Hassun

Hassun
Season 2, Episode 3
Air date	March 14, 2014
Written by	Bryan Fuller Jason Grote Steve Lightfoot
Directed by	Peter Medak
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"Hassun" is the third episode of Season 2, and overall the sixteenth produced hour of Hannibal. It originally aired on March 14, 2014.

Plot

Jack Crawford risks his job by going against the FBI's directives and revealing to the court that it was his hand that pushed Will to his limit.

Synopsis

In prison and on trial for his life, Will Graham has nothing to lose. Still, playing a chess match against a brutal serial killer is a dangerous way to earn his freedom... not only for him but also for his friends and colleagues. If he doesn't want more deaths on his conscience, he'll need a foolproof plan...

Somewhere in a prison, the hands of a clock run backwards. Will Graham, stone-faced and clad in a suit, throws a switch. Electricity flows to a nearby electric chair occupied by... Will Graham, head shaved and wearing a prison uniform. Suit-clad Will watches as his doppelganger in the chair writhes and thrashes, ghostly white smoke rising from his body. Nearby, a voice says, "Mr. Graham, it's time..."

Will opens his eyes. He is still in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, lying on the bunk in his cell. An orderly stands nearby, holding a suit. It is the first day of Will's trial for murder.

In the courtroom, Will listens to the prosecutor lay out the charges against him, ticking off the names of his alleged victims while showing pictures of their death scenes: Cassie Boyle, impaled on antlers in a field; Marissa Schurr, impaled on a wall of antlers in Garrett Jacob Hobbs's hunting cabin; Georgia Madchen, burned alive in an oxygen chamber in the hospital. It's a horrible montage of very creative staging, like performance art from the world's most sadistic theater director.

Hannibal Lecter sits in the audience in the courtroom, listening to the presentation and occasionally glancing in Will's direction. Will's face might betray the pain he is feeling over being accused of killing all these women, but Hannibal is his usual impassive self. The sight of all this horror does not seem to bother him in the least. Perhaps it's because he is mostly concerned about his friend Will. Or maybe because he's a psychopath. Though he does allow himself a small, knowing smile when the prosecutor describes Will as "the smartest person in this room". Even psychopaths have egos.

Jack Crawford nervously paces the hallway outside the courtroom, awaiting his turn to testify. He's visited by Kade Prurnell, the agent from the FBI's Oversight Office who has been tasked with investigating how Will became such an integral part of Crawford's team in the Behavioral Sciences Unit. It is clear from the conversation Jack is still struggling to believe Will is really a killer. Prurnell makes clear she believes it and that Will is a cold-blooded sociopath playing a game. "That's why you're a witness for the prosecution," she says. "If you can't represent your own beliefs, represent the Bureau's." This is why Prurnell is here in the first place: to clean up this investigation, pin these murders on Will and assure everyone a crazed killer is no longer roaming free. The question is, will Jack play along, sacrificing Will to save his own career?

He will not. During his testimony, Jack suddenly begins arguing with the prosecutor, admitting he had been warned he could break Will if he pushed him too hard, but he went ahead and pushed anyway. And now Will is broken, perhaps insane. This is great news for his defense, and afterward, Will's lawyer, Brauer, is ecstatic. As he lectures Will on the law not always being about the truth but rather about creating a perception, a courier brings him a piece of mail. Still talking, the lawyer opens the envelope and empties it onto the table. A severed human ear falls out. Will and Brauer stare at it, shocked. "I think I opened your mail," the lawyer says.

Will must have an admirer, and he thinks he knows who it is. But to tell anyone would reveal the game he's playing to get Hannibal to expose himself. Meanwhile, the FBI and the prosecutor have a new problem. Is there another killer on the loose? And where did this ear come from? Jack's team in the Behavioral Sciences Unit quickly determines the ear was cut off a corpse using the knife Will allegedly used to hack off Abigail Hobbs' ear before eating it. That knife was checked out of the evidence room at the courthouse by a bailiff from Will's trial and never returned. Jack leads a team of FBI agents to the bailiff's home and watches as the agents break down the door. But someone has booby-trapped the house. A homemade bomb explodes, sending flames shooting from the building.

When the fire has been put out, Jack and his team find the body of the bailiff in the house, impaled on a set of antlers, just like Will was accused of impaling Cassie Boyle and with his mouth split in the style of a 'Glasgow Smile', just like Georgia Madchen had done to her victim and Will was accused of doing to Dr Donald Sutcliffe. But beyond having a new killing to solve, Hannibal asks the big question on his mind: What does this mean for Will's defense?

Hannibal takes the evidence in the bailiff's murder to Will to get his take, and Will finds a difference between the bailiff's death and the earlier killings: the bailiff's ear was cut off after his death while the girls Will is accused of killing were mutilated before they died. "It's not the same killer," Will says. He adds that Hannibal knew this already. The doctor is chagrined. He wanted everyone to think the bailiff's killer was the same person who committed the murders of which Will is accused and get Will freed from prison. "I wanted to dispel your doubts about me," he says, casting a big set of puppy dog eyes at Will. "I wanted you to believe in the best of me, as I believe in the best of you." Psychopaths can be so manipulative.

Despite the weakness in the theory, Brauer tries a new defense. Instead of claiming Will was temporarily insane at the time of the murders, he puts Hannibal on the stand to try and convince the judge of this new theory that the killer of the bailiff and the girls is one and the same. The judge listens to Hannibal and decides that he won't allow Brauer and Will to change up the defense mid-trial. Which is too bad... for the judge. But he's not going to get a chance to rethink his decision...

Judge Davis' corpse.

A janitor is waxing the courthouse floor when he walks into the empty courtroom. Strung up in the middle of the room is the body of the judge. His head has been peeled open like a piece of fruit, the skin pulled down to cover his eyes. A scale holding the judge's brain and heart is attached to his raised left hand. "Not only is justice blind, it's mindless and heartless," Hannibal observes when he sees the body. Psychopaths are so philosophical.

Alana Bloom sits with Will in a meeting room at the BHCI. Alana had hoped a verdict in the case, one way or the other, would help Will focus on getting better. But now that process can't start for a while longer. So what now? Will thinks the killer will reach out to him again. "He wants to know me," he says with a hint of disgust. Staring at Alana, he asks, "What do you want?"

She thinks for a moment and says, "I want to save you." They stare at each other. Maybe she does have more than a professional curiosity about Will after all. He reaches over and takes her hand, and they sit like that, two people finding a moment of calm in a raging storm.

Trivia

• The episode's title, Hassun (八寸), refers to a course defined by constraints. It has traditional guidelines for presentation and should contain ingredients indicative of the season. It is meant to be a pairing of opposite but ultimately complementary ingredients.

Book to Show

• Marion Vega’s reference to Will’s incredible visual memory comes from a Dr. Bloom quote in Red Dragon. Will not being “real FBI” because he failed the screening procedures, previously alluded to by Beverly in “Apéritif” and Freddie in “Potage,” comes from a Lounds article in Red Dragon.
• Jack’s description of Bella’s sickroom comes from The Silence of the Lambs (although in the book Jack is credited with the appearance of the room, rather than Bella, who is incapacitated by the time of the novel’s events). Hannibal’s line that Jack does not have to go into the ground with Bella is something that Jack reminds himself of in The Silence of the Lambs.
• Alana’s “professional curiosity” about Will, last mentioned in “Apéritif,” comes from Red Dragon.
• Chilton’s testimony that Will caught the other killers simply to prove he was smarter than they were is similar to Will’s appeal to Hannibal’s vanity to help catch the Tooth Fairy in Red Dragon.
• The concept of one serial killer sending “love letters” to an incarcerated serial killer is reminiscent of Francis Dolarhyde’s correspondence with Hannibal in Red Dragon.
• Will saying that he heard his blood like the hollow drumming of wings comes from the description of Will’s mindset while exiting the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane after seeing Hannibal in Red Dragon.

Cut Scenes

• The script reveals the judge’s name is Judge Bertrand Davies.
• In the script, Freddie’s testimony is followed by a scene in which Jack confronts Freddie outside the courtroom. He says that she and Jack spoke at length about Freddie’s belief that Abigail was complicit in her father’s crimes, yet she failed to mention this on the stand. He also questions the veracity of the conversations with Abigail that she testified to. Freddie responds, “You’re looking after your friend. I’m looking after mine.”
• The script has a scene of Kade Prurnell sounding out Chilton for his opinion of Will. He expresses a belief that Will emotionally manipulated Alana, Hannibal and Jack, and that the severed ear was sent on Will’s behalf: “For an antisocial man, he has a lot of friends.”
• The script has a sequence near the end involving “Murda-bilia,” a website run by a man named Jonathan Mullion, which sells serial killer artifacts such as John Wayne Gacy’s paintings (paralleling Barney’s side business selling Lecter memorabilia in the novel Hannibal, and particularly the film adaptation in which he sells them online). Jimmy traces three messages from Andrew Sykes’s email to Mullion, and also recovers an old partial print of Mullion’s in Sykes’s house; however, Mullion was in jail in Florida for removing artifacts from a crime scene when Cassie Boyle was killed. Jack and the team search Mullion’s apartment, discovering a computer with a screensaver that reads, “Just saying hi to the FBI.” Beverly finds a signed copy of Will’s Monograph on Time of Death by Insect Activity, and Hannibal plants Judge Davies’s glasses next to the computer monitor. This sequence was setup for a more elaborate version of the “admirer” storyline in “Mukōzuke,” which Fuller eventually streamlined while “Mukōzuke” was being scripted and this episode was being shot. This sequence was likely not filmed.