Mind. Blown.

Penultimate episodes have usually been the strongest, but if the theory's right, yeah, that should be some serious Acting.

Holy shit.

You will have loved Days of Future Perfect!

It can't quite be the case the advertising works to make us aware of desires we already have—or, that can't be all advertising does. It has to invoke desires we already have, basic ones, universal ones, and promise their fulfillment in new and surprising ways.

AVC: This season, did you have some episodes you thought worked particularly well or some episodes you thought did not?

BF: I think, for me, the courtroom episode is one that if I could do the season again I would eliminate. Just because it was such a departure from the style of the show, and it felt like we weren’t…

I'm really glad to hear Fuller recognized the courtroom episode didn't work. That was the first and only episode of this show that I thought was actually bad, and sending it to the field to "stare at the flowers" sounds just about right.

I'd never gainsay anyone who quit this show because it's too gory, or morbid, or bleak. That's a perfectly rational response.

Yeah. Let's be real. There is absolutely no way, no how, no chance that Will is dead. Leaving aside his role in the books, leaving aside the value of having an actor like Dancy in your cast, leaving aside the fact that the 'manhunt' for Hannibal next season would be bland without him—haven't we learned by now that no…

I just spent an hour on the phone trying to work through my feelings about this episode.

I would've loved an absurdist take on the legal process in the Hannibal-verse; portraying Will's trial as something out of Der Prozess would've been wonderfully fitting. But what we got was a courtroom scene as written by someone whose knowledge of the subject seems to have come through vaguely recollected episodes of…

I don't think the criticisms of Mad Men as nostalgia porn are right, and I don't think the fact that it's pitched right down the middle of the plate to consumers of 'quality television' is a sufficient explanation for its "heaps of acclaim," but … I don't not think those things, either.

The writing is not Hannibal's strongest suit, and if that's your primary measure of quality for TV, then it's going to rank behind some of the others. (The notion that its writing is appreciably worse than GoT is … uhh, an opinion, I guess. But I don't think there's much to be said for that show beyond it being a very…

I don't want to rehash this, but while the foray into the legal milieu makes sense in the context of that arc, the writers were just flat-out incompetent about it. While I don't expect—or even really want—a proper reflection of actual legal procedure, I never got the sense the writers were playing with the form to…

"… because the flaws in the program are the kinds of flaws more TV (including that first season) could stand to have."

My hope is that they take their inspiration from Guy Fieri.

I'm kind of shocked the general presumption is that this episode would be the last time we see her. Are you kidding me? You don't write a character like that—more to the point, an actress like that—out of your show unless the story absolutely demands it. And they left … well, if not plenty of wiggle room, at least…

I thought it was some reference to "The Californians" that I wasn't getting.

Very cool; a much stronger episode, imo. I have a hard time choosing between 04 & 05 myself as a favorite; the two in sequence are just out of control good.

At first I thought I must be thinking of the wrong episode—I'm terrible when it comes to remembering episode names—but nope; that's just a really, really eccentric pick. Especially when this season's given us Sakizuke (2.04) and Mukozuke (2.05).