With 'Entrée,' Hannibal Offered a Taste of Its True Design

Right from the start, it was obvious that Hannibal was going to be must-see TV, and not just because of when it aired, after a block of sitcoms on Thursday night. Bryan Fuller's small-screen prequel to Red Dragon, which premiered on NBC a decade ago and survived for three critically acclaimed, ratings-challenged seasons, flaunted many of its best qualities upfront, flamboyantly peacocking like some monstrous version of the network logo.

As the pilot immediately revealed, the imagery would be grotesquely beautiful, pushing the boundaries of standards and practices with its forensic explicitness, opening dreamlike windows into the deductive imagination of its main character, tortured profiler and empath Will Graham (Hugh Dancy). The dialogue was playfully sophisticated: a kind of musical psychobabble delivered by characters constantly diagnosing the killers, each other, and themselves. And of course there was the casting coup at the show's center, a perfect pairing of actor to role. From the first lines he delivers with a dignified, almost soothing Nordic calm, Mads Mikkelsen is Hannibal Lecter.

Still, for all their phantasmagorical pleasures, the first few episodes of Hannibal had a certain whiff of formula to them. Fuller and his writers planted early seeds of serialization: Will's struggle with his mental health; the cat-and-mouse game between Lecter and an oblivious FBI pressing him into service; the tragic saga of Abigail Hobbs, passed from one psychopathic father figure to another. But these strands were woven through the conventions of episodic TV procedurals. There was a case-of-the-week quality to the show, with some new, colorful lunatic to apprehend every Thursday. And in explicitly placing Will on the spectrum, Fuller seemed to be fitting his Thomas Harris source material into a growing trend of TV centered on detectives whose developmental disorders gave them an edge in the field. Even an instantly addicted viewer could wonder if what they were really watching was, at heart, just a more artful Criminal Minds.

The first evidence to the contrary — the first glimpse of Fuller's grand design — arrived six episodes into that first season. In more ways than one, "Entrée" is the moment that Hannibal began to fully transform into itself, like Francis Dolarhyde twisting his body and mind into the shape of the Red Dragon. On the surface, it's not a radical departure from what came before, down to the introduction of a new killer. But the episode, written by Fuller and Kai Yu Wu, opens the narrative up significantly, stretching tendrils of intrigue forward and backward through the timeline. More notably, this is when Hannibal really began mucking with the canon, rearranging elements from the Harris novels (and past adaptations) into an intriguing new shape.

Fuller and Wu add several new characters to the ensemble in "Entrée," all of them either from the books or a mirror of someone from them. We meet Dr. Abel Gideon (Eddie Izzard), a homicidal inmate at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where he was remanded after murdering his wife. The episode begins with the former surgeon gruesomely killing a nurse in the style of the Chesapeake Ripper, the cannibalistic serial killer the audience — but not the characters — know is really Lecter. Gideon, however, is now claiming to be the Ripper, which prompts Will, consultant profiler Alana Bloom (Caroline Dhavernas), and FBI Director of Behavioral Science Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne) to interview him.

"Entrée" also marks the first appearances of the asylum's head administrator, Frederick Chilton (Raúl Esparza), an unethical gloryhound Hannibal will take special, repeated pleasure in punishing for his professional sins. Over the episode, it becomes clear that Chilton has planted in Gideon's head that he's the Ripper—a self-serving abuse of his psychiatric training for which he'll later be graphically (but not fatally) disemboweled. The third character we meet, through black-and-white flashbacks, is Miriam Lass (Anna Chlumsky), a young FBI trainee who Crawford put on the Ripper case. She was by all appearances murdered by the killer she was chasing — which is to say, by Lecter.

Lass is plainly modeled on Clarice Sterling, the heroine of The Silence of the Lambs, who Jodie Foster won an Oscar for portraying in Jonathan Demme's towering 1991 adaptation. Because of some complicated rights issues, Fuller wasn't allowed to depict Sterling in Hannibal — just as Clarice, the procedural that ran on CBS for a single season in 2021, couldn't include or mention Lecter. Lass becomes Fuller's proxy for the character, his sanctioned way to honor and commune with the phantom of her importance to the franchise.

In many respects, "Entrée" is the closest the show came to adapting Lambs. It borrows exact dialogue from the film ("It is so rare to find one in captivity," Chilton says of "complete sociopath" Gideon, just as his movie counterpart said of Lecter) and also some imagery. When the profilers arrive at the hospital, they walk down a long corridor, past cells with dangerous inmates inside, just as Sterling did at the start of Lambs.

Gideon also bears more than a passing resemblance to the amused, caged Lecter we meet in Lambs. In fact, you might even argue that Izzard, brilliantly cast against type, is doing Anthony Hopkins: Beyond their similarly stocky physiques, the comedian brings a kind of hammy, cavalier refinement to the role — a play on the famously droll killer-behind-glass routine that won Hopkins an Oscar, too. As with Lass, the impression is of Fuller finding a sidelong way to pay homage to what came before: We get Hopkins' version of Lecter and Mikkelsen's in one episode. There's also a sly meta flex to having a character who's falsely convinced that he's the famous killer adopt that particular schtick. It's the show treating us to the more widely known vision of Lecter, while positioning Mads' take as the "real" one.

Along with the Lambs references, "Entrée" also repurposes a very significant moment from Red Dragon: the scene from the start of the novel (and the 2002 adaptation) where Will figures out that Hannibal is the killer by stumbling upon some incriminating sketches, right before the good doctor — finally on the verge of being caught — ambushes him. Of course, it's Miriam Lass, not Will, plugged into the scene in Hannibal. Here, Fuller is once again toying with the imagery of the franchise, this time by finding a way to deliver an irresistible scene that couldn't logically happen the same way in the story he's telling. He treats the previous versions of the Lecter saga, the movies and the books, like Garret Jacob Hobbs treats his victims: as a repository of useful parts, to be repurposed as he sees fit.

After "Entrée," Hannibal would continue to creatively cannibalize its own franchise. Fuller and company borrow lines of dialogue, familiar images (a fearsome muzzle, a wheelchair on fire, a bonesaw held to skull), and plot points, only to scramble their context or place in the sequence of events. What starts as a prequel becomes a reimagining of the whole Thomas Harris library. You could call that a form of fan service, not radically different than the legacy sequels that trade on an audience's nostalgia for old pleasures.

But Fuller isn't just replicating. He's remixing, rethinking, even critiquing. In Hannibal Rising, Harris writes Lecter a tortured backstory—a regrettable stab at giving one of literature and cinema's most frighteningly unknowable monsters some easy motivation, an explanation for his evil. Hannibal, in its third season, seems to defer to that version of his history… only to tweak it with a very significant change that almost laughs at the attempt to psychoanalyze such a disturbing enigma of a man. It's not the first or the last time that the show will weaponize an audience's familiarity with the lore. Hannibal teases you with what you remember of the story and then goes another way. That's less fan service than diabolical subversion.

The closing flashback of "Entrée," where Hannibal nabs Miriam, is a reference that declares, in a sense, that all bets are off. It's the show using the audience's attachment to these characters and stories to say, in effect, "Forget all that. We're doing our own thing. The books are raw material, not a blueprint."

And more than just toying with our associations to Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon, Fuller is using them to interrogate the material, to dig into it. The Lass subplot is his way of giving Jack Crawford a dimension he never had in past adaptations. By envisioning a version of Clarice Sterling who didn't catch the killer, who got caught herself, Hannibal expands upon Harris' critical depiction of Crawford in Lambs as a mentor willing to treat his proteges like expendable chess pieces. We feel his flaws as a leader more deeply because it's a character we essentially know who — a shadow Clarice — paid for them. All the while, Hannibal forces us to to identify with Crawford by giving him a dying wife, a subplot that further complicates the show's ambivalent take on a once-more-stock character.

The paradox of "Entrée," the first great episode of Hannibal, is that it looks back in a way the show hadn't before (both through those haunting flashbacks and through allusions to a lineage of Lecters), all while declaring that this won't be the story you know already. It references the franchise past to forge a new future. And it expands the show's ambition to something richer than the weekly hunt for America's most wanted, teasing the operatic Grand Guignol psychodrama it would quickly become. In that way, the episode title is appropriate: Here's the first taste of the full feast Hannibal would serve, right up to its premature end. Ten years later, we're still hungry for dessert.

A.A. Dowd is a writer and editor who lives in Chicago.