Review: Hannibal “Releves”

This week’s episode of Hannibal, Releves, is the second-to-last and the crew behind the series has quite a bit to wrap up before we can have our final climax.  Luckily, they do a good job of tying up many of the loose ends while still pushing the story toward the end.  There’s no shortage of twists and turns and as the episode wraps up and we’re left with the impression that after next week, not everybody we’ve grown to care about over the season will be left alive.

As the episode starts, Graham is still in the dark about his brain issues.  Being confined to the same hospital as the girl who thinks she’s dead, he begins to make friends with her.  In the process he learns some clues that point to someone else being behind the killing of the brain doctor.  Unfortunately, he learns little else from her, as a bit of sabotage ensures that she does not survive her stay at the hospital.

Graham begins to figure out, via his hallucinatory visions, that the death of the doctor and the murders done by the copycat killer are connected.  He approaches Crawford with the theory and eventually convinces him to look deeper into the matter.  Crawford does some digging and discovers that Abigail happened to be present during most of her father’s hunts and makes the deduction that she was acting as bait.  He moves to arrest her, but Graham has already taken off, seeking to drag Abigail to the farmhouse where the murders took place in order to gain clues about the identity of the copycat killer.

Of course, as they do all this, both Crawford and Graham are discussing their findings and plans with Hannibal, giving the true killer all the information he needs to fight back in his own way.  Further, Crawford begins to doubt Hannibal’s motives with Graham and goes to talk to the good Doctor’s psychiatrist.  From the conversation between these two, along with another between her and Hannibal, we get the feeling that she knows much more than she’s letting on.  We also discover that she’s protecting Hannibal and that the death of the patient that attacked her was most certainly his doing.

In the end, we have Hannibal working to make Graham look like the copycat killer, poisoning Crawford’s perception of him.  We also have an eventual showdown between Hannibal and Abigail, in which he admits his role in her father’s killings.  Though the episode wraps up with Abigail still alive, I’m guessing next week won’t begin in quite the same way.

Once again Hannibal impresses me with its depth of character.  It’s easy for a writer to have a character blindly believe anything they need to about another character to keep the plot moving, but in the case of Crawford and Hannibal’s attempt to convince him that Graham is going nuts in a serial killer sort of way, we see that Crawford is smarter than that.  He trusts Graham, even when the guy seems out of whack.  He also makes sure to investigate Hannibal, to see what the doctor is doing exactly.

Hannibal shows even more of his motivation in that he’s been studying Graham, not only to gain insight into his own mind, but as a measure of professional curiosity.  In fact, it appears that everything Hannibal does that doesn’t just involve self-preservation is out of curiosity.  This guy is a truly bad dude and anyone has the potential to become a victim to his manipulative whims.

Next week, we’ll see the final confrontation between Hannibal and Graham.  If I didn’t already know that the series has been renewed for second season, I would wonder at which one was going to come out on top.  Now, it’s just a matter of how damaged each one of them will end up once the smoke has cleared.

For a preview of next week’s Hannibal episode, head over to this site.

Releves still courtesy of fanpop.com