Season 1, Episode 2:
Amuse-Bouche
We open on Will at the shooting range with his (somewhat anachronistic) FBI standard-issue P226, trying to get better at putting rounds on target. This becomes a less academic exercise when the target silhouette unexpectedly transforms into the corpse of Garret Hobbs. Will continues to knock chunks out of him... only to be disturbed by Jack Crawford, who is tapping on the car door Will was sleeping against. "We're here," Crawford says.
Will emerges into Chippewa National Forest, MN, where Garret Hobbs kept a cabin. The inside is a monument to deer hunting, including an attic full of antlers. Crawford hopes to find evidence that will lead to the corpses of Hobbs' seven other victims, though his (Crawford's) personal theory is that little Abigail helped her father find the girls by acting as bait. With Abigail still in a coma, they're scoping out the cabin to pass the time. And they do find evidence, though not the sort they were looking for: a curly red hair, suggesting that someone else visited the scene before they did. And someone has: a (as we first see her) currently-naked woman with a mop of violently red hair, working at her laptop to put together a new article for her tabloid website, tattlecrime.com, cataloguing the many horrors she found in Hobbs' cabin. Fredricka Lounds, paparazzi.
After the Title Sequence, Will returns to his classroom at the FBI Academy at Quantico, receiving a standing ovation (which he tells them to stop). While fighting off Shell-Shocked Veteran flashbacks to the confrontation with Hobbs, he points the class to their next duty: stopping the inevitable Jack The Ripoffs that will arise in the wake of the Minnesota Shrike. Will believes that one copycat killer, the person who gave them the girl on the stag's head, already exists.
After class is dismissed, Alana Bloom and Jack Crawford arrive with differing agendas. Crawford says that the board has approved Will's return to field duty, but Bloom wants to make sure Will actually wants to. Of course, first Will needs a psychiatric evaluation, and is assigned to Hannibal Lecter for the purpose. "I used to work homicide," Will protests. "The reason you currently used to work homicide is that you didn't have the stomach for pulling the trigger," Crawford retorts. "You just pulled the trigger ten times." It's also, as Bloom helpfully points out, the first time Will's killed anyone. On top of that, Crawford believes Will is starting to do the Like a Son to Me thing to Abigail, due to his empathy with Hobbs. And that's how we find Will in Lecter's office, investigating his wall of books.
Lecter knows how to deal with Graham too: he immediately forges Will's psych eval and puts it aside. ("Did you just rubber-stamp me?" Will asks, bemused.) Lecter also calls Graham on his surrogate fatherhood of Abigail, but unlike Crawford he's sympathetic: "You saved Abigail's life. You also orphaned her. It comes with certain emotional obligations." Unhindered by paperwork, they back-and-forth about Crawford's theory of Abigail-as-accomplice, as well as Will's ordeal as He Who Fights Monsters: "What you need is a way out of dark places when Jack sends you there."
Three random boys are walking in the woods of Elk Neck State Forest, MD, where they encounter mushrooms of some sort. At first they banter about marijuana, but then they notice the tubes slanting out of the nearby trees... and right hands, hooked up to IVs, emerging from the earth. After a commercial break, Beverly Katz pulls Will out of the shooting range to go investigate. There are nine bodies, Buried Alive amidst compost fertilizer, nutrients being pumped into them via IV. While Will does his reconstruction trance, a woman with a mop of violently red hair approaches Detective Pascal of the Maryland PD, claiming to be the mother of one of the three boys and asking for a few details. Specifically, she wants to know why that one FBI special consultant is being left alone at the crime scene. Graham doesn't manage to figure out a whole lot on this one, but that's okay: when looking down at the latest victim, he sees the corpse of Garret Hobbs instead. Oh, and then the corpse grabs him. He's not a corpse yet. (At least he's not Hobbs either.)
Graham, to his credit, returns his rubber-stamped psych eval to Dr. Lecter, but Lecter dismisses it as stress. After Lecter asks some armor-piercing questions about killing, and killing Hobbs specifically, they then discuss the murder of the week. Will is convinced they have stumbled upon somebody's garden, that he was keeping the victims alive to nourish his mushrooms. It's Lecter who points out that, structurally, mycelium
and human brain matter are quite similar, and the two of them theorize that the perpetrator was trying to create some sort of Hive Mind or Psychic Link between his victims.
In the waiting room, Freddie Lounds eavesdrops with a digital tape recorder. Upon reception, she claims to be a "Miss Kimble" and enters for her appointment.
Hannibal sees right through her. To Lounds' credit, she owns up to the deception, and surrenders her recorder when asked. After deleting the purloined conversations, Hannibal admonishes her for her rudeness. "What's to be done about that?" Dinner, possibly? But no, the guest at Lecter's table is Jack Crawford. He's here to check in on Will's state of mind, and ask why he returned to Lecter's office despite passing his psych eval. Lecter, curious why Crawford is treating Graham with kid gloves, asks if Crawford has ever lost an agent in the field. After a bit of prompting, Crawford begins to discuss his Greatest Failure.
Graham attends Katz, Zeller and Price as they investigate the nine mushroom farms. The cause of death is, to a man, kidney failure, and the killer was distributing sugar water through the IVs, which the mushrooms convert into alcohol. However, Graham suggests that the kidney failure was due to diabetic ketoacidosis, which was medically induced prior to the victims being buried. This means the perpetrator must be some sort of doctor or pharmacist. And, as Will predicts ominously, "He's gonna want to grow a new one."
This brings us to a local big-box store, where one Eldon Stammets dispenses insulin to diabetic Americans. As a pharmacist he is able to pinpoint victims with diabetes and little support system; the woman he dispenses to in his Establishing Character Moment, Gretchen Speck, is currently divorced, and signs over her home address as part of standard pharmacy procedure. He removes the vial of insulin dispensed for her and replaces it with another one he had set aside, presumably after altering its contents. Fortunately, he hasn't got long to prey on the unknowing: after a commercial break, we find the FBI's SWAT team moving in. As it happens, Stammets has just left, but one of his coworkers directs Crawford and Graham to Stammets' Buick, where they find poor Gretchen already immobilized in the trunk and submerged in fertilizer, though not yet dead. Crawford is mostly pleased, since they know the killer's name and address, and that he's not driving his car anywhere, but Price has checked Stammets' workstation and discovered bad news: Stammets was tipped off to the FBI's movements by a scandalous article about Will Graham on tattlecrime.com, claiming he's a Sociopathic Hero. Oh, and Freddie Lounds published a scandalous article about Will Graham, claiming he's a Sociopathic Hero. Not that Crawford is a paragon of virtue himself: in the next scene, we see him use FBI resources to raid Lounds' hotel room, where he blackmails her into keeping her thoughts on Graham to herself, using the hair found at the Hobbs cabin as his trump card.
The only person who doesn't seem upset over the Tabloid Melodrama is Will, who keeps vigil in Abigail Hobbs' hospital room. To his confusion, he sees a stag covered in raven feathers walk past the door. But it's only Alana Bloom, who puts a Comforting Comforter on the sleeping Will and then sits down to read a Flannery O’Connor novel to Abigail. Will notes that it's the first time they've ever been alone in a room together (for various values of "alone"). Alana says she hasn't noticed.
The next morning, Freddie emerges from her hotel room to find that Detective Pascal is waiting for her. He's been suspended for Saying Too Much, and Freddie is sure Crawford will make sure he's fired. She offers him employment in private security ("I'm not the first cop you got fired," he realizes), and she's dangling the possibility of higher pay in front of him when Eldon Stammets walks over and blows his head off. He wants to know about Will Graham. Lounds, one commercial break later, relates Stammets' Motive Rant to Crawford: he's become fixated on Graham's empathy and wants to meet someone who understands him. To demonstrate his own helpfulness, he plans to plant Abigail Hobbs, allowing Graham to connect with her. Crawford reaches Graham via cellphone, but by the time Will gets to Abigail's room, she's already gone. Graham tracks them to a side hallway and, in testament to his marksmanship training, is able to inflict a disabling gunshot on Stammets' right shoulder. Stammets seems more dejected that Graham doesn't get him than anything else.
Finally, we return to Hannibal Lecter's office, where Graham is trying to grapple with the fact that killing Hobbs felt good. Graham is worried—sadly, not unreasonably—that even though Hobbs deserved it, enjoying it makes Graham evil. Lecter's answer is troubling: "Killing must feel good to God too. He does it all the time. And are we not created in His image?"
