Hmm - this actor seems to have the opposite of charisma. He seems to radiate "you would never want to have sex with me". Maybe that is just me. Don't really appreciate men as sex objects much. But I can usually see the appeal of men the Buffistas kvell over. But I see no appeal in this guy. (To be fair, there has been no kvelling.) Again, though he is not well written. He does not give the impression of being contained or still or lazy or anything. Nor does he give the impression of great intelligence. The former may be on the actor, But the latter is totally the fault of the writers.

Not just you.

Stuttering streaming finally let me watch all of last night's Hannibal -- this show has left the universe of reality-based procedurals so far behind it's ridiculous. And beautiful. I know the finale will be all A-plot showdown and endgame and the Verger siblings may not appear at all, but I dearly hope we get more of both of them next season. Michael Pitt is so deliriously horrible in all his manic Grand Guignol giggly madness. I love him dearly (love as in would run away and never stop screaming forever if I ever came within a mile of him in real life, but admire him hugely as a carefully crafted and balls-out acted vision of batshit evil).

More than anything, I love how purely entertained he is by discomfort, and how extremely gifted he is at causing it, and how utterly catholic and universally appreciative his taste for it is. The tears of an orphan? Tee-hee! My therapist's mouth pinching up just a bit as I slap my butt in his personal chair and my feet on his desk? Yay yay yay! My very own searing agony as I carve up and chow down on my own nose? Everything is awesome!

And Margot, so deeply wronged, all the worse for his having no capacity for any real understanding of what he's done and continues to do to her, and so self-contained and controlled and self-protective and at last with some meager amount of actual power over him.

And I guess there was also, like, a serial killer and some FBI people and Gillian Anderson and Winston. Big severed thumbs up to all of it.

Who is Achilles in this parallel?

Maybe Jack is Patroclus and Will is Achilles?

That is why serial-killer narratives leave me cold, possibly. My new definition of insanity may be watching Dexter as a Simon acolyte.(they make enough mistakes in procedure that "Fuck the bosses!" me can tell. That is a lot, ftr.)

Not just you.

Nope. And I like Rhys Ifans as an actor, but he's just not Mycroft. Nor was Mycroft written well for this show. It's hard to beat Mark Gatiss, but his Mycroft is also superbly written (wonder why???).

Maybe Jack is Patroclus and Will is Achilles?

Hm. I think each character would have a different answer.

Michael Pitt is so deliriously horrible in all his manic Grand Guignol giggly madness.

I have decided that Jerry Horne (Twin Peaks) is "Papa" Verger. (Audrey and Margot would be cousins!) (If I were a fanfic writer, I'd keep building on this idea until I found a way to have a scene between Hannibal and Dr. Jacoby.) (It's possible I need more sleep.)

I have to say that, as much as I enjoy Margot Verger's portrayal and all of rest of the luminously beautiful batshit craziness that comes with this show, I've had a lot of difficulty mustering much sympathy for her poor-little-rich-girl woes about what might happen if her brother dies and all of her daddy's money vanishes into the SBC's coffers. Yeah, they're loathsome scumbags, and I'd hate to see them get richer, but she's spent her entire existence failing to acquire any skills that might result in remunerative occupation, and now she might not get to spend the rest of her life doing the backstroke in the deep end of her daddy's money pool?

Get a job, lady. Welcome to the working class.

Yeah, but she's spent her entire life being isolated from the larger world and physically and emotionally abused by her only sibling and (apparently) only parent. She didn't fail to develop basic life skills, she was actively thwarted from pursuing them or from being able to imagine that she even had any right to do so. That she still has enough sense of self to hate her brother, want to take everything from him and take practical steps to do so is practically a miracle. It's just a truly horrible miracle, because the world of this show is a truly horrible world.

I was going to say that if it were a reality-based show rather than an emotionally true but hellcrazy fever dream I'd be right with you on the "Get a job, lady" train, but then I remembered these kids. Even if you're as naturally good and sweet as these two appear to be, that many years with no way out from that much evil (with, like Margot, almost the entire outside world, despite numerous opportunities to rescue you, willing to just shrug and let the evil keep toying with you, because money) can be brutally damaging.

And erika, blech Dexter and everything about it (except Angel Batista and the very likable actor who played him, who so deserved to be in a better procedural). This really isn't the same kind of show at all; it's a Bryan Fuller show. It's dressed up in serial killer/procedural drag, but stripped naked it's Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies with all the metaphysics but almost none of the twee (well, no, there's actually kind of a lot of twee, but it's very gruesome twee). It's kind of a shitty procedural, but that isn't really the point of it. The procedural is just the structure Fuller's currently using to explore all the same themes he always explores in every show he ever does; whatever he does next when this ends (hopefully not until he's finished the 7-year plan he's already got plotted out for this one) will be the same themes again in some different genre drag.

I guess my distance isn't surprising since I'd have broken up with Wonderfalls season 2 and didn't like Pushing Daisies.

All I can think is "YES, it's very pretty. YES, you're very crazy." But since they killed Katz I don't even care about the rest of the Casketeers.