“Mizumono” might just be the most perfect hour of television I’m likely to see all year. Walking around after the final image cut to black, I found myself feeling a strange, vacillating mixture of hardcore adrenaline and physical numbness. It’s a feeling I’ve experienced only a handful of times in my life, each time indicating that I’d seen something that thoroughly blew me out of the water. “Mizumono” finds everyone involved in the show at the top of their game and firing on all cylinders. It’s an incendiary, bloody end to a profound season of television.
Much like last season, the first half of this batch of episodes presented itself as a more straightforward, case-of-the-week crime drama. Around the time the Vergers were introduced, however, the show began to get a little more loosey-goosey with its structure, disregarding an external, plot-based narrative in favor of an internal, character-based one. Rather than presenting us with scenes of the team investigating various crimes, we were treated to a series of unsexy sex scenes, extended conversations filled with heady aphorisms concerning human nature and Michael Pitt gloriously hamming it up as Mason. While the first year’s descent into this more dreamlike style dovetailed nicely with Will’s hypnosis at Hannibal’s hand, the motivating factor for such a sensibility this season appears to be Will’s ever-deepening relationship to Hannibal. In getting close to someone so evil and warped, Will’s entire sense of reality appears to be adjusting itself accordingly.
Such an elliptical, fever dream-esque approach has subsequently led to large logic gaps that are still not addressed in this final installment. In particular, how Will managed to gradually convince everyone that Hannibal was the actual Chesapeake Ripper—despite having little-to-no evidence beyond his word—never entirely made sense to me. Considering that Jack goes from firmly believing in Will’s guilt to recklessly putting his life and career on the line to capture the cannibalistic doctor, such a development does not feel like something that should just be glossed over. Then again, Hannibal has always been a show prone to restraining important chunks of information, and most of the latter half of the season works in spite of this plot hole.
Right off the bat, the episode itself seems to know that the audience has been waiting for the Hannibal-Jack confrontation all season and does its darndest to augment the anticipation. From the first scene, a distinctive clock-like ticking overwhelms the soundtrack. The sound continues to appear sporadically throughout the episode, hanging over the characters like some kind of sinister raincloud (incidentally, rain is exactly what characterizes the final, bloody mess that ends the episode). Original pilot director David Slade returns after a lengthy absence and really ups his game for this event. Few pilots in the history of television have looked quite as striking as Slade’s Hannibal and, subsequently, “Mizumono” might stand as the most darkly beautiful artifact to ever appear on network airwaves.
Prior to the final fight, the main conflict appears to center on where Will’s loyalties lie. The opening scene crosscuts between his discussions of plans with both Hannibal and Jack until the two figures eventually merge via split screen. Whereas I previously believed Will’s bond with Hannibal was always a means to an end, this episode seriously made me question how much of Hannibal’s influence had truly slithered its way into Will’s delicate psyche. At one point, Hannibal even smells Freddie Lounds’ scent on his friend. Realizing Will’s treachery, the good doctor gives him a choice—abandon his revenge path or be killed. Will chooses to continue his betrayal. Yet, the exact nature of his relationship to Hannibal becomes all the more confounding when, upon realizing that he and Jack will be arrested by the FBI for “entrapping” Lecter, he calls and warns his enemy. One can argue that Will is merely trying to get Hannibal to leave before an ill-prepared Jack makes his way through the door, but it remains a muddled motivation. The fact that his exact wording to Hannibal is “they know” definitely carries some serious connotations, as that was the precise wording Hannibal used to warn Garret Jacob Hobbs of Will’s impending arrival back in the pilot episode.
Finally, the moment we’ve been waiting for finally arrives. Jack enters Hannibal’s kitchen and we have a quick recap of the fight that launched season two. It ends with Jack bleeding to death in a wine room while Hannibal attempts to burst through the door. Upon first viewing this episode, I worried Bryan Fuller was showing his cards a bit too early. Little did I know, this encounter would merely be the tip of the iceberg.
Alana Bloom arrives on the scene to find a bloodied, disheveled Hannibal pounding away at the door. Producing a small gun, she orders him to stand down. Here, Hannibal gives her a similar ultimatum to the one he gave Will—leave now or die. Given the damage he’s done to her, Alana attempts to fire her gun, only to find it has been stripped of bullets. She runs upstairs and locks herself in a room. It’s here that she discovers Abigail Hobbs—alive, yet looking like hell. Before Alana has time to process this shocking development, Abigail pushes her out of the window and, in one of the most beautiful sequences the show has ever produced (and that’s saying something) Alana falls to the ground in super slow motion as bits of broken glass and raindrops fall around her like something out of an ethereal painting (or Cowboy Bebop).