Mukōzuke

Mukōzuke
Season 2, Episode 5
Air date	March 28, 2014
Written by	Ayanna A. Floyd and Steve Lightfoot & Bryan Fuller
Directed by	Michael Rymer
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"Mukōzuke" is the fifth episode of Season 2, and overall the eighteenth produced hour of Hannibal. It originally aired on March 28, 2014.

Plot

Freddie Lounds finds Beverly's sectioned corpse; Will meets the copycat killer and orders him to kill Hannibal. Gideon overhears this and gives Alana the chance to save Will from becoming a murderer.

Synopsis

Will Graham is still locked up in prison, but he still has his imagination. Which, combined with grief and a thirst for revenge, could be a very dangerous combination, even for a man as dangerous as Hannibal Lecter...

Hannibal has been busy the last day or two: saving Jack Crawford's wife from a suicide attempt, killing and doing who knows what to Jack's employee Beverly Katz. It makes sense that he would prepare himself a hearty breakfast this morning. He's also preparing a meal for Jack, who was up all night at the hospital while his wife recovered from her morphine overdose. "Feed the body, feed the mind," Hannibal tells him in convincing Jack to eat.

Reporter Freddie Lounds has returned to the observatory where not too long ago she was held captive by Abel Gideon, who made her assist him in surgically disemboweling Dr. Frederick Chilton. This time she's prepared, carrying a gun with her just in case. She enters the main room and is brought up short by something that is dripping blood on the floor. Freddie is taken aback, but ever the reporter, she pulls out her camera and snaps some pictures before calling the authorities.

Jack arrives at the observatory, now a crime scene. Freddie tells him not to go in. "She's one of yours," she tells the FBI agent. He ignores her, and determined and stone-faced, enters to find... the vivisected body of Beverly Katz, pulled apart like a biology project, each cross section of her corpse pressed between glass panels and lined up like a museum display. Like cooking, so much of serial killing is in the presentation. It's too much for the stern Jack, who breaks down in tears.

One other person needs to see Beverly, and that is Will Graham. Wrapped in a straitjacket and a plastic mask and strapped into a wheelchair, Will is brought to the observatory from the insane asylum. Jack removes his restraints, though while keeping his gun handy, and lets Will crawl inside the killer's mind. Will imagines himself as the killer strangling Beverly, freezing her body and then running it through a bandsaw. Beverly found something. But what?

She found the Chesapeake Ripper and the supposed copycat, Will tells Jack. One killer wearing two masks. And he will have taken her organs as trophies. Will, of course, has his suspect, but he knows Jack won't listen. "You have to make your own connection to the Ripper, Jack," he says. "I can't make it for you."

Will is right about the organs. Beverly's colleagues Jimmy Price and Brian Zeller discover that the kidneys in Beverly's body were those of the mural killer, James Gray, which Beverly had found in Hannibal's refrigerator just before he killed her. Not that the FBI knows this. All the agents know is that if they find Beverly's kidneys, they find her killer. Hannibal, a step ahead like always, is already eating the evidence in an elaborately prepared dish.

Meanwhile, Will has manipulated Chilton into transferring Abel Gideon back to the insane asylum. Suspecting that Gideon knows the identity of the Chesapeake Ripper, Will is hoping to get him to reveal the information. But Gideon is not so easily manipulated with appeals to his vanity. "If you want the Ripper," he tells Will, "you'll have to kill him." Will may have found a way to do that, even if he is locked up.

Freddie Lounds comes to the asylum to interview Will at his request. Will wants to get in touch with his admirer, the unknown killer who murdered the bailiff and judge during his trial. Maybe a story on TattleCrime.com will bring him out of the woodwork. Though he may be closer than Will thinks.

One night, alone in the therapy cage room, a hospital orderly reveals his secret to Will: he is the one who killed the bailiff in the hopes it would exonerate Will. Not the judge, though. That killer remains a mystery. The orderly seeks a connection with Will, and there is one good way to get on the accused killer's good side these days. "I want you to kill Hannibal Lecter," Will tells him. No problem! Except that Abel Gideon overheard them talking. Abel then later reveals to Alana Bloom Will's plan.

Alana and Jack track Hannibal's cell phone to a pool where the doctor is swimming laps. Or he was, until the orderly shot him with a tranquilizer dart and perched him on a bucket with his arms taped to a cross and a noose around his neck. The orderly toys with Lecter, cutting his wrists and suggesting he kick the bucket away and hang himself before bleeding out, then asking him if he's the Chesapeake Ripper. "You don't have to say a word and I'll know the answer," he says. "The pupil dilates with certain mental efforts. You dilate, that's a yes." And Hannibal's pupils dilate.

It's too bad Jack and Alana don't arrive a minute sooner to see that. As it is, Jack shows up and shoots the orderly, who manages to kick the bucket clear just before he dies, leaving Hannibal dangling. Jack rushes to Hannibal, holding him up so he doesn't strangle. "Get an ambulance!" he barks at Alana.

In his cell, awaiting word of Hannibal's death, Will watches as his sink overflows with blood.

Extra

• Trivia

• The episode's title, Mukōzuke (向付), refers to sashimi (thinly sliced raw meat) served during a traditional Japanese multi-course dinner (Kaiseki (懐石)).

The writers’ initial plan was to have Beverly die in the first season, and have it be her ear that Will vomits up in “Savoureux.” However, by the end of the first season, Bryan Fuller felt that Beverly’s character deserved to be developed more fully before she was killed, and that Abigail’s death would have more impact on the audience at that point.

The “admirer” storyline was initially scripted to be much more involved, with a nurse at the hospital smuggling messages to and from Will, and Will communicating with the admirer through the Tattle Crime website. (A glimpse of this version of the story can be seen in the script for “Hassun,” which set up a storyline involving the curator of a website devoted to selling serial killer memorabilia.) However, when this storyline took over the episode and left little time to honor the characters’ grief following Beverly’s death, Fuller decided to streamline the story and simply make the “admirer” an orderly.

Book to Show

• Beverly’s death does not come from the books, and having her die before the Tooth Fairy investigation is a departure from the novel Red Dragon, wherein she is alive and well.
• The sequence of Will being placed in a straitjacket and restraint mask and transported via handcart comes from the way Hannibal Lecter is brought to Tennessee in The Silence of the Lambs (in the novel, he was placed in a hockey mask; the use of a restraint mask here references the iconic depiction in the film adaptation).
• Freddie snapping a photo of Hannibal leaving the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane parallels Lounds doing the same to Will in Red Dragon after he visits Hannibal.
• Matthew Brown was intended as a dark inversion of the character Barney, Hannibal’s primary orderly in The Silence of the Lambs, who also plays a key role in the novel Hannibal. (In a deleted scene from the film Hannibal, Barney’s last name is revealed as “Matthews,” and the fandom as well as Bryan Fuller seem to have taken this as canon; hence, Matthew Brown’s name is a semi-inversion of Barney Matthews.) Matthew’s admiration for Will darkly mirrors Barney’s respectful relationship with Hannibal, although Barney never displayed any psychopathic behavior or murderous impulses. (Notably, the show did not have the rights to Barney’s character, as he first appeared in The Silence of the Lambs.)
• Will giving Freddie an interview in order to bait a killer into revealing himself parallels the desperate move Will and Jack make in Red Dragon to flush out the Tooth Fairy killer (a move they also made in the first season episode “Entrée”). Similarly, Will potentially using Tattle Crime’s website to establish a line of communication with his “admirer” references Hannibal communicating with the Tooth Fairy through the National Tattler’s personals column.
• Matthew’s instructions to Freddie before visiting Will echo Chilton’s instructions to Will and Clarice upon visiting Hannibal in Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs, respectively. The walk-and-talk way the scene was played references the film adaptation of Silence. 
• Matthew becoming an orderly after “pick[ing] up the drill” while spending time in a mental institution comes from a line Will has in Red Dragon when theorizing that the Tooth Fairy might be an orderly.
• Fuller has said that Will orchestrating Hannibal’s death while he is institutionalized was inspired by Hannibal sending Will’s home address to the Tooth Fairy in Red Dragon.
• Hannibal being displayed in a crucifixion pose references the way Mason Verger holds Hannibal prisoner and has him transported to be devoured by the pigs in the novel and film Hannibal. 
• The reference to Judas’s hanging calls to mind Hannibal’s lecture as “Dr. Fell” in the novel and film Hannibal, wherein he speaks of Judas and the connection between hanging and avarice in Dante’s Inferno.

Cut Scenes

• The DVD and Blu Ray feature a deleted scene of Hannibal visiting Will (explaining how Will knows later in the episode that Chilton spoke to Hannibal about Will’s accusations). In an effort to keep Hannibal’s guard down, Will claims that he believes that Chilton gave him a hypnotic instead of sodium amytal, and that Chilton then manipulated false memories in Will of Hannibal similarly manipulating him.