Cooper, Ophilia, and Miko Technogeisha sit down at Chicago's famous Golden Apple Grill & Breakfast House to discuss their evening's entertainment, seeing The Cornservatory's production of Silence! The Musical. After they discuss their favorite moments and songs, they decide to deconstruct the Hannibal series and give it the autopsy/post mortem it deserves. (So that the final Rudecast episode will no longer be Hannibal Rising)
Silence! The Musical is playing The Cornservatory through August 13th, 2016. If you're in Chicago check it out!
Buy the Silence! The Musical original soundtrack here
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I remember you saying there would be one more podcast after Hannibal Rising, but I was worried that wouldn’t be the case. In the absence of you ever covering Black Sunday, I went ahead during this long hiatus to write what is (as far as I know) the only Black Sunday fan fiction in existence:
http://archiveofourown.org/works/7698745
I can’t say it’s especially good, but at least it’s not Hannibal Rising.
The Hannibal fan blog “A Matter of Taste Podcast” has recently taken to covering horror musicals. I suppose this would be a good fit, but they haven’t gotten to it yet.
I never see musicals/theater, but I do live in Chicago so perhaps I’ll check it out later this week.
I was surprised how much I agreed with you on the end of the show. Perhaps it’s been so long that I misremembered your take on it. I think them both falling to their deaths is the perfect end for the series*. Having Will somehow convert to Hannibal’s side (particularly after he took such drastic steps to avoid that) would remove the conflict at the heart of the show. They’re not going to make a show about Jack hunting Will, particularly after evacuating Jack’s internal motivations in favor of writer’s needs last season. Also, Will wasn’t even credible to the audience during the second season when the show was trying to pretend he killed Freddie Lounds (and that’s someone he hated). The show has never been willing to let him actually commit murder.
*I’m assuming Thomas Harris’ depressing ending for Will as a disfigured alcoholic will never be adapted, although it would make all the more sense for this version of the character to give up on everything.
Unfortunately, Matt Zoller Seitz confirmed that Fuller’s take on season 4 was basically “murder husbands”.
Bedelia wasn’t a “hostage”. A hostage is held to make demands on a third party. Furthermore, Bedelia was only pretending to be a captive. She was perfectly capable of leaving, say in the first episode when Hannibal leaves for Sicily. After all, she says goodbye to him midway through the season when she finds it convenient. But thanks for reminding me of how much I hated what they decided to do with Bedelia in season 3.
“The Final Problem” and Reichenbach Falls actually were the end of Doyle’s Moriarty. That’s why when Doyle pathetically caved to fan pressure and revived Holmes for the Empty House it was one of Moriarty’s lieutenants, rather than the Napoleon of crime himself.
Like you folks, I enjoyed the fan-service of Jack’s curb-stomp fight with Hannibal. Unfortunately the bit at the end where he declines to capture a man incapable of outrunning him might be my most hated moment of that hated season. The Jack Crawford who didn’t give a shit what others thought about him “jacking up the law” to kill the Ripper would never stop himself from capturing the same person because he “needs Will to do it”.
In terms of the worst killer-of-the-week, one is so bad I can only assume you forgot him when you chose the totem-pole builder: Devon Silvestri, the organ thief. I guess he’s not even really a murderer (manslaughterer?) since he killed people inadvertently. I believe he had zero lines and only a few seconds of sheepish-looking screentime.
I agree on the utter worthlessness of Chiyoh, who made every episode she was in worse. She doesn’t deserve to be called a character. She’s a deus ex machina. I’ve said several times that I would prefer the first arc of season 3 if they removed all the dialogue, and a good chunk of that would be that I wouldn’t have bothered trying to figure out what her deal is. There’s no there there.
I enjoyed season 2 a lot, but no season of Hannibal has been as perfect as the recent seasons of The Americans. Just remember that season 2 contained easily the worst episode of the show’s history: Hassun.
Some could argue based on the finale that Twin Peaks was a show that ended before its time. But it had already gone off the rails before then when Lynch & Frost left.
Unlike you guys, I was grabbed by season 1 of Hannibal from the beginning, and it remains my favorite season (I like to say that I enjoy the seasons in proportion to how many episodes David Slade directed). Season 3, on the other hand, is one I don’t even like thinking about because I just get angry. That is my “point at which you regret getting more”.
While Pushing Daisies is sort of the tonal opposite of Hannibal, I enjoy both shows for that reason. They really commit to their particular style and make it work. I’ve never alternated watching episodes of them, perhaps I should try some day. I actually don’t care for the other shows Fuller has made (except for his pilot for The Amazing Screw-On Head). Shows yet to air are of course excluded from this generalization.
Thanks to your recommendation, I saw the musical. Also thanks to you, I was under the mistaken impression they were selling drinks there. That was not the case, but fortunately some nice folks next to me had a spare they lent me (and I found an IPL from Michigan I’d never heard of on the floor after the show was over). It was funny and the audience laughed throughout. I’d heard snippets of some of the songs before, but there was enough new to still be novel. I have as yet only seen portions of Silence of the Hams, so I can’t say how they stack up as parodies on the whole.
While I do love season 3, it is my least favorite season. There are things I love – the ending, everything with Mason Verger, the first episode of the third season, the pretentious up-its-own-ass aesthetic – it does, as you guys pointed out, have a lot of problems. The biggest problem for me is it tried to tell a lot of story in a short amount of time. Both stories – the Italy/fugitive arc and the Red Dragon arc – deserved to be a full season. I would have loved to see season 3 dedicated to the Italy/fugitive arc – just expand on a lot of things.
Like FictionIsntReal, my favorite season is season 1. What I loved about it was that it was basically a dark and twisted take on a crime drama. Maybe I was just taken with the fact that nobody knows who – what – Hannibal really is so he can walk around and and just fuck with people.
I actually just got done re-watching the first season of Pushing Daisies. If Hannibal is on one end of the Bryan Fuller spectrum, Pushing Daisies is one the opposite end. They are actually kind of similar – they both deal with relationships, death, crime – they just approach their themes in a very different way. I see Wonderfalls sitting right in the middle (I love Wonderfalls. After Hannibal, Wonderfalls is my favorite Bryan Fuller show – I have such a crush on Jaye Tyler.).
Also, if you guys like listening to podcasts, I came across one a while ago. The Unspoiled Podcast. This podcast covers a lot of shows – Game of Thrones, Justified, Breaking Bad to name a few – but they also covered all of Hannibal. Its a pretty good podcast and they had a lot of interesting things to say.
I would also like to add “The Person Suit”, “Hungry For Hannibal”, and “Hannibal TV Podcast Industries” into the mix of great Hannibal-themed podcasts.
Thanks for the recommendation.