Hannibal Season 2, Episode 7: Yakimono Review

Yakimono was quite a funny episode for me as it presents some of the smartest characters we have come to know as being dim, almost boarding on stupid. This series has presented up with some of the smartest people like, Katz, Prince, and Zeller who all excelled in the evaluating of evidence. Then there’s the craven but quite cunning Freddie Lounds who is skilled at reading people and determining what weakness will be most effective to exploit. Obviously, there is Will’s ability to pick so much up from so little evidence and imagine not just what happened but why. This episode created a further divide between Will and Hannibal, Will’s ability lets him see into the past and Hannibal can almost see into the future as he knows how events are going to unfold before they do. As Will points out, once you’ve caught a fish and it’s wriggled away, it’s that much more difficult to catch it a second time. Miriam Lass might have hooked Lecter, but she failed to reel him in, and since that day, it’s clear that Hannibal wanted to ensure that no one would ever again get the chance.

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Hannibal’s intelligence really shines in this episode as he has been holding Miriam and is able to brainwash her far more effectively than will, to the point where she believes that someone else is the Chesapeake Ripper taking the attention further away from Hannibal. While this was part of his plan to not get caught, the fact he cut off her arm and left it for Jack to find was almost asking him to catch him. Hannibal was running a bit of a risk and he knew it, yet he gets a great deal of pleasure from making others run around in circles coming to the wrong conclusions. For him, this is not just a matter of self-preservation, it’s a form of play. It is very clear to see from this episode that Hannibal is having fun.

I don’t think the characters are made to be purposely stupid in this episode, I think it is done more to highlight Hannibal’s skill at manipulating others, the main one being Alana. While many would see her as stupid for sleeping with Hannibal, he is using her to cover his tracks and it pushed even further in this episode as she refuses to acknowledge just how wrong she has been about Will’s guilt but by pushing it even further and attacking him when he points it out to her. While she would be correct in saying that it wouldn’t excuse Will’s action but if Will believes that Hannibal is actually the Chesapeake Ripper and responsible for the death of so many, including those investigating the case, then killing Lecter isn’t an act of revenge. It’s an attempt to prevent him from killing again. Alana has been led into a logical fallacy as Will isn’t who she thought he was and part of that is because someone who has killed repeatedly and viciously, and he attempted to kill Lecter to stop this but she refuses to believe someone she knows and trusted is capable of this, even though the very same thing happened with Will.

Alana’s blindness is nothing compared to Jack’s who doesn’t even seem to hold Will’s attempted murder against him, and everything seems to return to normal between them. Jack does acknowledge that there is a mind working behind the scenes to cause all this mayhem, and ignoring that murder attempt, takes Will to the killer’s lair for his insight. Considering this and the fact that Will has been consistently right about everything so far, it stands to reason that everything else is correct too, but no one seems to realise this. It seems that Will was right in saying they would find evidence that would lead them away from Hannibal and Miriam seems to be just this, yet Jack dismisses Hannibal on her word alone. After all, if Hannibal is the killer and had her in his clutches for two years, her mental state would have been putty to a man as skilled as they know Lecter to be and as sadistic as they suspect he might be. Stockholm Syndrome wouldn’t begin to cover what he did to her and Jack should know this. Once again Jack’s emotions are clouding his vision and his guilt over stopping the search for Miriam, and then her thanking him for not giving up has blinded him to the truth.

This extends further to Chilton, who aside from Gideon, seems to be the only person willing to believe Will and fails to do the smart thing and take Will’s advice not once but twice. Chilton has the opportunity to tell Jack the truth, including his and Hannibal’s shared secret of using very unorthodox methods in their treatment which would explain Miriam’s actions. Chilton also could have listened when Will told him not to run and he’s paid a heavy price for his foolishness. Unlike Chilton, Will is no longer anyone’s fool and for all of Alana’s concern, it seems that Will’s return to the world after years of exile, while it may have temporarily injured him, has actually saved him to some extent. The Will Graham we see at the end of the episode is not the same tortured soul he was in the beginning. The man who would not look people in the eye before has now chosen to lock gazes with the evil that has been just out of his line of sight for so long. When he and Hannibal square off at the end of Yakimono, we get the sense that this is finally a battle between equals and Hannibal may well have met his match.