Hannibal S03E08 – The Great Red Dragon – Eat The Rudecast

We're joined by Kate Kulzick from Sound on Sight‘s Hannibal podcast This is Our Design joins us to discuss the rise of The Great Red Dragon, as Miko completes her summer walkabout in a vacation home with poor wifi. Cooper is a bit jarred by the transition from pretentious seventies foreign film first half of the season to (relatively) straight forward procedural adaptation of the first book of the Hannibal Lecter series Red Dragon. We marvel at an almost silent introduction of our new character Francis Dolarhyde played by Richard Armitage.

All on this episode of Eat The Rudecast, a podcast about NBC's Hannibal, and the works of Thomas Harris.

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12 Comments. Leave new

  • I agree with you guys, I love the books over the show and movies and I LOVE what Fuller is doing revitalizing the material.
    In the book, Will Graham saw a picture of the Wounded Man in Lecter’s office and he knew he was the man. Then Lecter knew he knew and went to kill him. Will shot Lecter and he was lucky that the bullet hit him. He was lucky. So those people whining are incapable to read, I guess.

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    • FictionIsntReal
      July 29, 2015 1:30 am

      666, I think Will didn’t see the actual picture of the Wound Man in Lecter’s office. He just saw a book he recognized as having the picture within it. And he didn’t shoot Lecter (like in Ratner’s movie). He went to a payphone to alert the FBI, and Lecter gutted him while he was making the call. When he woke up in the hospital, Lecter had already been arrested.

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      • I read the book twice and I’m still mixing things up. I do think he saw the actual diagram but yeah you’re right, it was the FBI agents who got in time.

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  • He said “this is my design”, DLC confirmed it.

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  • – Maybe its because its been so long since we last saw Will reconstruct a crime scene but that reconstruction he did was brutal and horrifying.
    – I’m interested to see how the show incorporates the dragon in Dolarhyde’s life. It seems like a physical being. Maybe we’ll actually see it at some point? Maybe it will be Dolarhyde’s version of the Stag?
    – Can’t wait to see more of Armitage in the role. It will be interesting to see the struggle between man and beast.

    Anyway, good start to the Red Dragon arc. Looks like it is going to be really good.

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  • Re: Hannibal’s cell: you can see that it’s basically a stripped down version of Chilton’s (now Alana’s) office–same walls, same alcoves, shelves etc–they’ve cleared out the dangerous stuff and bolted everything down, but yes, it was a more administrative part of the building converted especially for Hannibal. I agree that it’s probably part of Chilton showing off his dangerous but erudite and cultured prisoner; also, if they want to guarantee good behaviour/punish him for misbehaviour, he needs privileges that can be offered/rescinded as needed.
    And more astute people on tumblr pointed out that Chilton, Alana and Will are allowed into different degrees of Hannibal’s reality; Chilton, only into the real world of Hannibal’s posh cell; Alana into the part of the memory palace that is Hannibal’ office, and Will into the heart of it–the Norman chapel and the memento mori on the ground where Hannibal left his broken heart for him.

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  • Oh, and re: his wine glass–could be plastic? I understand prisoners turn plastic into weapons by melting it with lighters etc but that’d depend on what else they allowed into his cell at the same time–I doubt he’s allowed a lighter. Or it could be glass, with the understanding that if they don’t get an intact wine glass back at the end of the evening he gets tranqued, cell gets searched, he loses privileges again. He’s clearly allowed to prepare meals, somehow (does someone else do all the chopping for him first? Heh, Alana as his sous chef again, like she was in S1), so I assume they’re a little loose about what he’s allowed, provided it can be accounted for?

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  • Sorry, last one–Alana, Hannibal and the insanity plea: could be him blackmailing her over Mason’s death (help keep the death penalty off the table or I’ll tell everyone what you did)–that wouldn’t just threaten her but also Margot and any child of Margot’s (if Margot faced charges, would that kid end up with other Vergers, who sound terrible?) Or vengeance, on her part; better him humiliated and constricted in jail for the rest of his life than given the easier way out–remember, too, her original plan with regard to Hannibal and Mason Verger was to call the FBI in, not let Hannibal be killed (it just… got away from her, as these things do!) (I could also totally believe she doesn’t believe in the death penalty, but that doesn’t, of course, mean she’d go out of her way for Hannibal.)

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  • I lied, 1 more thing–Will said ‘this is my design’ of the broken hart in 302. No pendulum there, but he was in Hannibal’s head, not a stranger’s, and they were blurring together etc.

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  • FictionIsntReal
    July 29, 2015 6:28 pm

    I’m one of the people who has been very negative on the first arc of the season. I’m fine with being arty & weird, but not poor characterization (glad to hear you agree about Chiyoh on that front).

    There are more and less fundamental aspects of an original work to be considered in an adaptation. If Hannibal was not a serial killer in an adaptation, fans would rightly be crying foul. The most important component of Will’s relationship with Hannibal in the source is that Will was the one to catch him. Discarding that means you lose the dialogue about how Will caught him (which Fuller claimed was the chief inspiration behind the series) and makes it considerably less plausible that Crawford would think he needs Will to come out of retirement.

    Rather than test audiences, it was Michael Mann’s perfectionism that caused him to keep tweaking the tattoo, never satisfied enough with it to keep it in the final cut.

    The only possible reason I can think of for Alana to do anything for Hannibal is in exchange for him taking credit for Mason. I don’t know why Chilton would have any inside knowledge of that though. I did not get the impression Alana felt attacked by Hannibal’s article. She was portraying it as an attack on Chilton.

    I disliked the meta commentary. If someone had pulled all the crazy shenanigans Hannibal has on this show, they’d be a never ending source of media fascination. The Tooth Fairy is relatively mundane in comparison.

    Beams of light shining out of Mrs. Leeds eyes & mouth were already used in Manhunter, it was interesting how they used that on Dolarhyde here.

    I didn’t mind the plausibility of the totem pole. I’m willing to let character motivation run rampant, unhindered by practicalities (imagining obstacles that don’t seem to exist, like Alana not freeing Will herself in Digestivo, is another story). I will admit that the tree man & Katz slices were harder to accept at first. Fuller came up with some explanation about Hannibal hiring work crews and then killing them all, but I’d prefer to not think about that.

    Venus in Fur has too much antagonism at its core to term the characters “romantic interests” in a normal sense. It’s a snobbish playright who discovers the perfect actress to a was seemingly sent from hell to torment him (it’s very funny). Given the book that the play-within-a-play is based on, that antagonism is unsurprisingly eroticized. It was seeing this that got Fuller to cast Dancy in the show. Nina’s character in it is closer to Hannibal than Molly (there’s even a psychoanalysis couch scene).

    I don’t know if the Red Dragon would be any more rational than Dolarhyde. It is interesting that Dolarhyde is so visually oriented (perhaps less so in this version if he has a different job), but the glove removal and a famous later scene rely on the sense of touch.

    I don’t recall any of the previous adaptations mentioning glass in the labia, so it would seem odd to call it “toned down”. It’s unfortunate season 1 already used the line about suck marks with bites, because its the absence of those which suggests a fighting pattern to Will.

    The Motel seemed somewhat similar to Will’s shack. Michael Mann would have insisted on a cool modernist location full of ceiling-length glass windows to brood out of.

    The song Dolarhyde is listening to with his projector running is Never Be Anyone Else But You by Ricky Nelson. Checking out Chilton’s office in previous seasons, it doesn’t seem set up for two desks at opposite sides. If I had a better sense of aesthetics, I could probably tell if it’s the same room as Alana’s current office. Jack does seem to be in the same office as he was before.

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  • FictionIsntReal
    July 29, 2015 7:06 pm

    Checking Ted Tally’s script for Brett Ratner’s Red Dragon, it does include Graham mentioning that Mrs. Leeds was raped after she died. The film euphemistically refers to this when he wonders why the intruder moved the bodies, if none of them got the same “… extra attention” as the mother. So I’ve been wrong about the sexual violence only occurring in the book (they also find Dolarhyde’s semen in an earlier draft of Manhunter, but not the final script). There’s no mention of glass in the labia though.

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  • is there a new series of this film?

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