[Ed. Note: You know how our friend, author and lapjacking enthusiast Andrea Speed, did all those Breaking Bad recaps for us? Well, that's dead and gone, but out of the blue, Andy asked if she could recap another television show, Hannibal, for us. And we said yes! So... uh... this is it? I mean, I would have hoped that was obvious by now. Doggs, there are so many spoilers.]

Hannibal, Season 2, Episode 1: Kaiseki

I almost missed the boat on Hannibal. I didn’t watch it when it first premièred, because, ugh, I was never a Hannibal Lecter fan. I get the appeal of liking monsters in horror films (though it almost automatically defangs them and makes them campy – for example, Jason or Freddie), but I never found anything about the character I particularly liked. Menacing psychopath/cannibal? Ho hum. Not that Manhunter or Silence of the Lambs weren’t good movies, but I really didn’t care about Lecter.

So I missed this at first. Finally, about four or five episodes into season one, many people I know raved about it on Twitter, and I finally decided to give it a chance, even though I seriously regretted giving The Following a try. (N.B. – When you look up stupid in a dictionary, there should be the title card of The Following. It is so aggressively dumb, it slaps you in the face with its idiocy. Too painfully bad to even hate watch. How is it still on the air?) I’d watch the pilot, and see if I could take it. And that’s when I had to take the crow out of the fridge and eat it.

This Hannibal skews closer to the books, which means Hannibal is never an anti-hero or a campy monster you can root for. He’s a straight up monster, a charming psychopath who’s an expert at manipulating people, and projecting an urbane, slightly fey air. An intelligent, fussy foodie – what could be more harmless? The hero is the damaged, empathetic to a fault Will Graham, who is manipulated in a variety of ways (the most egregious is Hannibal successfully hiding a serious illness from Will, and using it to trick Will into doubting his own sanity) and realizes the truth too late to save himself.

Along with staying closer to the books, the style of the show is unique and extremely disorienting. The design is exquisite, from camera angles and color saturation to choice of iconography and love of surreal imagery. Things that would seem absurd in another show work on Hannibal, simply because it plays by its own set of rules. It is pulp horror, with a thin veneer of a murder mystery show, but it should be noted that, despite what appears to be procedural elements, this is not another CSI or Law and Order. These shows could not sit comfortably side by side. They are universes away.

Which brings us to the season two premiere. Save for a brief, brutal battle that’s a well choreographed flash forward, the show basically picks up where we left off, with Will awaiting trial as a mass murderer, now aware that Hannibal is the killer he’s been searching for, and the one that framed him for these crimes. The problem is, the more he goes on to his shell-shocked friends about how evil Hannibal is, the crazier he looks. Of course we as the audience know he’s telling the truth (and thanks to the flash forward, we know the truth does eventually come out), making it all the more agonizing when everyone seems ready to write him off.

Except Hannibal. The man who feels absolutely nothing remains fascinated with the man who feels too much, and Hannibal’s cagey, guarded psychiatrist warns Hannibal that maybe this isn’t good. But Hannibal has to visit Will and continue trying to convince him he did do all these things. It’s a bizarre chess match, where Hannibal is essentially playing for the camera, while Will kicks himself for not seeing the monster in front of him all this time.

Hannibal, meanwhile, is filling Will’s place as a profiler, as a macabre new serial killer has surfaced, one who turns live humans into some kind of bizarre, resin covered models. Although Hannibal calls out a few telling details, even he can’t see the victim pattern, but when a friend brings Will the pictures and asks if he can make sense of them, he does. This is confirmed in the nightmarish final image of the show.

Surreal and nightmarish are part and parcel to this show, and we get several of these scenes and images this episode. While the food preparation part is both beautiful and unnerving (how can anyone watch this show and not become a vegetarian at a certain point?), the scenes that are both beautiful and grotesque at the same time are mainly limited to Will and that final image. From a sensually detailed fishing daydream that becomes a nightmare, to the attempt to recover a memory (and Alana becoming smoke and then oil is beautifully done), and the actual recovered memory are examples of this show telling you a lot with images, although few are direct. For instance, if you saw the first season, you know the stag appearing in Will’s dream is a bad sign, especially now that Will’s subconscious has finally made the connection, and the stag is becoming this half-Hannibal homunculus.

Maybe I should take a moment to point out that death is dealt with differently here than in the procedural shows that litter the television landscape. The deaths there are weirdly sterile, even when gratuitous and done simply to create a plot or move one along. The deaths on Hannibal tend to be grotesque and hard, just unpleasant in every way. They can be clinical and all the more creepy for the distance, as well as the extent of physical decay they’re willing to show. Oftentimes they’re an unpleasant reminder that we are all just meat, which Hannibal knows all too well. Again, I can’t believe we’re not all vegetarians after watching this show. He creates these beautiful, artistic dishes … and then you remember, that’s a person on the plate. Yeah, it looks like pork or beef, but that’s not actually what he’s serving. And people eat it blindly, enjoying it, praising the chef. Eee. Look what happens when you trust the wrong person. And if there’s any overarching message to the show, it’s that you don’t really know anyone, no matter how much you think you do.

I should add that this episode is not new viewer friendly. You can watch it and understand it in a general sense, but you will miss a hell of a lot. So if you haven’t seen it yet, stream the first season or pick up the DVDs before watching this. You will enjoy it much more. Although enjoy may be a relative term. This show is a beautiful grotesquerie, and I mean that in the best sense of the term. It’s probably too good for NBC, and it’s anybody’s guess how this didn’t end up on cable, but despite NBC dumping it in the Friday night death slot, I’m glad everybody gets a chance to see it. But those expecting movie Lecter will be in for a shock.