Picking Nits
The panel challenges Chilton’s pen, Catherine’s food, missed moth evidence, Lecter’s elaborate escape, profiling by personal acquaintance, Precious’s capture, Miggs’s death, Lecter’s wine pairing and moral code, and Gumb’s target selection.
In the discussion (11)
Approx. transcript time · 01:48:30Read transcript
- Chilton imposes exhaustive safety rules and then leaves a sharp pen with Lecter.
- Gumb is supposedly starving Catherine to loosen her skin, yet she has enough food and bone to lure Precious.
- Investigators miss cocoons in multiple throats and fail to infer a skin suit from systematically removed body areas.
- The most dangerous prisoner receives only two guards and no visible camera surveillance.
- Lecter fits perfectly into a guard’s clothes, removes his face cleanly, raises and stages the second body, and fools medical professionals while healthy.
- Lecter’s apparent profiling insight is weakened because he already knew Gumb as a patient.
- Catherine’s off-screen bucket capture of a small, skittish dog is treated as mechanically improbable.
- Miggs cannot physically swallow his own tongue without first severing it.
- Chianti is criticized as the wrong wine for liver and fava beans.
- Lecter’s disgust at Miggs’s sexual assault seems inconsistent with his own cannibalism, though the panel frames it as a strict code against rudeness.
- The panel asks whether Gumb knowingly chose a senator’s daughter for notoriety or failed to recognize her.