“The next moment is Mads Mikkelsen being flawless. Without a word and barely a change of expression, we see Hannibal’s sadness as he realizes that Will is not what he thought, and that now he has to die.

Bryan Fuller succeeds in making you feel bad for Hannibal Lecter for deciding someone has to die. That’s talent.”

-From the spot-on review/recap for Hannibal’s season two finale, “Mizumono”  by @geekgirldiva

What she said.

I would seriously have trouble recapping this episode, mainly because of getting so worked up and emotional over the events unfolding – this show gets more jaw-dropping with every episode (and I had barely picked my jaw up off the floor after the Mason Verger self-mutilation and auto-cannibalism scene from the penultimate episode). They’ve now ended two seasons in a row with a complete game-changer, something most successful shows usually don’t try until the end of season three or four. Read on, unless you haven’t seen the Hannibal S2 finale, because MAJOR SPOILERS.

I let you know me. See me. I gave you a rare gift. But you didn’t want it…

I was describing the series to a friend Sunday evening. She was upset because there were no good shows on network television anymore, so I was trying to be helpful by giving her suggestions and get her interested. She was, until I made the mistake of describing a couple of scenes that I could not BELIEVE got through NBC Standards & Practices (there’s a great interview about that here on the Onion’s A.V. Club, and pretty informative), at which point she was horrified and… yeah, she’s not going to be watching the show.

one of the LESS gory shots from Hannibal’s “Tome Wan” episode.

Here’s another great A.V. Club piece by the nearly always-amazing Todd VanDerWerff, this time a post-mortem  (that terms has never seemed more appropriate, suddenly) interview about the finale with Bryan Fuller. Turns out Fuller had written it knowing there was a tiny chance it could be the SERIES finale, in which case Jesus H. Christ, that would have been one of the bleakest series finales ever (along with the Buffy S5 finale if UPN hadn’t picked things up for two more seasons, among others).*

Enjoy the recap, and here’s one last Hannibal finale link (yet again, the A.V. Club): an excellent review written by By Molly Eichel. Should you have the time, there are a shitload of comments (1600+ as of this writing) by impressed die-hard Hannibal fans that are almost as well-written and as entertaining to read; do yourself a favor and sort the comment forum by “Best First”. The reviewer also included her usual “Recipe of the Week”, which in this case was Julia Child’s rack of lamb.

* Such as Sleeper Cell (2005-2006). They were evidently pretty sure at the time the S2 finale was conceived that the show would be renewed. It wasn’t.  I was pissed off for days when I listened to the commentary, where the show-runner had a very whimsical, happy go-lucky attitude about just about the bleakest ending possible for the series and said something along the lines of ‘and what the heck, who knows, if this is the end, well, it’s a good bummer to go out on’. A bummer AND a cliffhanger- Grrrrr. If you saw the show, you know what I mean.