Elementary: I got to the ear thing before Sherlock did. I'm so proud.

Hannibal: I seem to have missed if Will was ever correctly diagnosed and treated for encephalitis?

He was treated for something when he was arrested and before they took him to the Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane (or whatever). But I'm not sure if they knew it was encephalitis or if they were just treating fever/basic infection.

Thanks, Amy.

I really, really don't want Bedelia to end up dinner.

That was such a creepy episode!

I just finished watching it off the NBC website, and squeed with Amy backchannel, but really need to squee here with the actual community.

Random notes:

Will is cat-and-mousing Hannibal right back, after that season of being batted around and emotionally mutilated. This makes me utterly, unreasonably happy. No, reasonably happy. There's no amount of happy in this that exceeds reason; it just perfectly fulfills it.

"Hello! ... I love your work." Oh, fuck, SHOW. "There is no God." "Certainly not with that attitude." Oh, come on, show. Stop! No, don't.

A commenter on the AV Club said a while ago in a discussion of sources for the show and for the showrunner's sensibilities: "It's clear by now that Bryan Fuller's parents must have been murdered by an installation artist." I take this episode as conclusive proof.

Oh, that poor last victim, the utter bone-deep horror of his last minutes in the world. And yet... he died, he died horribly and in pain and despair, but in his death he accomplished some amazing things. He escaped from the killer's design, disrupted his art, and ultimately led to the killer's discovery and the complete dismantling of his terrible work. All those other victims, no longer anonymous brush-strokes, returned to their names and histories and, eventually, to the people who will mourn and remember them. And all because of his past frailty - it was his history of drug dependence that gave him the power to tear himself out of the killer's design.

I love Bedelia, so much (and was just flooded with relief when the camera peeked around the corner of that archway into her living room and we caught a glimpse of the first sheet on the first piece of furniture). The writing for her dialogues, not just with Hannibal but with Jack and now Will, is so spare; the writers clearly have great trust in their cast to take a few words that say nearly nothing and use their voices, faces, minds and bodies to beautifully convey all the weight of everything unspoken. I'm pretty sure that if you looked at these scenes on paper, the lines themselves would look like nearly nothing.

"There is no God." "Certainly not with that attitude."

Oh yeah. HANNIBAL. In his plastic suit.

I heart everything about JZ's post.

I also loved all the parallels and foreshadowing with Silence of the Lambs in this episode. This is such a great show. I can't understand the ratings.

And it can't be a cheap show to make, either. Are the ratings bad? I thought the S2 renewal came pretty early.