Hannibal Season 3

[Beorning]

So, I keep watching the new season of Hannibal and I keep thinking that... it's not as good as the previous season...  :-(

Warning: spoilers follow, obviously.

The second season, especially the final few episodes, were fantastic: extremely tense, surprising and dark. The ending was brilliant and left me at the edge of the seat. I so wanted to know what would happen next!

Finally, Season 3 came... and it is sooooo slooooow. It took them four episodes to even reveal who survived the massacre at Hannibal's home. Aside from that, not much was really happening, did it? There was almost no tension, no action - just countless artistic shots and slow motion. And people wandering, thinking, whispering... The only episode where some actual stuff happened was the climax of the Vergers plot. The rest of the season was... some sort of hazy dream...

Also, I just couldn't get the motivations of the characters anymore. I just didn't buy Bedelia deciding to follow Hannibal to Europe all of sudden. I didn't buy Will being so enamoured with Hannibal that he was constantly tempted to run away with him. I had no clue what the Japanese woman's motivation was at all. Heck, I didn't even get Jack's motivation - did he wanted to kill Hannibal? Get him arrested? Why did he let him go after the initial confrontation, when he had him on the ropes? And Hannibal's motivations... one day, he wants to eat Will's brain. Then, the other day, he saves him and leaves him be. Huh?

Finally, can I say that the show dropped the ball with Mason Verger? His injuries were supposed to be gruesome. He even had to wear a mask for some time. But then, it turned out that it wasn't all that bad... I mean, he had no lips and spoke funny, but he looked way better than we were led to believe he was...

And one minor gripe: Chilton. Seriously, he survived that headshot in Season 2? I mean, it's not impossible, but... come on. Some people are really hard to kill in this show - aside from Chilton, there was Eddie Izzard's character, who turned out alive after being shot, too...

I don't know - I hope that the rest of Season 3 (the final season, it looks like...) will be better. So far, I feel that the show's been a let down this time around...

[RedPhoenix]

I agree. (copypasting my rage post about it)

fangirl raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaage

Season 3 of Hannibal is just so terrible. It's lost everything that was good about Seasons 1 and 2 and added absolutely nothing worthwhile. Am I even watching the same show? I hate to say it but I'm glad it was cancelled before it can get any worse than this. Every character has become much less interesting than they were at the end of Season 2. Was each episode of this show designed for someone who had never seen any of the previous ones?

Ace investigator Will Graham displays no trace of skill, finds guy hiding in plain sight in the first place anyone would look for him, fails to capture him, mumbles about being connected to him in some way that was done much better a year ago, and oh hey an hour later we're at the same place we were when the last episode ended.  What happened to the best profiler in the business? Does he work for the keystone cops now? This isn't building tension. You already built the tension and burst in at the end of season 2. That was so fucking good. This is....I don't know what the fuck this is, the closest word I can think of is masturbation.

Hey guys remember how good season 2 was?!? Here's the exact same interaction BUT IN ITALY THIS TIME. You know what this is? You know what's so fucking sad bout this. This is something the Jersey Goddamn Shore tried. And you're doing it worse.

Or more like this is phoning it in that's what the fuck this is. This is "I didn't think we'd make it past two seasons uh...I dunno flip to a random page of Hannibal (the book) and stretch it into an hour long show." Wasn't Margo supposed to be terrorizing Mason? Nah that would be too interesting. Make her have lesbian sex with Alana for some reason. How do we explain that? Oh well Alana is sooo desperate to catch Hannibal she's hanging wit the Vergers. Which makes her the only member of the FBI that survived Season 2 that isn't in Florence standing within ten feet of Hannibal with a day or so of this season beginning. Because she's so obsessed with catching him. Wait no....fuck it lesbian sex scene then switch somewhere else, works for Game of Thrones, right?

Everyone looks bored. Mads looks like he's sleepwalking. Hugh looks like he regrets signing on for this. Laurence appears to be thinking long and hard about agreeing to do a tv show. Katharine....is a goddamn treasure that you are wasting you stupid stupid people. Michael Pitt is somewhere thinking goddamn did I make the right call. The guy who replaced him is doing the job about as well as Ed Wood's dentist replacing Bela Lugosi.

Why the fuck did I watch Jack punch Hannibal around for ten minutes? What. Was. The. Point. It didn't tie into anything and it produced nothing. The legit reasons Jack has to be furious at him aren't ever explained that Jack actually knows. Maybe that's why he just watches him stroll away and doesn't pull out his gun and shoot the crippled mass murderer as he slowly ambles to freedom.

And Chiyoh is .... you picked up the wrong book to randomly pull her out of. You picked up the terrible book that was written to cash in on the popularity of Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster and blamed Hannibal on Nazis (so fucking lazy). There was no reason to include her in this and so far all she's done is stand around looking as vaguely Japanese as possible. when you have license to reinterpret this franchise, you pretend Hannibal Rising never existed. Or you can just have her park a six foot long sniper rifle on a cobblestone roof a half story up right in the middle of the palazzo de fucking uffizi I guess. bah.

This show is supposed to interpret Hannibal as the devil or did you forget all that? Did you forget what will saw when he finally saw hannibal for who he really was? Did you forget the horrifying imagery you used before you decided that looking like you were shooting from inside a blender was just as good. And then you put him in the middle of a collection of artwork expressing man's relation with God and you forget to get into Hannibal's relation with the guy. Where are the church collapses? Where is the philosophy that made the good books worth reading? Where is anything that didn't happen over the last two fucking seasons. Where is the revenge?!?! Hannibal went to Florence with no goddamn endgame plan. You lobotomized the smartest villain TV has produced in ages, which is maybe why you had to make all the people chasing him so goddamn stupid too.

And stop with the goddamn whirly floaty effects. They aren't interesting. They aren't good. They're bush league. Aronofsky can pull this off in movies about time travel, and I seem to be the only person on the planet who likes it then. But it doesn't fucking work for ten goddamn minutes in a show about hunting people. Especially when the main point of it all is to show how fucked up Will is when him overcoming all of that was the crown fucking achievement of Season 2. You've undone him as an interesting character. Fuck youuuuuuuuu every person who let this go into production. Fuck you so much.

And you know what's just insultingly lazy? The fucking titles. The goddamn fucking titles. Season 2's were subtle. They were masterful. They added a hint of interpretation to the meaning of the scenes in the episode in question that compounded the meaning of it all, foreshadowed menacingly and pushed the darkness from cyclopean to intricate. Season 3 you aren't even fucking trying. Antipasto?!? Dolce?!? Really?!??  Fuck you. This is McDonald's after five star Oo-toro.

Fuck you season 3 fuck you so much. Un-exist then try again. @#$@KLJLKJL#$

[Beorning]

Some good observations there in your rage post :)

Yes, it really does feel that the show got off the rails this season. The tension is gone, the characters are... out-of-character. I admit that I didn't notice it immediately - after watching this season's first episode, I was surprised by what was going on with Bedelia, but aside from that, I thought: "Okay, this is certainly an interesting way to continue this story". I thought that the initial slowness and not revealing the who survived the massacre was a clever tease. I though: "They keep us waiting on purpose, everything will be revealed next week".

But next week, we only learned of what happened to Will... and, also, we had him declare that he "forgave" Hannibal, which was just stupid. I mean, Will, seriously? You're forgiving a guy who eviscerated you and who murdered Abigail just to spite you? For the whole Season 2, Will considered Hannibal a devil, he did everything to get him caught... and now, he was suddenly thinking of him as of a friend? After everything that had happened with Abigail, Beverly, Alana and Jack??? I admit that I started to be worried after that scene...

(aside from that, that whole scene with Will finding Hannibal in the catacombs was idiotic. What, did Hannibal just sit there for days, waiting for Will to appear and to have an epiphany to walk downstairs? Come on...)

The third episode was... okay, with some beautiful shots of Hannibal's old home and some good mood. But I did continue to worry, when I saw Will put into a dead guy's body into a wicker moth... what was that supposed to be? The only sensible explanation was that Will has really gone bonkers...

The episode that made really frustrated was episode four. Almost nothing happened in there! And it had Alana (the kind, sensible Alana) turning into an ice queen in heavy makeup. And starting to work for Mason Verger. And it had Chilton's return from the dead. Whaaaat?

And then, there was episode five, with Chiyoh arbitrarily tossing Will off the train. And Jack finding Hannibal, beating him up, then letting him go... And more of artistic shots. And of people talking. I was honestly banging my head at the wall at that time... Episode six was a similar mess, with Hannibal deciding to eat Will's brain and Chiyoh doing... enigmatic stuff again...

The only semi-good episode was the seventh one. Because stuff happened there at last!!!

I don't know, I really don't understand what happened to that show. The last time I  saw a show drop in quality so much was when I got exposed to the third season of Prison Break....

I wonder if it may be because of the show finally starting to adapt the books? And the source material failing them?

[RedPhoenix]

I don't know, I really don't understand what happened to that show. The last time I  saw a show drop in quality so much was when I got exposed to the third season of Prison Break....

I can only assume this means you haven't seen the 4th season of Arrested Development.

I wonder if it may be because of the show finally starting to adapt the books? And the source material failing them?

Nope. Most of the first two episodes comes from the books too, just good re-imaginings of them. I was drooling at Hannibal (the book) being given a similar treatment in this season but they just blew it. Hannibal the book is probably the best of them other than Silence of the Lambs which the show hasn't touched other than a few parts that are flashbacks in the book being part of the first two seasons.

[VivienSm]

To be hones i heard about this film a lot but never seen that. I wonder do you advice me to watch "Hannibal"? Is it very interesting?

[Beorning]

To clarify: I'm talking about Hannibal the TV show, not Hannibal the movie from over a decade ago :)

I'd say that the first season of the show is rather slow. The first episodes seem to be a formulaic crime show, but in the later episodes the show breaks out of this mold and starts getting interesting and dark. It was enough to get me hooked. The second season is much better, with the second half of the season being (IMHO) a masterpiece of psychological thriller. The third season is surprisingly bad, though - hence this thread :)

One thing I must warn you is that this show is really, really violent and viscerally macabre. Also, as it's about Hannibal Lecter, there's a lot of cannibalism in the show.