I really hope that one of my good friends isn’t a secret serial killer that eats people. When I watched the first season of Hannibal it left me with a feeling of needing to scream for days on end. The emotions that I felt were invoked by the acting. The actor Mads Mikkelson plays Hannibal very well. The actions of Hannibal are performed with such grace that you are convinced he is a psychopath that would do all the things he does in the show. The only negative in the beginning of Season 1 is it’s hard to understand his accent because he is Danish.
Hugh Dancy plays the main character Will Graham. Dancy could express Will in such a way it left me in awe. When Will goes through a period when he loses time and wakes up in the road, the confusion of Will is played so well that I was 100 percent convinced that he was completely befuddled. Dancy does an amazing job and expresses everything perfectly. Laurence Fishburne plays Jack Crawford, an FBI agent who hired Will to look at crime scenes and try to tell the FBI what happened. Fishburne plays Jack in a great manner. Jack always sounds angry and frustrated with everything around him, but he always feels different emotions which can be seen in his acting. In general the acting is phenomenal and can make the viewer feel angry and shocked.
A great thing about this show is that a large amount of it ties itself together throughout the season. Meaning it’s magnificent in how the symbolism ties in with what happens to Will emotionally and physically. In the beginning Will imagines a stag, this stag represents evil. The first few crime scenes involve a stag. When the series progresses, Will starts losing track of time and wakes up walking down the street. When this happens people get suspicious of Will because he went into work during one of these episode of time loss and he contaminates the crime scene by stabbing the body. He believes he is becoming evil. The stag is more tied into Season 2 but it shows up in the season many times. And that’s how I believe they got the symbolism.
A major thing that makes this show what it is, is the crime scenes. One of the first crime scene seen is someone impaled on stag antlers. This crime scene shows the brutality of Hannibal and how the writers really won’t hold back. If you don’t like gore, beware. This crime scene ties in a lot to future episodes. Another scene is when some children find a few people buried alive in diabetic comas, the person who did this used sugar to put them in a coma. After a little bit the sugar came out in the sweat and caused mushrooms to grow. The criminal used diabetics as a living garden to grow mushrooms. One last example is a man that takes a victim and makes them into a human cello by shoving neck of a cello down his throat.
Overall I would recommend Hannibal if you want a show that is entertaining and intense. It will leave you feeling in awe due to the events that happen throughout Season 1.
