While its more deliberate pace might not jive with all audiences, one of the great advantages of Hannibal’s slow-burn approach is how it allows the characters’ various plans and internal developments to play out in a more organic, dramatically satisfying fashion. For the past half-dozen episodes, we’ve witnessed Will working through the machinations of what appears to be his master plan to capture Hannibal. I say “appears to be” because one of the show’s unique—if frustrating—tendencies is to withhold significant elements of its plot from us. On one hand, the show’s penchant for depicting nightmarish dream imagery acts as the ultimate reflection of subjective storytelling; on the other, the characters often keep their cards close to the table, thus eschewing explanation for plot points that most shows would go out of their way to make clear. It’s the kind of show where we are made to wonder, for multiple episodes, whether our main character is actually becoming a killer or if it’s merely part of his elaborate revenge ploy.
“What Hannibal does is not coercion, it is persuasion,” says the titular character’s former therapist Dr. Bedelia Du Maurier (Gillian Anderson) at one point. Indeed, unlike most other narratives on TV, Hannibalgrants us the chance to see things like the antagonist’s psychological manipulations playing out over time. Certainly by the end, “Tome-Wan” goes a long way to demonstrate the true power of Hannibal’s persuasive personality.
As the episode opens, Will lays out his current plan to an increasingly impatient Jack Crawford. After turning Mason Verger against Hannibal in the previous episode, his hope is that the murderous psychiatrist will attempt to kill Mason, thus allowing Will to catch him in the act. The two also get some inside information in the form of Dr. Du Maurier, making her dramatic return after running away earlier in the season. Discussing Hannibal’s methods, Du Maurier emphasizes that his downfall will come about due to his flights of “whimsy.” In other words, in being so self-congratulatory, Hannibal leaves himself vulnerable to mistakes.
As Will expected, Mason eventually sends his cronies to abduct the good doctor. After preparing Hannibal to be dropped into his cage of hungry pigs, the psychotic magnate hands a knife to Will and allows him to draw first blood. Rather than cutting Hannibal’s throat, Will slashes him free instead. One of Mason’s thugs promptly whacks Will over the head and we are robbed of the knowledge of how this situation played out. Upon regaining consciousness, however Will quickly deduces that Hannibal again won the battle.
Elsewhere, he see a restrained Mason being pumped full of psychedelic drugs by Hannibal. As Mason begins cackling like a hyena, Hannibal begins manipulating his drug-addled mind, ultimately convincing him to start cutting himself.
And here’s where we get to the super-gross stuff. As in, if I wasn’t aware of Mason’s fate from having read Harris’ Hannibal book, it might have reached the gag levels prompted by the “human mural” from the premiere episodes.
Will enters his home and discovers a still loopy Mason sitting in the shadows. The only clear image we have is Mason’s blood-spattered arm feeding Will’s dogs some kind of meat. It quickly becomes apparent that most of the bottom half of Mason’s faced has been ripped apart and what he’s feeding to the dogs are the last scrapes of his remaining skin. Appearing behind Will, Hannibal adds to the mayhem by suggesting that Mason cut off and eat his own nose. In what stands as the most horrific image of the night, Mason gleefully obliges. “I’m full of myself,” he jokes before sampling the nose and comparing it to a chicken gizzard. Hannibal then completes the picture by snapping Mason’s neck and paralyzing him. He has officially become the deformed character we later meet in 2001’s Hannibal.
Yeah, network TV has definitely come a long way in terms of what they allow on the air.
More so than any previous entry, “Tone-Wan” is Michael Pitt’s hour. I can easily see his Mason becoming a polarizing performance— some may very well enjoy the inherent hamminess of his portrayal whilst others take umbrage in how it clashes against the show’s otherwise somber tone. I personally appreciate how Fuller and his writers have attempted, with this season, to create a proverbial cocktail of the different Hannibal iterations—from the gritty atmospheric crime drama of Manhunter/Red Dragon to the boisterous camp of Ridley Scott’s Hannibal. Even if I never entirely bought the Verger plotline as anything more than an entertaining, fan service-y tangent from the main storyline, it certainly endowed the latter half of the season with some definite highlights.
As the season’s penultimate episode, “Tome-Wan” delivers all the grotesque thrills that the show’s creative team does best. It’s cerebral without ever being boring, and deliciously violent without ever quite feeling exploitative. As the clock counts down to the long-awaited Jack-Hannibal duel (and Laurence Fishburne’s possible departure) in the season finale, it’s impressive to look back and see how the writers have so deftly laid down an unorthodox, yet somehow believable story trail from the beginning of the season to the end. Fingers crossed they stick this landing.
Mark Rozeman is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and regular contributor to Paste. You can follow him on Twitter.