Lambs.)

Back in the US, Alana has teamed up with the Vergers to track down Hannibal, but the thing is that Mason doesn't just want Hannibal dead - he wants to eat the good doctor piece by piece - essentially subjecting Hannibal to what Hannibal did to Abel Gideon. The six million dollar bounty on Hannibal has turned the Italian police into an army of bounty hunters, and while Pazzi died trying to collect, that has not deterred others.

Also of note: Alana and Margot have some freaky kaleidoscope sex. This perhaps comes out of nowhere - the only reason I knew it was coming was because Caroline Dhavernas suggested it to Bryan Fuller in the middle of a commentary track on the season two DVDs. Margot is down a uterus after the events of season two, but she still wants to have a child - something that Mason even agrees to (and creepily, wants to be the father. Jeez, this is more fucked up than the Lannisters!) It seems Margot wants Alana to have her baby. Ok.

Jack and Will meet as the coroners are picking up Pazzi's body. They decide to keep up the story that Hannibal is really just Doctor Fell, to prevent other cops from going mercenary, but it's not really something they can manage.

They do, however, come to Hannibal's home and find Bedelia there. "Lydia Fell," after meeting with Chiyo, drugs herself, maintaining the story that she is an innocent, being manipulated like Miriam Lass. In an earlier scene with Hannibal, the two of them talk openly about his plans to murder and eat her (seriously, does Hannibal have any relationships that he does not intend to ultimately end by eating the other person?) but Bedelia's got a leg up. She isn't done "marinating," and she knows that Hannibal can't stay with everyone converging on him. Is she permanently safe? No, probably not, and paradoxically the very fact that she has out-maneuvered Hannibal probably makes it more likely for him to try to kill her later.

Bedelia meets Jack and Will, and while they see through her act with ease, she maintains it - she knows that she's not the one they're after, and ultimately, she's doing what she needs to survive.

As Jack tries to get the truth from her, Will disappears, and this proves to be a mistake. He goes to meet Hannibal at the Uffitzi, who is doing his sketches of Primavera - substituting in Will and Bedelia's faces. For Hannibal, this return to Florence has been a return to his roots.

He and Will walk out of the museum, not noticing that Chiyo has set up high above with a sniper rifle. It seems she's ready to take out Hannibal, but instead, she zeroes in on Will right as our hero pulls out a knife and gets ready to put Hannibal down.

Will awakens in Hannibal's captivity, and he is eventually sat down at a table while Hannibal spoon-feeds him a reduction of rosemary and thyme. The "soup" isn't for Will - it's to infuse him with flavor. Hannibal is finally going to kill him and eat him.

Jack walks in, as if to save the day, but Hannibal gets him by the Achilles tendon and sits him down on the opposite end of the table - so that he and Hannibal can chew Will's brain more literally than they were ever able to before.

Will is drugged to inaction, and Jack is forced to witness in horror as Hannibal takes a bonesaw to Will's forehead....

And then, images of clouds and hanging pigs, and Will and Hannibal are next to each other, hanging upside-down from hooks as Mason Verger wheels in, welcoming them to his farm.

I expect we'll find out how the hell that happened in the coming weeks, but we're left with quite a few questions. It's likely that the police officer interviewing Bedelia was the one to collect on the bounty, and that those loyal to him took Hannibal and Will right before the former could get into the latter's brain, but what about Jack?

We're now about halfway through what will probably be the show's last season. I expect next week's episode to be quite the climactic one. If the structure of this season is similar to the previous one, we might even see a massive time-jump to take us to the events of Red Dragon quite soon. After a whole lot of set-up, the show is moving pieces at a lightning pace.

The Gift of Hindsight - Re-Reading A Game of Thrones

While a "book reader," I can't claim the hipster credibility of having read George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire books "before they were cool." I had heard of the series, but I didn't delve into it until I began hearing how good the television show was.

I did purchase the first of the books before watching the first season of the show (which had finished by the time I decided to watch it) but I lent the book to a friend, as I was still working on Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel (which has recently gotten its own adaptation, though a more modest BBC one - whose first episode I saw but have been unable to find a way to watch more.)

I watched the first season, but then I barreled through the other books, finishing, if I recall correctly, the fifth book before season two premiered (the only time I really slowed down was book four, which, to be frank, at least at the time felt really dull - I never cared much for the Dorne plot, and it looks like the showrunners didn't either.)

The thing is, the Song of Ice and Fire books are incredibly dense with backstory. Martin has gone to Tolkienesque lengths to give just about every town or castle a history, and that has provided myriad fan theories ample evidence to argue their cases.

As an example, the most popular fan theory that I'm not even going to bother marking as a spoiler, is the so-called "R+L=J" theory. Which is to say that Jon Snow is not actually Ned Stark's bastard son, but is instead the child of Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark, and could potentially be the rightful heir to the Iron Throne, rather than Daenerys. (Of course, as he is a member of the Night's Watch it's kind of moot, and Jon still might be a bastard, technically speaking. Wait a second, does that mean that Jon Snow should really be Jon Waters, if he's Rhaegar's bastard son?)

Martin clearly has a lot of hidden stories going on in the subtext of his novels, but it's also always interesting to see how a series evolves when it is written over the course of several decades. Take Stannis for example - while he's mentioned in the first book and first season, we never see him. We only know that he's the rightful Baratheon heir that Ned thinks should take the throne rather than Joffrey. But our introduction to him in book two, and particularly his adherence to the Lord of Light religion and Melisandre's influence, really fills out that part of the story (and of course muddies the waters on just who really should be in charge.)

Anyway, there's a ton of stuff that I missed simply trying to keep up with the text-level plot. But now that I'm far more familiar with that (having read the series and also watched the show - which certainly has some differences but tends to stay on the same course) I can dedicate my attention more fully to these subtext questions.

And I've been happy to discover that Martin has laid a lot of groundwork for future developments even in the very first few chapters. Daenerys' first introduction (and man is it weird to remember how naive and innocent she was, and how much she was dominated by her brother) sees her listening to the Red Priests stoking their fires for the night, and Ilyrio invoking the Lord of Light as a blessing. The faith of R'hollor in Westeros is seen as basically a small cult, but it does seem to be pretty mainstream in the Free Cities (though hopefully they do less person-burning.)

It's also within the very first Eddard chapter that we get some of the groundwork laid for R+L=J. We know that Howland Reed is the only person other than Ned to have survived the battle between Ned and the Kingsguard who were guarding Lyanna. She apparently died of a fever, which could have been complications from childbirth. Also, why would multiple members of the Kingsguard be guarding the "captive" of the crown prince during a massive war? The presence of an heir seems really the best way to explain it.

Anyway, another few notable things come up. One big thing is just how young everyone is. Eddard in the books is a mere thirty-five, but was played by a 52-year-old Sean Bean. And of course, the effect of this is far greater when it comes to the children. Daenerys is in her early teens, it seems, while Robb and Jon are I believe fifteen - compare that with their actors, who were all about 24 or 25 when the show began.

Of course, this was definitely for the best. It's easier to read about a thirteen or fourteen-year-old girl being married off to some guy she's never met than to see it. And it's not as if that scene in the first episode of Game of Thrones was easy to watch either.

If I spot anything else notable enough to write a whole blog post about... I'll write a whole blog post about it. Anyway, it'll tide me over until Season/Book Six (whichever comes first.)

A Bit of Catharsis, a Bit of Defenestration in Hannibal's Contorno

The noose is tightening for Hannibal as the people he didn't actually kill are coming for him. And while Hannibal treats one of them to the kind of historical allusion/horrifying death that he's known for, it would be hard to say Hannibal comes out ahead this week.

Will and Chiyo are heading to Florence, but Will's trip is delayed when Chiyo throws him off a moving train. Now, Will's our protagonist, but he desperately needs a shock to the system that being gutted didn't accomplish. Will has spent way too much time with Hannibal, allowing il monstro to worm his way into Will's mind. The danger of Will's pursuit is that he is still seeing the world the way Hannibal made him see it - that he either needs to kill Hannibal or run off to be murder-buddies with him. Will is stuck in a rut - he's forgotten that he wasn't always this way. Oh, he was messed up before, sure, but nowhere nearly as after his abusive friendship with Hannibal Lecter.

Will this train ejection help him? I sure hope so. Nothing would please me more than to see Will grow past the form that Hannibal molded him into.

Meanwhile, however, Jack has arrived in Florence. He spreads Bella's ashes in the Arno along with his wedding ring before meeting up with Inspector Pazzi, with whom he is collaborating to capture Hannibal.

Poor (former) Inspector Pazzi, who we find out is actually of the Pazzi family who rivaled the Medicis for power in Florence. (If you've played Assassin's Creed II, you've killed some of his ancestors!) Pazzi goes after Hannibal, but rather than calling in the police, he responds to Mason Verger's bounty, taking great risk for a 3 million dollar reward.

Foolishly, he meets Hannibal alone and Dr. "Fell" shows him a woodcut of one of his Pazzi ancestors who was hanged after attempting to kill Lorenzo di Medici - and according to Hannibal, had been paid thirty pieces of silver by the Church to do so. This hanging, as we saw in an earlier episode (I want to say Antipasto,) is how the death of Judas Iscariot is depicted as well. Hannibal continues his horribly blasphemous antichrist routine by giving Inspector Pazzi the same fate, hanging him with an extension cord after slicing his abdomen open (bowels out.) (So is a piece of silver worth $100,000?)

It's exactly how Hannibal's dealings tend to go - a highly symbolic death committed with immense cruelty.

But just as Pazzi's guts hit the pavement below him, Jack shows up.

And Hannibal clearly did not expect this, because we get the most satisfyingly one-sided fight I've possibly ever seen on television.

Hannibal spends a moment trying to prepare for the confrontation, and all of a sudden the music comes on (it's a really famous bit of classical music that I confess I don't know the name of) and, taking a page out of the good doctor's book, Jack sneaks up behind him in just his socks. And then, holy shit, the mother of all beat-downs as Jack just wails on Hannibal.

Lecter doesn't get a single significant hit in. He is quickly disarmed and then thrown through glass cases. All the while, Hannibal tries to press his advantage with (and forgive me if you haven't already become addicted to TVTropse) a Hannibal Lecture, only for badass Jack Crawford, as an avatar of justice and rage, to just not give a fuck (just going to leave this here.) Hannibal ends the fight bloody and broken on the ground after being thrown out a fucking window, hobbling off while Jack stands victorious.

Sure, this'd probably be a good time to arrest him, but clearly Will's going to need to be there for that.

Pazzi's dead, which is certainly on the negative side of things (and in a way that looks like it was quite painful) but that fight left me freaking cheering at the screen. Hannibal seemed so untouchable, so powerful as if he would never be defeated. But this set the record straight. Also, Jack is fucking badass.

The Pieces are in Play in Hannibal

Finally, on Hannibal, we got the official confirmation that the only person to die at the "Red Dinner" was Abigail Hobbs. In fact, this fourth episode of the season not only confirmed that Alana Bloom is still amongst us (and with some bite now, which is refreshing and probably a lot more interesting to play,) but Dr. Chilton, who we literally saw shot through the head, has survived as well. Apparently the bullet went through the cheek and just underneath the brain, as we see in typically horrifying fashion.

This week is actually missing one prominent cast member - Hannibal himself (save for one brief shot.) There is a degree of anachronic order - we are not following up Will's trip to the Lecter estate, but instead we are reassembling the rather vast number of people who now have great reason to want to take revenge on one cannibalistic doctor.

Apertivo sees the reintroduction of the Vergers, and late in the episode we watch (in even more horrifying detail than the path of the bullet through Chilton's head) the skin-grafts that have restored Mason's face... as well as they could manage it, at least.

Chilton serves as something of a through-line of the episode, as he visits the various injured parties to put together some sort of revenge society together, but he does not have much luck. (Actually, an even larger throughline of the episode is the fact that we see many of the characters at the moment they wake up after their major injury - the exception being Chilton.) While everyone has something of a plan to deal with Hannibal, they are not quite ready to hop on Chilton's wagon. Chilton - whose injuries pre-date those who survived the Red Dinner - visits most of them while they are bound to beds, carrying a bouquet of flowers that might seem like a note of sympathy, but in a way it's more like he's asking them out on a date - it's his proposition. He approaches them each with a strategem - with Mason, he takes out the prostheses that have allowed him to look like he used to - a contact lens, a plate in his mouth that mimics his missing chunk of palette and teeth, and some make-up to hide the bullet's entrance wound. Without these aides, Chilton looks half-dead (though still better than Mason.)

Most heartbreaking is Jack's story this week, as Bella finally succumbs to her cancer. Perhaps more than anyone else on the show, Jack feels the most like an ordinary person, and so this loss hits us hard (not to mention the fact that Laurence Fishburne and Gina Torres are married in real life, which comes through with the authenticity of their rapport.) As he sits with Bella's body in the church, remembering or perhaps imagining their wedding day, he finds that Hannibal has sent a note of condolences. As always, with Hannibal, you don't really know if this is a genuine expression of sorrow or a way to twist the knife a little more in Jack's gut - or both. It's sad to see Gina Torres leave the show, but this was clearly where the story was heading, and at least her death from cancer was about as good a death as you could hope for - dying in her sleep in the arms of the man she loves (though Jack points out that she probably would have wanted to die while he was out to spare him the trauma.)

While not totally bereft of surreal interludes, this episode plays a bit more straightforward (though that's in relative terms - we've really left behind the crime-procedural stuff from season one by now.) Essentially, we get where each character is. Jack is no longer with the FBI, and he wants to ensure that Will is ok. Will, of course, is off to Europe - his relationship with Hannibal is so bizarre that even a disemboweling and the murder of Abigail hasn't been enough to permanently divide them - though Alana points out that this is essentially a kind of emotional blackmail.

Chilton has attempted to enlist Mason Verger's aid (and his resources) in a plot against Hannibal, but Mason isn't really interested in him as an ally. Instead, he finds Alana Bloom. Alana, so deeply violated by Hannibal but lacking Will's fuzzy mentality, looks like she's become an avatar of pure vengeance, and I'm very excited to see her enact it.

Honestly, if there's a critique I have of the show, it's that I'm waiting to see Will's image of Hannibal transform. I understand that he has a great deal of affection toward his friend, and certainly we cannot lose that without losing a key component of the show's themes. But I want to see Will angry. As much as Will might like Hannibal and admire him, fundamentally Hannibal is a monster, and one who has done terribly cruel things to Will personally - cultivating a disease within him, framing him, and finally eviscerating him literally. Will risks losing agency if all of this can be forgiven - we are presented with their relationship as one that transcends mundane conceptions of what friendship really is, but it seems much more like a kind of grand case of domestic abuse, with the abused partner forgiving far too easily.

Will has not had his confrontation with Hannibal yet, but when it happens, I want to see him get fucking mad.

Hannibal Cancelled, By NBC At Least

Look, I'm not an idiot. Frankly, it was some kind of miracle that NBC allowed Hannibal to get to a third season, given how incredibly not-network the show has been. But ultimately, they've pulled the plug on this horrifyingly wonderful show.

Certainly the violence of the series made it a very, very, very odd fit for a show on broadcast television, but Bryan Fuller's commitment to abstraction and an expressionistic style of filmmaking tested audiences - and most of that audience wanted nothing to do with it.

It's easy to get into a film-buff (or tv-buff, though the two are really just different branches of the same tree) bubble, where you forget that most people who watch shows on television or movies in theaters are really in it for pure entertainment. I don't mean that in an elitist way - some people really care more about the real world. We art-nuts are the ones with the strange disease/addiction, but it's a shared malady that has allowed us to feel a sense of community.

Hannibal, the TV show, was not made for general consumption, and so it was quite odd indeed that it wound up on NBC. Now, to be fair to NBC, it's the network that tends to have most of the shows I like, or at least it was a couple years ago. Its comedies from the past decade like 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, and Community were among my favorites. But what I enjoy a lot in a television show is a great deal of depth - layers to be pulled back to discover more.

But shows that reward viewers for paying obsessive attention effectively punish those who don't, and so a show that is broad but shallow will appeal to more audiences, who just aren't interested in putting their energies into analyzing a show, and would rather use that entertainment as a way to unwind from other challenges in their lives.

Hannibal was one of the most challenging shows I've ever seen on television. And while we're used to seeing that type of program on cable, the broadcast networks have always, by economic necessity, been forced to cast a wide net.

So I do not in any way blame NBC for canceling Hannibal. In fact, I'm shocked they didn't do it earlier. Its viewership was minuscule, and even if it cost them very little to exhibit, NBC is a company that needs to maximize the profitability of its entire schedule.

BUT:

The good news is that we're in an era where many such shows don't really need to be associated with a given network to survive. Community, seemingly cancelled multiple times by NBC, now lives on with Yahoo.

Given the fact, also, that Hannibal is largely financed outside of NBC's budget, a move to another platform might not have a negative impact on the show's producers' ability to retain the same quality.

I would personally love to see Hannibal survive long enough to get through all the books' stories (hopefully they can get the rights worked out to Silence of the Lambs,) but there will definitely be some new challenges in finding a way to distribute the show.

I'm fairly confident, however, that if the financial backers of the show were willing to keep it funded when it had a .5 rating on NBC, they'll continue to do so if it becomes an Amazon Prime or similar program. (And maybe we'll stop having to deal with the bizarrely skewed FCC morals on standards and practices - no more blurred Botticelli butts.)

Redemption and Breaking Bad

Walter White is a bad person - one could imagine him as an anti-hero as one begins the show, but very soon - the second episode, for me - one could begin to see his true nature - not as a hero at all, but a villain protagonist.

Walter's decisions get many, many people killed. A few of them he kills himself, but in most cases, he creates a situation in which people wind up dead. Walter has an amazing capacity for rationalization. Indeed, even by the end of the series, he never once really considers that the production of crystal methamphetamine itself is an evil act - that he is creating a drug that does longterm harm to its users. Gale Boedecker at one point refers to himself as an "extreme libertarian" as his justification for cooking, but Walter never even considers this.

The focus of the series is less about the drug-use itself, but about the criminal world that one must involve oneself with to partake in such a business.

The events of Ozymandias are the culmination of the collapse of the world that Walter has tried to create. Uncle Jack's arrival technically frees him from arrest, but the disintegration has already begun. We see Walter at his most despicable - even though he tries to save Hank's life, he still envisions some sort of endgame that leaves him with his family and his money, but the truth is that all of his sins have isolated him, and he ends the episode by severing his ties, trying to give Skyler enough distance by playing the role of a more monstrous and cruel version of himself, a brute rather than a liar.

Granite State, the penultimate episode, shows us how even these last efforts were not enough to ensure a legacy. Horrors persist in this world, and Jesse is left enslaved, with the innocent Adriana - someone who I had foolishly thought was safely no longer a factor on the show - is executed by the neo-Nazis - a demonstration of their ruthlessness and a gun to the head of her son.

Jesse is essentially in hell - he's in a place where he must escape into a dream-like version of his task, an amber-colored vision of solid craftsmanship in which he imagines he's building some sort of innocuous woodwork. He has life, but what kind of life is it?

Such it is for Walter White, who has been relocated to New Hampshire to live in a freezing cabin and... wait to die. Any move he makes will invalidate the safety he has, but what was the point of "freedom" if freedom requires him to hide out in two acres of snowy forest?

Walter makes one last attempt to do something for his family, but Flynn isn't going to put up with his shit anymore. Walter knows he's never going to be that paragon provider now. He'll never be able to get what he wants how he wants.

But he might be able to get what he wants.

Thus we come to the finale, Felina. While I think it's generally well-regarded, I have heard some dissenting voices saying that it lets Walt off too easy. I understand that position, but on the other hand, I don't think we automatically have to complain if we get the slightest modicum of a happy ending (hint hint, George R. R. Martin...) Walter does not make up for all he has done - not by a long shot. But he is able to get something resembling justice. He spends his last days putting things, if not right, then righter than they are.

His journey begins in a snow-covered car, and it's here that Walter makes one plea to whatever higher power that might be. Walter isn't a religious man, and religion actually plays a very small part if any in this series, but whether it's fate or a god that is willing to give him one last chance, the keys fall into his lap and he is allowed to move forward.

First, he pays a visit to the Schwartzes. It's actually a fairly horrifying scene, and that fear doesn't really let up until we see who the "assassins" were. Granted, by the time the sniper-lasers showed up, I was pretty sure this was a ruse, but one sort of wonders just how much the Schwartzes deserved this treatment. Indeed, we never really get a sense of what exactly went down between them. Still, they really threw Walt under the bus on Charlie Rose (by the way, when did that become an expression because I feel like I only started hearing it a couple years ago.) Still, this allows Walter to get the money to his family without their knowing it's from him. It's still a fairly prideful act, but it's one that doesn't require his family to acknowledge him as the source of the wealth.

But he does come to say good bye, and Walter's true atonement to Skyler is that he finally confirms that yes, he did all of this for him. Finally, he drops the bullshit and tells her that he became what he was because it made him feel strong and in control. After five seasons of lies, this means a lot, and it allows him to have one last moment with Holly.

The last act of Walter Heisenberg White, though, is one of brutal justice and mayhem. What I find fascinatingly ambiguous is what his intentions are toward Jesse. Is he still furious with Jesse for going to the cops? Somehow that doesn't really sit right with me - as an audience member, we know that Jesse is hardly getting anything good out of this deal, but would Walter really want Jesse dead for cooking their blue meth?

The real target, though, is Uncle Jack and his aryan asshole brigade. There have been plenty of terrifying bad guys on this show, but there was usually some kind of redeeming quality to them. Gus, in particular, might have been a callous killer, but he had his own history and motivations. Uncle Jack is just disgusting. He's a nasty killer in a nasty little criminal world, without any of the grand vision or projected civility that we saw out of Gus.

So Heisenberg does as Heisenberg tends to do. He goes in with an engineered plan. He cooks up a bullshit story to approach Lydia with what seems like a desperate new business opportunity. Now Lydia, a season-five addition, is a monster of a different sort. Like Walt and like Gus, she has tried to maintain this distance from her business to keep herself safe. But she is also paranoid, and thus she has allowed many people to die to clean up her perceived messes. Her willingness to kill for her own safety doesn't differentiate herself much from the rest of the villains in this show, but it seems that murder (always by someone else's hands - she's not even willing to look at the bodies of the dealers that she has Uncle Jack wipe out) is her first and only option.

And it's Lydia who finally winds up taking the dose of Ricin that Walt originally cooked up for Gus, I believe (I think the one for Tuco got splattered on the floor by his uncle.) There's probably a whole article about the way that Lydia - as the only real female villain in the show - fits into a story that is so much about masculinity, but this is already very long.

Walt goes to Jack's compound seemingly in an act of foolishness, as they're planning on just killing him. But Walter has already arranged things, parking his car so that the automated machine gun he's hooked up will blast the clubhouse with a deadly barrage.

The only real hitch in the plan (other than the rather easily-dealt with issue that his keys are a bit of a reach from him on the pool table) is when they present Jesse. Again, I wonder how much Walter knows - if he's really ready to take revenge on Jesse for filling his shoes, or if he is simply trying to draw him out - but when he sees that yes, clearly, he's been mistreated, Walter does one last good act, pouncing on Jesse in the pretense of attacking him just as the machine gun opens up and wipes out the aryan asshole brigade.

Almost. Jack's taken a lethal hit, but Todd is unharmed. He gazes in childlike astonishment at the death-trap Walter created, only for Jesse to both take revenge and free himself by choking that scary motherfucker to death. Todd (excellent naming, by the way - no offense to real-life Todds) is weirdly inhuman. It's almost like he doesn't really understand what is wrong and what is right - this is the guy who offers Jesse ice cream for getting a 96% out of a batch, but also murders a child with absolutely no remorse. There's a childlike quality to him, but the horrifying things he does prevent us from viewing him as anything resembling innocent. It's the uncanny valley.

Uncle Jack isn't quite dead, and he tries to play his last moments cool - he knows where the money is. But this was never about money, and Walter lets him know with a bullet.

Finally, the reckoning comes between Jesse and Walt. Walt kicks the gun over to Jesse. He has no hatred, and no reason to harm Jesse anymore. He offers himself up, but Jesse knows that killing him is exactly what Walt wants. And besides, Walter is already bleeding from a nasty wound from a stray bullet he took protecting Jesse.

The point is, Jesse is done being anyone's tool, and he won't be Walter's killer. Jesse, that poor Jesse, drives to freedom. What the future holds for him, I have no idea, but damn it's good that he's free of that cell, free of that lab, and, frankly, finally free of Walter White.

As the police arrive, Walter goes to the lab that Jesse had been working. He's done all he could to set things right. Was it enough? Has Walter redeemed himself? I don't know if I'd go that far, but he has finally been honest with himself and with the people who are important to him, and he has done what he can to fix the problems he has created. And so, Walter gets to die where he belongs - in a lab, surrounded by chemistry equipment. A lab that produced his most famous creation.

Divergence and Convergence on Hannibal

The relationship between Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter is the core of Hannibal. That relationship was inexorably changed by the events of season two. Will cozied up to Hannibal following his framed imprisonment, presenting himself as a serial killer apprentice. Will's ultimate intentions were always on the mysterious side, especially to himself, but we saw that he ultimately turned on his "friend," which led to the catastrophic Red Dinner - Hannibal's ultimate declaration of his own nature.

But Hannibal still retains a deep connection to Will, and it seems that he realizes - in a way that is plain enough that Bedelia can read it in his behavior - that ultimately, he will be caught. It's a question of how he wants that to go down. Hannibal is like a chess player who can see that his opponent will checkmate him, but for now, he has control of just how that defeat comes.

And of course, given that this is still technically in the pre-Red Dragon period of the story, there's a certain inevitability - we need to actually get to the point where the Thomas Harris novels start, and that requires a caged Hannibal.

We get a reveal in this episode of another survivor of the Red Dinner (and the previews for next week give away the last,) with Jack arriving in Italy, speaking briefly with Pazzi. Jack's primary concern is Will - we don't know exactly what kind of communication occurred between them before Will's trip to Italy, but I'm guessing it wasn't a mutual decision. The scene here, to my mind, really just indicates to us that Jack is back in play, but what his role will be in the events of the season remain to be seen.

Will and Hannibal have diverged - Hannibal has re-created his image as a respectable member of high society with Bedelia playing the part of his wife, but his heart doesn't seem to be in it - he has been killing more frequently than he needs to. Perhaps he knows he will be caught, and so he sees no need to cut back. Inviting a colleague to dinner, (the same Italian professor who seemed upset that Hannibal would become their primary Dante expert) he serves the man a cocktail that passengers drank on the Titanic right before it sank. Damn, Hannibal, that's not the most subtle foreshadowing you've done. Yet when he jams an ice pick into the professor's head, he claims it was impulsive. Perhaps this is Hannibal at his "not-giving-a-fuck"-est. In a moment of intense dark humor, when Bedelia removes the pick, ending the professor's broken-brain rambling, Hannibal quips "Technically, you killed him." Yes, Hannibal has drawn Bedelia into participating, rather than just observing, but this is hardly his A-game. Bedelia's action is clearly an act of matter-of-fact mercy, and one could hardly imagine that this is the moment that is going to give her the taste for killing. It's horrifying in that she is so desensitized to the violence that she can carry on a conversation afterward, but personally, I don't fear (for now) that Bedelia's going to join team Hannibal, at least in any capacity beyond her current status.

Yet even though their paths have diverged, Will and Hannibal share something - both technically force a woman to take a life this week. However, Will's version is oddly more similar to something Hannibal might have done. Was he sure that this is how it would have gone down? I don't think he was. Yet it is Will, and not Hannibal, who creates a corpse-sculpture at the end of the episode.

Ok, let's back up and explain Will's story, which continues this season's intensely surreal experimental style. Will has traveled to Lithuania, to Hannibal's family estate. And of course, OF COURSE Hannibal grew up on an estate with a freaking castle. Again, the Devil-by-way-of-Dracula imagery continues (not to mention the mixing of blood and wine - damn, Hannibal, even when you're hundreds of miles away you're always blurring the line between food and human matter.)

Will hops the padlocked gate and wanders into this haunted manor. There he sees a Japanese woman, Chiyo (and forgive me if I'm doing that white person thing of confusing Japanese and Chinese - I know Hannibal has a Japanese aunt, so that's where the assumption is coming from,) who hunts game birds. Will avoids her and wanders into a wine cellar that is filled with snails (a motif I imagine we'll continue to see this season) and a caged-off alcove covered with strange, almost voodoo-like skeleton charms and containing a dirty, almost feral man.

Chiyo confronts Will and they go up to the gamekeeper's house where she apparently lives to talk about why he's there, and why she is. Hannibal's history prevents him from returning to this home. His claim is that the man in the cage murdered and ate his sister Mischa. He has left Chiyo there because he expects she will eventually kill the man. We really don't get a specific date for when this happened - there's a date on Mischa's tombstone but I couldn't read it - but for all I care, it could have happened a thousand years ago. This is a fairy-tale land, and Chiyo stands committed to remaining innocent of killing another person, yet because of the man's crimes, she cannot simply allow him to go free. And thus, Chiyo is as much a prisoner as the man is.

Will sets the Eternal Guardwoman free by liberating her prisoner. He sends the man on his way, but of course this is too easy. Chiyo goes to check on her charge, but the man breaks free of the unlocked cage and attacks her. She smashes a bottle of wine and drives the bottle's neck into his. (Correction - it's actually the chicken bone Will stepped on in an earlier scene.)

Will, perhaps inadvertently, got her to commit the act that Hannibal had wanted her to do for so long. At least through Will's machinations, it was an act of self defense and not of murder.

Of course, we discover that Hannibal's story was a falsehood. As he says, "Nothing happened to me. I happened." The implication is that this man was innocent, at least of that particular crime. Hannibal presumably ate his own sister, but he has spent the rest of his life trying to replace her. Oddly, this re-frames his relationship with Will, not as a patient or a not-technically-sexual lover, but as a surrogate sibling. In many ways, I think Hannibal wants Will to be his little brother. Rather than being the object of his attention - a kind of "facing each other" relationship, he wants Will to occupy the same vantage point - to share a background and home ground in the way that only siblings can. Is Mischa's murder the only one that Hannibal actually regrets?

While the general rule for writing characters in any situation is that more fleshed-out characters are better (personally I think that this mainly makes them easier to write,) when you are dealing with an iconic monster like Hannibal, retaining mystery is important. Horror is in the unknown. Yet in a clever way, this exploration of Hannibal's past seems, on the surface, that it will help explain his motivations - to see a perhaps traumatized child who internalized the violence he was exposed to and continues to inflict it on the world. Yet that's not the case. The root of Hannibal's evil remains unknown, and that helps to blur the line between whether he is really a human at all, or truly a monster wearing a person suit.