Hanna: Season 1 (Amazon)
If you haven’t watched Hanna on Amazon Prime, you might want to check out my spoiler-free review of this unique show. The review below contains spoilers all the way to the end of season 1 of Hanna.
I’m not going to go episode-by-episode through the season. Instead, I’m going to talk about several issues that I feel will be of interest to viewers and speculate on what will happen in season 2. Join in the discussion by leaving a comment below.
Hanna’s relationship with Erik
Let’s just get this out of the way first, since it’s probably what’s foremost in your heart if you just finished watching the Hanna season 1. Hanna and Erik have a very complicated relationship, and it goes through some ups and downs during the season, but through it all, they clearly love each other. From what we can tell, though Erik has done some questionable things in the past, everything he did with regard to Hanna was motivated by love for her and a desire for her best interests.
We can see that Hanna has both the teenager’s natural desire to be independent and also a justifiable hunger for the truth about herself, which Erik at first is not telling her. She finds a piece of paper with information about her DNA and zeroes in on the fact that it says “abnormal.” But Erik takes the paper and destroys it. Then she acquires another paper which lists Erik as a “recruitment officer,” and her birth certificate listing her father as “unknown.” Clearly something highly suspicious is going on.
Hanna feels betrayed because Erik has kept many details from him and equates this with lying, so she leaves and reunites with Sophie. When Marissa finds her and tells her Erik is dead, Hanna goes with Marissa in hopes of learning the truth about where she came from. But she also realizes how much she loves Erik, even if he’s not her biological father.
When they come together again, it’s amazing to watch how well they work together without having to stop and have a long discussion first. We also see a bit of a shift in roles — he tells her about the girls at Utrax and Hanna is the one who decides they have to get them out. She also takes care of his wound. She’s done with the training phase — she’s now able to care for him and take a leadership role going forward.
Erik is clearly a strong man and also strong-willed and determined, but by the end of the season he’s been shot twice and it seems to be beyond belief that he could survive. And while we mourn his death with Hanna, we also are encouraged by the strength she shows in making sure he has a proper burial and then heading back to the only real home she’s ever known, bringing Clara, a.k.a. 249, along.
There are no loose ends: he’s told her all the secrets he’s been keeping from her and she understands he was protecting her from a complicated truth. His loss will leave a big hole in her life, but it promises growth and new relationships for Hanna in season 2.
Sophie, her family and her friends
Hanna has no place to go when she runs away from Erik in Berlin. They don’t show how she makes her way from Berlin to London; we just know she memorized the address Sophie gave her and that she stows away in the back of one of Dieter’s produce export trucks, because she earlier observed him providing some “travelers” a shady lift out of the country. So we don’t see Sophie’s reaction when Hanna suddenly shows up without calling ahead.
Despite Sophie’s seemingly close friendship with Dan, she must be longing for a girlfriend because she immediately bonds with Hanna. The two are so different that they each appreciate every aspect of the other’s personality. Sophie is patient with Hanna, not making fun of her as Hanna fills in the gaps of her knowledge of how the world works.
Hanna says she can’t trust anyone, but in essence she’s trusting Sophie, at least somewhat. She sees Sophie and her family as examples of “normal” people. I really hope these characters are in season 2 of Hanna, I want to see them again.
Erik’s relationship with Hanna’s mother
It was unclear for a long time what was happening between Erik and Hanna’s mother. But after watching the whole season, it appears that Erik recruited Johanna to sign away all parental rights and give her baby to the Utrax program.
At some point, Johanna changed her mind, and we can read between the lines that she saw something in Erik that made her feel he would be on her side. Eventually, the two of them came up with a scheme whereby Erik would go in and get the baby and the two would escape somewhere together with the baby, presumably to raise her and be a family.
Erik tells Hanna that, “I loved her. Very deeply.” But as we saw early in the first episode, the car crashed as they were being chased by Marissa and Johanna died, leaving Erik to escape with Hanna and become a single parent.
Erik managed to get Marissa to tell him where Johanna’s body was buried, and he takes Hanna to the cemetery, where Hanna later buries Erik’s body. These scenes at the cemetery bring closure and allow Hanna to move on even as she is grieving.
Erik’s relationship with Marissa
The relationship between Marissa and Erik is complicated and interesting. They don’t spend a lot of time together on screen, but in episode 4 we learn that Marissa recruited Erik to work as part of a secret CIA operation she was overseeing.
Erik was coming out of a career as a soldier and needed a job, apparently. It’s clear they have similar skills and have been carrying similar baggage from their respective roles in the original project Utrax.
Erik seems to hold Marissa responsible for the evils of the project, since from his perspective, she was in charge of it. She, in turn, obviously holds a tremendous amount of guilt about her actions, but also realizes that the higher-ups hold both the ultimate responsibility and a potential threat if Hanna’s continued survival is discovered.
When Erik kills Jacobs, and Marissa clearly realizes his death is on her since she involved him in this off-books operation.
The one thing Erik and Marissa seem to agree on, besides their shared guilt over their involvement with the first iteration of Utrax, is that Hanna needs to stay alive. Sawyer, Marissa’s boss, also seems to agree that Hanna needs to stay alive. We never find out what they plan to do with her if they captured her.
Hanna’s abilities
One of the things I liked about this show is how they slowly introduced you to Hanna’s abilities. For quite some time, I wasn’t sure if there was physically something unique about Hanna or if she just had unique training and upbringing. But as things progress, it’s clear she has extraordinary powers of observation, can think very fast on her feet, and has hearing that’s well beyond normal human capabilities.
She’s exceptionally strong and she learns fast and has an excellent memory. She managed to get back to Dieter’s apartment based on her observations looking out of the car windows while crouched on the floor in front of the back seat, and later found Dieter’s export business. Not to mention that she found the address in Berlin that Erik gave her all on her own, and later finds Sophie’s family’s home in London.
I was fascinated at how she observed and understood that Dieter was using his export business to smuggle refugees and later hitched a ride for herself. She also showed her cleverness as she searched Dieter’s apartment for the pouch Erik gave him, and the way she engineered some time alone to search for it by hiding one of the kids’ homework and pretending he dropped it on the floor.
But there’s more going on with her that’s so subtle you might have missed it. Imagine being raised in a forest wilderness with not TV, no video games, no music, no people, no streets or motorized vehicles. The world would seem so overwhelming to you that you might just panic and have a meltdown. But instead, we see Hanna open up like a sponge to experience and observe all of the new things: from the market in Morocco to the ferry to the train station to Berlin and then London, we see her making sense of the world and finding her way around, despite not having any money or prior experience using public transportation.
She also seems to enjoy music and chocolate with nuts, things she didn’t experience in the forest, and she beats Sophie’s brother’s high score on his video game the first time she plays it. She shows empathy for Dieter’s young son when she catches him out of bed for a midnight snack, and she immediately recognizes a connection with Anton, but she has no clue she’s invading Dan’s privacy when she barges into his room while he’s making out with his boyfriend.
Utrax
We don’t get to learn everything about what’s going on at Utrax, but we do learn quite a lot:
- The subjects are all girls and are known only by numbers. The highest number we see is 249, though I don’t think there were that many girls there.
- The doctor in charge of the science aspect of it insists that they need to be kept medicated until they have received socialization training.
- They’re given some kind of medication at least once a day and are trained in physical combat and also American history and geography, even though the facility is located in Romania. It’s clearly run by some secret branch of the American government.
- These are not the babies that we saw in episode 1, which were apparently euthanized after Erik breached the compound’s security. But we can conclude this is a similar study to what was done with Hanna, except she has not continued to receive the mysterious medication since Erik removed her from the facility (she was hooked up to some kind of IV when he took her, so presumably she had some treatment that accounts for some of her extraordinary abilities.
- Marissa told Erik that she carried out orders from “powerful people” that “nothing must remain” from the operation involving Hanna and the other babies. She warns him that these people “must never know” that Hanna is still alive.
The question is, what are they trying to accomplish with these girls and why? We don’t get a lot of information about this, but we do know that the other babies of Hanna’s age were killed and the program terminated (we assume that Marissa is telling the truth about that), but soon after another round of subjects were acquired and the program started again in the same location.
This time, when the security breach occurs, they decide to move the girls to a new location. Presumably they’ve got too much invested to go completely scorched-earth, or maybe they’re just not willing to kill a couple hundred pre-teen girls.
Looking ahead to season 2 of Hanna
I’m very excited to see what happens in the next season of Hanna on Amazon Prime. Hanna, though she’s only 16, is clearly a mature adult by the end of season 1. She’s learned everything she could from her father and mentor, and now she’s become the mentor/teacher of Clara.
She can clearly take care of herself. There are still mysteries to discover, as we don’t know exactly what the CIA has planned for the girls who were at the Utrax facility with Clara. They were taken to another location and one story line could center on the two girls trying to rescue them.
Marissa’s role within the CIA is in question, though it seems they will see her value even if she didn’t always obey orders. She seems to want to save her job, going so far as to shoot herself in the leg to make her story about being shot by Sawyer believable.
Do you have any theories about what they were up to at Utrax? Who was your favorite character and why? What are you most looking forward to in season 2? Let me know in the comments below.
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