Please do not miss this FANTASTIC Hannibal postmortem from Abigail Nussbaum. This is just a small taste:
[Clarice] Starling appears in the guise of FBI trainee Miriam Lass (Anna Chlumsky) whose recruitment by Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne), seen in a flashback during the first season, is a direct quote of the scene in which Starling is recruited by Crawford in Silence. Crawford sends Lass to pursue the killer known as the Chesapeake Ripper, and the scene in which she recognizes him in Hannibal Lecter is taken from Red Dragon, where it happens to Will. Unlike Will in the novel, however, Miriam does not escape Hannibal. She's presumed dead, but in the second season Jack finds her in one of the Ripper's hideouts, at the bottom of a dried-out well (another quote from Silence--this is where Catherine is kept by Buffalo Bill). During her years of captivity, Miriam is manipulated and brainwashed by Hannibal. She identifies Fredrick Chilton as the Chesapeake Ripper, and shoots him (seemingly fatally, though hardly anyone dies for good on Hannibal). Her fate after this is unknown. Starling also appears in the guise of Beverly Katz (Hettienne Park), an FBI forensic technician who befriends Will in the first season and is horrified when he's arrested for multiple murders at its end. Nevertheless, Will is able to persuade her to investigate Hannibal, and the relationship they develop becomes an echo of Lecter and Starling's "quid pro quo" relationship in Silence--Will gives Beverly insights into her current serial killer cases, and in return Beverly looks into Hannibal. When she becomes persuaded that Hannibal is a killer, Beverly goes to his house to find evidence, and is cornered by him in his basement. That scenario--a female FBI agent pointing a gun at a serial killer in his dungeon of horrors--is the final set-piece of The Silence of the Lambs, but unlike Starling Beverly does not emerge triumphant. When a shot rings out, it isn't her taking Hannibal out, and when we next see her he has left her body in a gruesome display for Jack and Will to find (Beverly is one of a few characters on Hannibal whose death is unquestionably real). Starling appears in the guise of Bedelia Du Maurier, played by Gillian Anderson, whose most famous character was modeled on Jodie Foster's performance as Starling in the movie of Silence, and who was in the running to play Starling in the movie adaptation of Hannibal when Foster passed on the role. A psychiatrist who treated Hannibal, Bedelia claims to have been manipulated by him, as he did to Miriam and tried to do to Will, into becoming a killer. She starts the first season as Hannibal's semi-willing traveling companion, and there are multiple repetitions of the scene at the end of Hannibal the novel, in which Lecter and Starling sit down to a meal that consists of the third person at the table. By the end of the season, however, we learn that she's easily as twisted as Hannibal, and though perhaps not as eager a killer as he is, takes pleasure in observing the suffering of others. [...]
Hannibal scatters Starling liberally throughout its storytelling, but always with one consistent theme. Every moment where Starling achieved a triumph in the books is transformed into failure.
read it allllllllll
