‘Hannibal’ 1.12 Recap: “I Hope You Have Good Insurance”

As the first season of NBC’s shockingly terrific ‘Hannibal’ nears its finale, events on the show appear to be coming to a head. In fact, after last week’s episode, it seems like Will Graham will have to discover Dr. Lecter’s horrible secret soon. If that’s the case, Season 2 should be very interesting indeed.

As I expected would happen after she was introduced a couple episodes back, Ellen Muth returned in episode ‘Relevés’ as Georgia, the girl whose untreated illness caused her to believe that she was dead. She’s now confined to a hyperbaric chamber in the same hospital where Will Graham is recovering from the fever that made him delusional. Graham pays her a visit, at which they bond a little about being crazy. She tells him that the doctors plan to give her shock treatment to see if that will sort her mind out.

As we know, Georgia had seen Lecter kill Dr. Sutcliffe, but was incapable of recognizing his face. Worried that she may regain her memories, Lecter decides to take care of the situation with a seemingly subtle solution that leads to tragic consequences for poor Georgia. All he does is (somehow, unexplained) slip a plastic comb into the chamber with her and remove a grounding bracelet from her wrist as Georgia sleeps. When she awakes, she assumes that the doctors have left the comb for her to groom herself. Unfortunately, as Georgia starts to comb her hair, static electricity ignites the pure oxygen in the chamber, engulfing her in flames as she screams for help that will not arrive in time. We witness this in disturbingly detailed slow motion. This is by far the most horrific death we’ve seen on the show so far, and that’s saying a lot.

The other FBI investigators assume that Georgia removed the bracelet on purpose in order to commit suicide, out of guilt over the murders she’s committed. Graham doesn’t believe it. He puts together that her death is the work of the same copycat that had previously imitated Garrett Jacob Hobbs – which means that Nick Boyle (the man that Abigail Hobbs killed when she thought he was attacking her) could not have been the copycat. This sets Jack Crawford back to believing that Abigail is following in her father’s footsteps.

Graham absconds with Abigail back to her father’s cabin in Minnesota, in order to revisit the scene of the copycat murder of Abigail’s friend Marissa. Will is thinking much more clearly now, and may be on the verge of figuring everything out. He realizes that Abby was the “bait” that lured her father’s victims. As he gets angry with her, his fever returns and he blacks out, later awakening on a plane at Dulles airport in Washington, D.C. with no idea how he got there or where Abigail is.

As this is going on, Lecter has set to work framing Will as the copycat killer. He drops hints to Crawford that the killer must be someone with inside knowledge of the FBI’s involvement in the Hobbs case, and reveals to him that Will has been delusional. This doesn’t look good for Will Graham at all.

Later, Lecter meets Abigail at Hobbs’ old office. By this point, she’s been told by Freddie Lounds that Nick Boyle wasn’t the copycat. She finally comes to the understanding that Lecter is. He coldly admits to her that he killed Marissa, and many more – more, in fact, than her father ever did. When she asks if he’s going to kill her now, he responds that, “I’m sorry, Abigail. I’m sorry that I couldn’t protect you in this life.” That sounds like a yes to me.

When this show started, I assumed that Lecter would toy with the FBI for a couple of seasons before Graham found him out. However, it sure seems now that the big revelation may come as early as this week’s season finale. On the other hand, series producer Bryan Fuller has given interviews where he claims to have mapped out a seven-season arc for the show, wherein Season 4 would play out the events of the first Lecter novel, ‘Red Dragon’. That suggests to me that Lecter will successfully forestall the inevitable for a while longer. I can’t wait to see what the finale has in store.

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