“Everybody thinks it’s cool or funny,” Catherine Martin says of the serial-killer phenomenon. “These monsters, they leave human beings behind — like you and me.” She’s saying all this to the mother of the serial killer who nearly made her one of his victims, but she could just as well be saying it to the audience of Clarice. From the start, the show has steadily steered away from the sort of supervillain glamour that gets attached to serial murderers in the public consciousness. Buffalo Bill is just an asshole who dies coughing up his own blood on the basement floor in flashback after flashback; Hannibal Lecter isn’t even mentioned by name. That last bit is legally mandated, of course, but from this episode, you almost get the sense that Clarice might have kept him at a distance anyway. This is less a show about the evil that men do than it is about the trauma left in their wake.
I reviewed the tenth episode of Clarice for Vulture.
Tags: clarice, hannibal, reviews, the silence of the lambs, TV, TV reviews, vulture