RIP, Beverly Katz.
It’s official: The crime scene investigator ran afoul of Hannibal in the worst possible way and ended her life tragically. While other characters have certainly been threatened over the course of the series, Beverly’s death was the first real blow to the team as a whole, especially considering her increased participation in the first four episodes of the second season. Hannibal brings Beverly back to the observatory, a place that haunts those in the Behavioral Science Unit: It’s the location of Miriam Lass’ lone arm and Dr. Chilton’s non-elective surgery in “Entree.” It’s also worth noting that Miriam and Beverly died by strangulation after figuring out Hannibal’s true secret. Now the observatory is Beverly’s mortuary.
Bryan Fuller and company are no strangers to incorporating artful images into Hannibal’s visual schema. In my eyes, Beverly Katz got the Damien Hirst treatment. Her corpse, dissected so expertly and precisely, reminded me of Hirst’s “Mother and Child (Divided),” in which a mother cow and calf are bisected in half. Hirst has referenced how this bisection is a reference to the religious iconography he grew up with. Yet in Hirst’s version, he is separating the ultimate mother and child both by proximity and through their bisection. They can never be whole. But Beverly is not bisected, she is cut into many pieces, perhaps symbolizing the fractured nature of the team now that Will is behind bars, Jack is distracted by his dying wife and Beverly is no more. Yet, Hirst has also discussed how bisection allowed his subjects to be viewed in new lights, and Beverly’s death—including the realization that her murder is linked to muralist James Gray through the kidneys found in Beverly’s body—will allow the team to turn their eyes to the Chesapeake Ripper case anew (“We find her kidneys, we find her killer”). Will won’t tell Jack who Beverly was going to see while he tended to his suicidal Bella, because Jack must come to the conclusion himself. Now, having seen Beverly inside and out, he has the fresh perspective to do so. Even Will’s empathetic recreation of Beverly’s death possibly foreshadows how Hannibal’s actions will affect his future: “I pull her apart layer by layer as she would a crime scene.”
While the “Mother and Child (Divided)” connection may only be my critical theory, it’s impossible to ignore the religious iconography that ends “Mukozuke,” with Hannibal positioned with his arms outstretched, as blood drips down an altar as if he is a sacrifice. The episode starts with Will and Hannibal’s parallelism, albeit of the unequal sort, while they both dine on very different breakfasts. By the end, they are both killers. For the first time, Hannibal is no longer in control. He is bested by Will, or Will’s admirer Matthew Brown (Jonathan Tucker). The episode marks such a seismic shift in the power dynamic of our two central figures, Beverly’s death acting as the ultimate catalyst for this shift. Just as the Behavioral Science Unit is hopefully given a new set of eyes because of Beverly’s peculiar death, Will is pushed from empathizer to attempted killer. Or murderer in his own right if Matthew Brown’s death by Jack’s hands can be construed as Will’s fault.