Wednesday, September 23, 2015

085: Hannibal Retrospective - Everything Has to Happen…So Much


SPOILERS FOR ALL THREE SEASONS OF HANNIBAL, and potential spoilers for where they plan(ned) to take the series next.

In this episode:
  • Cleolinda Jones joins us once again! We discuss the Hannibal panels at Dragon Con 2015 and the way the Hannibal TV series wrapped up.
  • Cleo's Dragon Con experience was pretty awesome.
  • Our discussion of Dragon Con mixes with our discussion of the Hannibal Finale.
    • We get very deeply into discussions of the placement of Bedelia’s final scene, joking ways that Hannibal and Will could have survived, and the ramifications of the finale on all of Will’s emotional connections were the show to continue and he actually run off to Argentina with Hannibal.
  • At 1:25:52, we begin our discussion about Hannibal as a show in a broader context, including how Bryan Fuller handled the show and its community, the contrast between the first and second halves of Season 3 (and the reasons thereof), and how we feel about the show as a whole.
  • Links:
  • Keep us in your podcast feed! We're moving to a monthly format, so stay tuned next month for a special, Halloween-themed episode.
THERE'S ALWAYS AND ADDENDUM:
  • Alternate titles for this episode:
    • God, Tennis Balls
    • Get Weird With The Lithuanian?
    • Playing Around With Tiny Flaming Homoerotic Birds
  • Highlights from Fio's timestamps:
    • 36:38 - “Or something stupid like that” - Ian on American education. Ian from the future: “Critical Thinking,” that’s the homework question section I was thinking of.
    • The Sordid Activities of Scott Thompson and Aaron Abrams
      • “They should take it on the road” Yeah they should. Sorry, I’m terrible.
      • Cleo shouldn’t feel bad about not being able to talk to famous people, I totally clammed up while meeting Gail Simone in bmore.
    • “You can’t do that, people won’t be on board with that” - And the ratings told them that they were right, hahaha
    • Man, we could probably talk about The Satanic Verses and its intrusive narrator forever.
    • We get mad sappy about this show, dude.
Music:
http://archive.org/download/AMOT085/AMOT085.mp3

    2 comments:

    1. Bedelia severing her own leg would be ridiculous, but so was Elliot Budish stringing himself up in that barn.

      Clio mockingly imagines others stating that the theory of Hannibal surviving is "stupid", but she's the one calling the alternate theory stupid. For the record, the possibility of Bedelia doing it to herself didn't even occur to me until I read Alan Sepinwall, although Hannibal surviving that also strikes me as quite stupid.

      Will doesn't act like the Argentina version of Clarice at the end: he tries to kill them both. That's what Will's "attempt to contain" is. If Will changes his mind about killing them both, i don't know where the conflict is supposed to come from.

      The house was used for both Miriam & Abigail.

      Chiyoh was a deus ex machina, not a character. Please no more of her. Her flipflop on whether Hannibal should be caged was completely unmotivated, not that her purported motivation ever seemed to have any connection to her actions. Just a complete failure on every level of writing.

      The Simpson's quote was "So the children learned how to function as a society, and eventually they were rescued by, oh, let's say...Moe".

      Will seemed surprised in Digestivo when Hannibal showed up outside the house.

      I find the notion that anybody has any sympathy for Hannibal to be bizarre. I guess "Hannibal Rising" was supposed to induce that, but nobody wants to remember that.

      Bryan's scripted version of the cliff scene is different: Will lunges at Hannibal to push him off the cliff, which would make his own death a side-effect, rather than him deliberately throwing himself off.

      Mads' view was at odds with the writing in Sorbet, where Hannibal is coming to a realization rather than having done so in Apertif.

      Thomas Harris doesn't have Hannibal do all the terrible things to Clarice that Fuller has him do to Will. Harris has Mason & Krendler ruin her career & Hannibal helps kill them, whereas Fuller has him put a saw to Will's head a la Krendler.

      The best part of the show were the tableaus, hallucinations, dreams, second-unit shots of landscapes & closeups of objects you normally don't focus on. Second to that (or in conjunction with it) was Reitzell's score.

      I don't like stunt-casting, but Gina Torres & Nina Arianda were good in their roles.

      Fuller wasn't trying not to be pretentious, he's used that very word describing it from the beginning.

      For me, Hannibal season 3 is already analogous to Twin Peaks season 2, although it was fortunately shorter.

      I was unaware of the hostility toward Freeman's wife on Sherlock.

      I like Will as a character, it made sense that Thomas Harris ended Will's story. It makes no sense on the show for him to maintain any involvement with the FBI.

      I'm fine with slow pretentious art film. The slowest show on tv, Rectify, is one of my favorites, but this season of Hannibal had terrible characterization.

      Will indeed shouldn't want to go back to a nightmare, which is a defect of the show.

      I believe Damon Lindelof is collaborating with Tom Perrotta on The Leftovers, which makes sense since he wrote the book.

      I think this works great as a series finale, although anything afterward showing they survived diminishes it, and I doubt Fuller will be able to match it with another series finale.

      "Everything happens so much" sounds like the song "Everything Happens to Me".

      Fuller said season 4 would feature “Something a little more unexpected” than Hannibal & Will "on the run together, start[ing] a family of sorts". But I don't know exactly what that means.

      I can compare the seasons: season 1 > season 2 >>>>>>>>>>>>>> season 3.

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    2. The Chilton arc was great, but Hassun was the worst episode of the series.

      Fishburne was in the Petersen role in CSI, a show I have still never watched.

      The Canon podcast is doing The Thing vs The Fly next episode. Maybe your horror podcast could cover them.

      ReplyDelete