Hannibal Season 2

Woof, this is not one to watch at the gym. Sure, having fiction’s ur-serial killer as a star will make you want to work on your cardio in case you ever need to run away from something scary, but the show’s fatalism certainly blunts your will to improve yourself, seeing as we’re all hunks of meat waiting to expire. But it is dementedly graphic and gory, so at least you’ll lose your appetite.

I really loved the tone and operatic drama Hannibal was going for back in Season 1, such that I was able to forgive the forgettable case-of-the-week format. Season 2 ups the ante by removing the procedural elements almost entirely, instead making the entire season about Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter sniffing around one another like a pair of hungry wolves. All the elements that made the show stand out in its first year return for round two, and for the most part, they’re all better. The murder tableaus are more elaborate and sickening than ever, the humor is more appropriately used, and the look of the show is unlike anything on TV. It handles surreal nightmare fantasies just as capably as it does noir-detective imagery (it’s low quality, but this screengrab from midway through the season is one of the most strikingly composed shots I’ve seen all year).

The show’s dialogue has always had a habit of wallowing in the philosophical for too long, which eventually becomes a bit of a crutch. This is, after all, a show largely concerned with psychological and existential issues, but one can only hear so many coded conversations about the nature of good and evil in a given hour. And while the latter half of the season jumps into some ridiculous territory even by the show’s own standards, and you see a number of the twists coming, turns out, that’s all by design.

The finale for Hannibal Season 2 miraculously gave me that same feeling of “I’m an idiot, Bryan Fuller is so much smarter than me” that Season 1 pulled off so spectacularly, and much as I’m glad there will be at least 13 more episodes next year, where the show ended in 2014 could have made for one of the most daring endings in TV history. Anyway, whatever quibbles I might have, there’s really nothing like Hannibal out there, and the fact that it actually exists is the most insane thing about it.