Season Two of Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal begins with Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) — framed as the Copycat Killer by Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen), thus driving a wedge between Will and everyone (else) who loves him — imprisoned under the watch of Dr. Frederick Chilton (Raúl Esparza) in the Baltimore State Asylum for the Criminally Insane. There he stands either in his weirdly medieval-looking cell or the barred cage Chilton provides for high security sessions/visits, gaze gently absent, rehearsing memory-based fantasies of fly-fishing for trout during which he is occasionally accompanied by the girl he briefly considered his adoptive daughter, Abigail Hobbs (Kacey Rohl) — the girl whom he’s now accused of having murdered.
These fantasies are, of course, a method of escape under extreme pressure … “what I have instead of a view,” as Anthony Hopkins’s version of Dr. Lecter admits under similar circumstances, in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs. But they’re also a promise Will makes to himself, first in a long string of visual metaphors: If Hannibal’s a hunter, a creature of the woods — a Wendigo, in Will’s symbolic dreams — then Will is a fisherman, playing out a long, long line and changing his bait when needed to force his predatory prey to give way to instinct and bite, all while seeming to do nothing at all. “You have to create a world where only you and the fish exist,” he tells Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne), much later: sink to its level, mimic its behaviors, match yourself to it in ways that may alter your own thinking until the two of you begin to blend. It’s a lot like friendship, a lot like love … except that if you do it right, it ends with a hook (and a plate).
Season One of Hannibal is a bit of a one-joke pony, which makes it weirdly comforting in hindsight. How, it consistently wonders — all but out loud — can the people around Hannibal possibly fail to figure out his true nature, considering him almost up until the last moment to be a trustworthy friend and colleague? (For Christ’s sake, as the old meme goes, it fucking rhymes.) By Season Two, however, at least one person onscreen is finally both completely aware of what Dr. Lecter’s capable of and completely committed to speaking the truth about what lurks beneath that beautifully tailored person-suit, even if absolutely nobody to whom he voices that theory seems willing to believe him.
To former potential love interest/Will Graham cheerleader Dr. Alana Bloom (Caroline Dhavernas), for example, Will’s frantic insistence that Hannibal is both the Chesapeake Ripper and the Copycat Killer is just more proof Will belongs in an asylum rather than jail, his singularly empathetic brain obviously overtaxed by encephalitis and traumatized by being thrust into murder scene after murder scene by Jack Crawford. And then there’s canny forensic expert Beverly Katz (Hetienne Park), who turns up at Will’s cell looking for consultation on the latest weird string of murders after Hannibal proves less than up to the task of being “the new Will Graham” (mainly because Lecter’s far more interested in tracking down the serial killer and disposing of him himself, as he thinks Will would want, rather than solving the case through conventional methods).
Will cuts a deal with Beverly to swap his expertise for her checking out evidence that might point to Hannibal, then has to deal with the guilt when doing so gets her killed. “Luckily,” however, this also happens around the same time that Will, now on trial, discovers he has an “avid fan” whose fascination with his supposed murderous career prefigures the Great Red Dragon’s eventual fan-mail to imprisoned Dr. Lecter (in Michael Mann’s Manhunter and Brett Ratner’s Red Dragon). When Beverly’s corpse turns up, sub-divided between glass slabs like Damien Hirst’s famous steer, Will is thus able to point said fan towards Hannibal in a first attempt at revenge. The results of this are both less than he hopes for and more costly than he expects, in that the act is enough to cause Alana to finally break with him and start a rebound relationship with Hannibal instead.
This one step forward/five steps back pattern continues through most of the season’s first half, as Will becomes increasingly ensnared in the violence that Hannibal’s betrayal has roused inside him. The same man who once told Abigail that killing someone felt like “the worst thing in the world” is confronted by his instinctive desire to render “a reckoning” that will make his toxic former friend suffer all the same helplessness, fear and loss of self with which Will is now struggling, determined to free himself from both his current situation and the “psychic driving” he soon realizes Hannibal must have used to put him there. What makes it particularly frustrating is that, since Will now knows Hannibal’s methods, he can clearly see the strings once used to puppet him as they tug on everybody else, but still can’t convince anyone those strings exist.
Yet he and Hannibal continue to share a unique mutual vulnerability, a weird meeting of the minds where psychopathy and ultra-empathy blend into each other — something neither has ever shared with anyone else, or ever will. It’s this bond that Will eventually decides not only to use, but to undermine, to trap Hannibal, even knowing that to do so will be like trapping himself. “It’s all theater,” he says, after Jack’s finally “allowed” (in episode 2.07, “Yakimono”) to find his long-lost protégé Miriam Lass (Anna Chlumsky) again — but only because this discovery is part of Hannibal’s apparently long-seeded plan to get Will out of the asylum, while simultaneously using Miriam as brainwashed Exhibit #1 in a plan to shift responsibility for his own body-count as the Chesapeake Ripper onto none other than Dr. Chilton.
While this gorgeous feat is just one of the series’ many examples of what fans had already started to call “murder wizardry” — a series of ever more crazily elaborate displays of bodily deconstruction, retroactively rendered only slightly more plausible by the eventual revelation that Hannibal’s had a secret assistant all along, (im)balanced by the same sort of ultra-violent choreography as the Hannibal-vs.-Jack knock-down drag-out kitchen brawl which bookends the season — it’s notable as the turning point where it becomes really obvious that Hannibal was always a Gothic blood opera staged with snarky camp flair, rather than any brand of true procedural, much as the show might have aped the genre’s tropes in Season One. In other words, the real reason Will Graham’s trial doesn’t last more than an episode is because traditional courtroom drama bores Bryan Fuller … and that’s fine, but it’s not like it doesn’t show. Then again, maybe watching people who talk like Will, Alana, Jack, and Hannibal attempt to testify in court without sounding completely ridiculous really is its own reward, in terms of sheer theatricality.
Moving into the season’s second half, we settle back into an inside-out version of the therapy template: Once again, Hannibal and Will end up sitting like bookends in Hannibal’s office, facing each other, exchanging observations — except this time, Will demands as much truth from Hannibal as he can get, and Hannibal … actually tries to provide it, highly metaphorical language aside. Again, the cases they cover together mirror the emotional movement of their relationship: In Episode 2.08, “Su-zakana,” Will can’t help but identify with hapless, brain-damaged former groom Peter Bernardone (Jeremy Davies), who engineers a grotesque “burial” for a co-worker for whom he once might have harbored romantic aspirations, hoping it will point the finger at her real murderer: His blandly smiling social worker, who compels Peter’s silence by threatening him with misdiagnosis. “Do you have a shadow, Peter?” Will asks him, anger visibly rising. “Someone close to you … someone you trusted?” This leads to a showdown in Peter’s old stable, marked by one of the best lines in all TV scriptwriting: “Peter, is your social worker inside that horse?” Hungry to regain any sense of righteousness, Will almost allows himself to gun the social worker down vigilante-style, only for Hannibal to thwart him by literally sticking his finger in the trigger. “With all my knowledge and intrusion, I could never entirely predict you,” he tells Will, admiringly. “I can whisper through the chrysalis, but what emerges follows its own nature, and is beyond me.”
It’s definitely to Hannibal’s advantage that we can soon juxtapose his elegant Luciferian manipulations with the antics of a much more immediately hate-able villain, pedophile slaughterhouse empire heir Mason Verger (Michael Pitt), whose three main hobbies are breeding man-eating pigs, drinking dirty martinis seasoned with children’s tears, and being unforgivably rude. Hannibal and Will become entangled with Mason through his sister, Margot (Canadian horror icon Katharine Isabelle), whom Hannibal starts treating after she tries — and fails — to kill Mason. “Perhaps you should find someone else to do it for you,” Hannibal suggests, making sure Will’s therapy appointments coincide with hers; Margot raises an eyebrow and goes for it, even though she admits Will doesn’t really have the right sort of parts for her proclivities. Will’s not too surprised, considering how much time Hannibal’s already been spending trying to convince him to kill somebody other than Hannibal, and enjoy it.
In many ways, curiosity/amusement remains not only Hannibal’s primary raison d’être but also the lure he dangles before Will, only to have Will dangle it for him in return. For a three-episode span (“Yakimono,” “Su-zakana” and 2.09, “Shiizakana”), Will seems genuinely undecided about whether to drop his initial idea of a “reckoning” in favor of becoming (or “Becoming,” as the Great Red Dragon will eventually call it) what Hannibal continues to maintain would be Will’s best potential self: i.e., a fellow human-hunter capable of the same aesthetic understanding Hannibal believes sets him apart from all other serial killers. “Who will answer your questions [if you kill me]?” Hannibal asks, turning his face away when Will sticks a gun in it, apparently willing to gamble that the high Will gets from bringing down people like self-created were-cavebear Randall Tier (Mark O’Brien) can’t fail to make Will eventually join Hannibal, instead of beating him.
Will certainly seems to deliver on this wager when he lays Tier’s broken corpse out on Hannibal’s dining table like a piece of retrieved game, noting: “I’d say this makes us even. I send someone to kill you, you send someone to kill me; even-Steven.” Soon enough, Will’s claiming to have given up good and evil for behaviorism, to which Hannibal replies: “Then you can’t say that I’m evil … Typhoid and swans, it all comes from the same place.” Can killing for fun, like the not-so-absent God who made both, and bringing Hannibal fresh cuts of meat for them to share be far behind?
Well, apparently not — and yet. If Season One’s arc can be reduced to Hannibal using Will’s weaknesses against him while simultaneously falling a little bit in love with the idea of a friendship between equals, at least enough to feel about as sorry as he can when he “has” to destroy Will’s life, then Season Two’s arc boils down to Will both turning that strategy inside-out and deepening its overall impact on both of them, allowing Hannibal to literally fantasize about he and Will running away together before pulling the rug out from under him. 
That the stakes this time around have ramped up from friendship to outright love is made fairly explicit, literally and figuratively — a spectacular double-lovemaking scene, which visually marries Will having sex with Margot with Alana having sex with Hannibal, manages to be both startlingly erotic and downright creepy, while Hannibal doodles himself as Achilles mourning over Will as Patroclus (“Took divine intervention to bring them down”). Even Will’s dreams of killing Hannibal are infiltrated by dialogue that seems stolen wholesale from Plato: “No one can be fully aware of another human being unless we love them. By that love we see potential in our beloved. Through that love, we allow our beloved to see their potential. Expressing that love, our beloved’s potential comes true.”
By the time Will’s supposed conversion to a Lecteresque system of ethics is revealed as just the longest of all possible long cons, his efforts to remake himself into the image of Hannibal’s soulmate have already racked up a body-count that must make Hannibal’s Crowleyan philosophy of “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law” seem considerably more attractive than accepting responsibility for what happens next: Mutual betrayal and a last awful spasm of heartbreaking violence which leaves Hannibal in the wind, both Will and Jack possibly dying, Alana potentially crippled, and Abigail first “resurrected,” then murdered yet again (for real, this time) right in front of Will’s face. (The main problem with consistently talking in metaphors, Dr. Lecter, is that you might end up with the person you wanted to surprise with a gift they couldn’t possibly have seen coming left just staring at you in bloodstained disbelief, like: “You mean Abigail actually being alive all this time was the fucking teacup?!?”)
It’s a bitter non-victory, just one more regret for Will to be riddled with, and if the whole series had ended there, it would’ve been both pretty damn awesome and the very worst kind of narrative stomach-punch — the sort delivered knife-first, like Hannibal hugging Will tight enough to kiss at last, but only in order to disembowel him all the more efficiently. “I let you see me, know me,” Hannibal tells Will. “I gave you a rare gift, but you didn’t want it.” “Didn’t I?” Will replies, through gritted teeth. But also, and just as truthfully, Hannibal asking: “Did you really think you could change me, the way I changed you?” To which Will replies, simply: “I did.”
Which, in turn, paves the way for Season Three.
I adore this show so much, but there are not enough words to describe how much I loathe Mason Verger.