🌞

• The first thing I noticed was that it really did not feel like it was set in the early '90s. Jonathan Demme did say he intended for The Silence of the Lambs to feel timeless in the aesthetic sense. Clarice (in TSOTL) isn’t dated by her clothes, but in the show, the costumes seem like "90s-inspired" clothing. They’ll nail one aspect like the silhouette or the material, but entirely disregard another. They did stick to the movie for Clarice's main outfit that she wears in the climax of the film, but a lot of her other outfits just scream 2010s. Also, the sets all kind of had the vibe of an IKEA showroom; there was very little detail if it wasn’t used as a prop or a direct nod to a plotline. Initially I wondered whether they had copied NBC's Hannibal and done some sort of timeline jump, or if they intended for it to seem more modern, but I couldn’t see any evidence of it. I wouldn’t mind if they had done it intentionally, but it’s meant to be a pickup from a year after TSOTL, and it just makes it very hard to believe.

• I really liked that they brought light to the struggles trans people faced during that time, as well as focusing on the racism Ardelia faces, but my biggest issue with it is that they entirely missed the point of Harris’ storyline for Clarice. It felt like they seriously underplayed the misogyny that Clarice faces in both books. Trying to humanize Paul Krendler by turning him into a stubborn old man who’s abrasive because he’s going through a difficult divorce feels like such a huge betrayal of the feminist message of Clarice’s original character arc. Yes, today, if someone was to be an open misogynist who sexually harasses their coworkers and snuffs out careers simply by playing on sexist stereotypes, they would be reprimanded. However, Paul Krendler was based on a very real archetype that did very real harm to women. Changing his character to make him redeemable feels like they entirely erased the aspect of Clarice’s unique suffering because she’s a woman. It just strips down her character to a traumatized orphan turned FBI agent and almost makes the show feel like a poorly written fanfiction.

• Despite my gripes with the script, I think Rebecca Breeds did an great job. Even though the story diverges from the novel and movies, her performance is a very solid middle ground between Foster and Moore and the two versions you see of Clarice in the films. She seems very passionate about Clarice as a character and the challenges she faces as a female FBI agent in the '90s. Though the script didn’t give her a chance to fully explore it, in interviews she said she read the book multiple times, and it seems like she has a really deep understanding of the character.

• The fact that they couldn’t get the rights to Hannibal’s character and had to spend the whole series trying to allude to this massive piece of the TSOTL plot without saying his name is quite funny to watch. But because they couldn’t delve into that aspect of the story, it took away from getting to put across Clarice’s full character, especially when she’s going back over her memories from childhood and her relationship with her parents. In a funny way, it kind of vindicates the ending of the Hannibal novel, because nearly every single one of her problems in this series could’ve been solved by running away with a hot cannibal.

• I really like the details they added from the book that weren’t in the movie, like Jame Gumb's mother and the tape of he watched of the beauty pageant. I appreciate that they tried to expand on the character further than the movie did and clean some things up, because the film did a lot of damage to trans people, even if that wasn’t the intention.

• I don’t know how to feel about the ending. I think if they had given more attention to the effect of the patriarchy in the show, the idea of Clarice returning to her estranged mother would have felt a lot more well-rounded and satisfying, but it kind of felt like they just didn’t know what else to do with her. I still have the same feelings as the ending of the Hannibal film, she is still stuck “trying to break through the glass ceiling like a bee in a bottle.” Nonetheless, I do now sob to Brandi Carlile’s rendition of “Take Me Home, Country Roads” when thinking about Clarice.