081: Hannibal 3x10 "...And the Woman Clothed in the Sun" - Dolarhyde's Chairs II: The Chairening

A Matter of Taste

...I think I fought that in a Diablo III boss fight.
SPOILERS UP TO (and including) HANNIBAL 3x10, as well as spoilers for the Red Dragon novel/movies.
In this episode:

• Discussion of Hannibal 3x10 "...And the Woman Clothed in the Sun," including Hannibal's changing role, Dolarhyde and Reba's relationship, Will and Bedelia's relationship, and where the season may take us next.
• How many religious figures has Hannibal been compared to on this show? Can we take some bets on who’s going to be next? (Fio's money’s on Ammit)
• We appreciate the amount of effort the scriptwriters are making to get these actors all into the same room for certain scenes.
• The echoes of the Sutcliffe situation felt retroactively in our glimpse at Bedelia’s encounter with her “violent” patient
• The beastial side of humanity and different beastial facets of nature are a running theme in this episode, which is an area we haven’t really explored yet.
• We also don’t have the entire story behind the Bedelia/Neil story yet, and since we’ve got 3 more episodes with Gillian Anderson this season, there’s a good possibility we’ll see something more of this before the season is out.*
• The rehearsals we’ve had for the Red Dragon story over the past couple of seasons

THERE'S ALWAYS AN ADDENDUM:

• From Ian: Looking back at this scene in particular, I realized we never really touched on the fact that Neil's description of Lecter's treatment seems to imply that Hannibal is essentially programming him (psychic driving, anyone?) to involuntarily start swallowing his own tongue when exposed to certain stressors. The way I was talking about it, I was almost believing it to be a tick that developed naturally from Neil himself somehow, brought to light by Lecter's unorthodox treatment (just goes to show how insidious Hannibal can be, even toward the audience). I think that is an important distinction to make when discussing this scene, especially if when Neil starts talking about the tongue-swallowing to Bedelia, it's her first time hearing about it. At that point she may still be operating in a worldview where she hears that and is like, "Wow, this guy really is losing it if he thinks he can swallow his tongue," rather than "That certainly sounds like something Hannibal could make someone do." The big question that needs to be answered is, how close is Bedelia to Hannibal when he refers Neil to her? How much does she know of his darker side at that point in time?
• Highlights from Fio's notes:
• The Tyger is generally interpreted as highlighting a duality of aesthetic beauty and primal ferocity, so I’m not 100% off base in my interpretation, but I am pretty grade school about it on the podcast
• When I was talking out “explicit” I was talking about Reba’s comments on other people’s view of Dolarhyde being positive, but it seems like you thought I was talking about the sex scene, so I’m going to leave any freudian judgements up in the air here, haha. Ian from the future: Specifically, the thing that made me go "Oh, this is something that's happening on network television, ok" was Reba going down on Dolarhyde in the living room. ...I was going to say "We've had weirder sex scenes on this show than Reba and Dolarhyde's," but on second thought, I'm not so sure we have, what with the imagery of Reba LITERALLY as the woman in the Blake paintings.

Music:

• "This is My Design" - Ian Doherty | SoundCloud | Bandcamp |

http://archive.org/download/AMOT081/AMOT081.mp3