Much like the first season, Season 2 of Hannibal has been absolutely chock full of mind-blowing visuals and some of the most wildly spectacular – not to mention drop dead gruesome – happenings in the history of the small screen.
This week, as we await the season finale, we thought it fitting to take a look back on some of the craziest things we’ve seen during the second season thus far, and we can be pretty damn sure that we’ll be wanting to add a few more to the list, once the credits roll on what is sure to be a shocker of a finale!
Craziest Moments of Hannibal Season 2
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#1
The second season of Hannibal unexpectedly kicked off with a particularly epic fight sequence between Hannibal and Jack Crawford, which went on for two full minutes and immediately promised us that Season 2 was going to be a wild one. The biggest shock of all was that the fight - which takes place some period of time after the events of the majority of the season - ended with Hannibal stabbing Crawford in the neck with a piece of glass, presumably killing him. Does the fight really end with Crawford's death? I guess we'll find out soon!
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#2
Hannibal has been home to some of the most wildly creative killers in the history of entertainment and we met a particularly artistic one in the Season 2 premiere ('Kaiseke'), who used dead bodies to create his ultimate masterpiece. He literally created a color palette of human corpses, collecting and stitching people of various skin tones together, and then preserving them with a resin spray. Horrifying? Beautiful? The lines tend to blur between the two, when it comes to Hannibal!
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#3
Amanda Plummer played a twisted acupuncturist in Season 2's fourth episode ('Takiawase'), essentially serving as Hannibal's answer to the real-life 'suicide doctor' Jack Kevorkian - only a whole lot crazier. When patients in extraordinary amounts of pain come to Plummer's Katherine, she treats them by lobotomizing them and removing their eyeballs, and the episode reveals that one of her patients has been literally turned into a human beehive - with bees crawling on and flying in and out of his honeycomb-covered corpse. Well... at least her intentions were good?
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#4
Speaking of Episode 4, the episode came to a close on a cliffhanger of a note, with crime scene investigator Beverly Katz finding out the truth about Hannibal, and discovering his stash of human meat. While Episode 4 ended with Hannibal and Beverly coming face to face in Hannibal's basement, Episode 5 ('Mukozuke') kicked off with the unsurprising reveal that Beverly didn't make it out alive. What was surprising, however, was the manner in which she was killed and displayed. Hannibal froze her corpse, cut it into neat and tidy sections and then sandwiched each piece of Katz between glass panels, turning her into one of the most horrifying crime scenes in the history of the show. Hannibal sure does know how to make a statement, doesn't he?!
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#5
Another one of Hannibal's horrifying/beautiful visuals was on display in Episode 6 ('Futamono'), when city councilor Sheldon Isley was found on display in a parking lot, literally fused to a tree and with poisonous flowers replacing the internal organs that were ripped out of him. The parking lot was once a natural habitat for songbirds and it was Isley who was responsible for destroying it, you see, and Lecter didn't take too kindly to that. "So he paved paradise to put up a parking lot," Crawford remarked upon seeing Isley's body and realizing why he was killed, quoting Joni Mitchell - or Counting Crows, if you prefer.
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#6
Episode 6 was a pretty memorable one all around, and later on in the episode, Hannibal provided Dr. Abel Gideon the courtesy of a last meal, before he finally dispatched of the faux Chesapeake Ripper. Gideon's last meal, you ask? His own leg, which Hannibal cut off and forced him to eat. Gideon nonchalantly took a bite and offered up his 'compliments to the chef,' in one of the season's most deliciously twisted moments.
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#7
Not long after being acquitted of the murders he was accused of throughout the first half of the season, Will Graham resumes his work with the FBI in Episode 8 ('Su-zakana'), which features one of the more unusual 'Killers of the Week' we've yet seen. Social worker/serial killer Clark Ingram murders a female victim and then stuffs her body inside the uterus of a dead horse, presumably because he's fascinated by the idea of rebirth. Oh, and if that wasn't crazy enough, he also places a live bird inside the chest cavity of the woman, which flies to freedom during her autopsy. Later in the episode, animal rescue worker Peter Bernardone buries Ingram alive, inside the body of another horse, solidifying the episode's status as one of the most off the wall hours in TV history.
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#8
Another 'Killer of the Week' is featured in Episode 9 ('Shiizakana'), in the form of an animal-obsessed dude who builds himself a deadly exoskeleton suit, which essentially turns him into a mechanical grizzly bear. A former patient of Dr. Lecter's, the man - Randall Tier - truly believes he is an animal stuck inside the body of a human, and he builds the suit to at long last embody the form he's convinced he was meant to have. Several victims are brutally slaughtered at the hands of Tier during the episode, their limbs torn off, throats slashed and buckets of blood decorating the snow-covered landscape. Much like many of the killers on the show, Randall Tier is one that I'd love to see an entire movie devoted to!
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#9
Episode 10 ('Naka-Choko') introduced us to the delightfully sadistic Mason Verger, one of the more memorable characters from the Hannibal universe. In the series, Michael Pitt takes over the role from Gary Oldman - who played Verger in the 2001 Hannibal movie - and Pitt is absolutely divine in the role, brilliantly channeling the over the top madness of Heath Ledger's Joker. In the 11th episode ('Ko No Mono'), Verger forces a young boy to cry, telling him his foster parents don't want him, and then he soaks up the kid's tears on a small piece of cloth. Shortly thereafter, he drops the tear-soaked cloth in a martini, literally drinking the salty tears of the boy. Doesn't get much more evil than that!
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#10
Of course, as soon as Mason Verger made his presence known on the show, diehard fans of the source material were anxiously waiting for the moment where Hannibal forces him to cut off and eat his own face, and we were indeed treated to that scene in last week's Episode 12 ('Tome-wan'). After Verger nearly kills Hannibal and feeds him to his flesh-hungry pigs, Hannibal gets the upper hand - as he always does - and exacts his revenge, drugging up Verger and convincing him that it's a good idea to slice off his own face and consume the hunks of bloody flesh. Yep. They went there. And it was awesome.
