Anatomical and Metaphysical: An Overview of Hannibal: Season Three

After the jam-packed twisty delight that was season two of Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal, complicated as a Moebius strip ourobouros, season three — the climax of this luxuriant and decadent meal — can seem, at first glance, almost schizophrenic. On revisitation, the best way to approach it may be as two mini-seasons shoved into a single package, stuck together by Fuller’s mounting realization that he’s probably not getting any more last-minute renewals. Because there’s so much to cram into those thirteen episodes, therefore, the effect can’t help but be somewhat hallucinatory and feverishly super-heated, particularly in the season’s first sequence (his meditation on Harris’s novel Hannibal, in the same way the second sequence finally brings us his meditation, bass-ackwardly, on Harris’s Red Dragon, often cited as the whole series’s primary inspiration).

In the wake of his flight from Baltimore, after apparently massacring most of the rest of the main cast, we rejoin Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) at the helm of a sexy motorcycle, clad all in leather, driving through Paris to the accompaniment of a very giallo-like synthesizer score as opposed to his usual classical music. He’s returned to Europe — first France, where in the cold open he kills art historian Roman Fell in order to assume his identity, and then Florence, Italy, where he uses his new name (“Dr. Fell”) and surprisingly intimate knowledge of Dante’s Inferno to charm his way into a prominent curatorship at the Palazzo Capponi. Along for the ride is his former psychiatrist, Dr. Bedelia Du Maurier (Gillian Anderson), who was smart enough to extricate herself from Hannibal’s proximity back when he still had a person-suit to worry about, yet returns to him once it’s been shredded. Apparently, she’d rather enjoy herself for a while sharing the international high life in hiding with him than spend her days waiting to get run down and eaten, an attitude which anyone who’s already watched the last two seasons can probably understand.

So now Bedelia answers to the name of “Lydia Fell,” the new curator’s wife. Their weirdly sensual yet celibate “marriage” reduces her to the most beautifully modern of Hannibal’s possessions, a spectator/voyeur who’s eventually forced to become a co-conspirator/participant, forever eating a flesh-sweetening diet of acorns and oysters while drowning in the addictive murk of Hannibal’s murderous allure. As usual, however, she’s already figured out an exit plan: Cultivate an addiction to the same drugs Hannibal once used on Miriam Lass and Will Graham while “psychically driving” them both, imply that her real identity has blurred so much she barely knows what’s going on around her, then welcome the police or FBI as her rescuers once they turn up.

“You’re drawing them to you,” she observes, after Hannibal’s killed their second dinner guest in a row, but we can’t fail to understand what — or who — she really means, especially after discovering Hannibal turned the first victim into a dripping red meat-origami valentine’s heart. After all, we haven’t seen Will (Hugh Dancy), her chief competition for a spot on Hannibal’s dinner-plate, since the end of season two…and frankly, that’s the sort of overdramatic grotesquerie that has the former profiler’s name written all over it.

As Will recovers from season two’s fallout, meanwhile, the lingering impingement of the “evil Will” persona he’d constructed to tempt Hannibal allows him to imaginarily cohabit Hannibal’s “memory palace,” tracking Hannibal through those shards of himself he allowed Will to see which don’t ring entirely like lies. (Like any good devil, Hannibal lies mainly with the truth, after all.) Will’s also pursued by his own regrets, literally: Episode 3.02 “Primavera,” allows us to cooperate in his yearning/delusion that Abigail Hobbs (Kacey Rohl) — the “daughter” he and Hannibal first saved, then killed, together — might have survived that final bloodbath in Hannibal’s mansion, almost right up until the final act-break. (It’s this sort of supremely slippery storytelling that makes much of season three’s first sequence a bit of a blur: non-linear, super-theatrical, occasionally barely coherent; stuff happens, but it goes by quick, and sometimes you can barely remember how you learned a given piece of information, except in hindsight.)

But Abigail’s still dead and Will’s left stranded in Italy without her, chatting with Inspector Rinaldo Pazzi (Fortunato Cerlino), here reframed as the first person to realize what Hannibal Lecter was but unable to prove it to his own department’s satisfaction. Saddled with money problems and a hot young wife, Pazzi’s also still living down the disgrace of having once accused a young Lithuanian medical student who liked to sketch Botticelli paintings over and over of being Il Mostro de Firenze, an aesthetically-minded serial killer of twenty years ago whose case remains open (mainly because even back then, Hannibal ate his evidence). He and Will meet in the Norman Chapel in Palermo, which Will is visiting because it’s literally the foyer of Hannibal’s memory palace, which makes it seem like a good place to start. But Hannibal’s been there first, which is why Pazzi’s there, and when Will sees what’s been left for him — the heart-corpse — he realizes that while Hannibal is almost certainly in Florence, a short stop-by in Lithuania will be necessary to discover the building blocks of Hannibal’s personal trauma, if only to figure out how to catch him. “I forgive you,” he murmurs, before he leaves, hopefully unaware of Hannibal standing in the shadows right behind him, listening.

Episode 3.03, “Secondo,” is Fuller’s compacted reply to Harris’s much-decried fourth Lecter novel, Hannibal Rising, in which we find out that — much like Inspector Pazzi — Dr. Lecter is the sole survivor of a line of similarly “eccentric” aristocrats, born a Dracula-esque Count in an honest-to-badness castle. Will visits said castle, finding it abandoned and decaying, inhabited only by the man Hannibal says killed his little sister Mischa and the self-elected warden of that man’s firefly-ridden snail garden prison, Chiyoh (Tao Okamoto). Quite possibly the prettiest deus ex machina ever, Chiyoh was once “handmaiden” to Hannibal’s aunt/adopted mother Lady Murasaki and co-guardian to Mischa, who was young enough to play the Abigail Hobbs role in Hannibal’s formative years. She’s also a dab hand with both shotgun and sniper rifle, which will come in handy later on. (Okamoto’s mysterious, deadpan performance is a subtle treasure, well deserving of the compliment Mikkelsen’s Hannibal eventually gives her — the same one Harris’s Hannibal gives Clarice Starling, that of comparing her to the most stable elements in the periodical table, those between iron and silver.)

From the moment Will introduces himself as Hannibal’s “intimate friend,” Chiyoh becomes the first person to hint around what Bedelia will later announce straight out — just as Hannibal has allowed Will to understand him on a far deeper level than anyone probably has since Mischa’s death consolidated his own knowledge of himself, Hannibal similarly understands Will in a far deeper way than anyone to whom he’s previously provided not-exactly-professional therapy, had sex with, or mentored/fathered. Which is why the idea of Will forgiving him for the way he punished Will’s betrayal upsets Hannibal enough to finally make him vow to eat Will, if Will won’t leave him alone. The idea that Hannibal can feel betrayed by anyone is apparently a novel one for Chiyoh, as is the simplicity with which Will punctures her moral dilemma: If Hannibal left her alone to turn Lecter Castle into his sister’s murderer’s prison, it was only because it amused him to wonder exactly how long she could go without finally killing the man.

“He took someone from you, and you want revenge,” she tells Will. “But there are other means of persuasion besides violence.” Though Chiyoh does end up killing the murderer, it’s only because Will essentially forces her to by letting the man out of his cage; she still wants Hannibal caught, not killed, and when Will fails to convince her he’s not more in favor of the latter rather than the former, she throws him off the back of a moving train.

Back in Baltimore, flashbacks reveal the survival, though scarred both inside and out, of not only Dr. Frederick Chilton (Raùl Esparza, last seen getting shot in the head by poor Miriam Lass) but also both Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne) — whose last wrenching days with his terminally-ill wife send him back to Italy, where they met — and Dr. Alana Bloom (Caroline Dhavernas), whose fall from Hannibal’s upstairs window has left her with blood that’s half marrow and a very Chilton-esque limp. It’s through Alana that we re-meet the Vergers, Mason and Margot, who’ve (temporarily) put aside their personal problems so Mason can track down Hannibal and punish him for “making” Mason eat his own face. Re-cast after season two, Mason is now played by sly and weedy British actor Joe Anderson, as befits a version withered from Michael Pitt’s height by the after-effects of paralysis. This new Mason also claims to have become a sickbed Christian, which makes his continual evocation of “the risen Jesus!” he’s supposedly gotten “right with” a particularly black-humorous note, especially when applied to his elaborate plans to capture and cannibalize Dr. Lecter by sections. Margot (Katharine Isabelle), on the other hand, is mainly there to transfer money and ignore Mason’s jokes, at least until she lays eyes on Alana, appearing at her stable door in blood-red lipstick and a fierce new haircut. “This place is confusing,” Dr. Bloom announces, coolly. “Is this my entrance?” “It could be,” Margot replies.

Odd kaleidoscope sex scene aside — never has it been quite so obvious that this series is driven primarily by the cis-male queer gaze, IMHO — Alana and Margot do make a great power couple going forward; they think in very similar ways, now that Alana isn’t quite as held back by her affections or an inability to rationalize the spilling of blood. Yet she still isn’t as completely amoral as her lover, let alone her prospective brother-in-law. Which is why it’s Alana who tries to warn Inspector Pazzi what an absolutely terrible idea it is to try to sell Hannibal’s whereabouts to Mason, only to discover Hannibal on the other end of the line and Pazzi’s guts already spilled. This episode also includes a beautiful follow-up to Hannibal and Jack Crawford’s knock-down drag-out brawl at the beginning and end of season two, a rematch which proves that when Hannibal doesn’t have the advantage of surprise, it’s the heavier weight that really does the damage. Much like Will’s train trip with Chiyoh, gravity becomes the deciding factor, though of course Hannibal has Pazzi’s corpse to break his fall.

Accelerating through the next episode — Jack and Will “rescue” Bedelia; Will meets Hannibal in front of Botticelli’s “Primavera,” then pulls a knife on him and promptly gets shot by Chiyoh; Hannibal tries to feed Will’s brain to Jack, only to be interrupted by a squad of Pazzi’s equally corrupt but less conflicted fellow Italian cops, from whom Chiyoh saves Jack — we end up back at the Vergers’ home-base, where Mason and his weird-ass pet medico Cordell Doemling (Glenn Fleshler) plan to transplant Will’s face onto Mason so Mason can eat Hannibal with it. Mason also tries to head off any interference from Margot by offering her a “Verger baby” carried inside a pig surrogate, but much like most of Mason’s weirder ideas, this turns out to be…shall we say unviable? Which makes it easy for Alana to convince Margot that asking Hannibal what to do next isn’t quite as crazy an idea as it might seem. (He thinks Margot should kill Mason, that it’d be “therapeutic” — particularly so if they harvest Mason’s sperm first, so Alana can carry an heir which will finally give Margot control of the Verger fortune — but suggests she feel free to blame it on him, once she’s done.) In the moment where Alana could potentially extort her own life back from Hannibal, meanwhile, who ended season two by vowing to kill her, she asks him to promise to save Will instead. “Could I have ever understood you?” Alana asks. “No,” Hannibal answers, to which she just nods.

And here, with Episode 3.07, “Digestivo,” we reach the place where that metaphorical teacup Hannibal held over Will for so long finally crashes to the floor, from whence not all Hannibal’s temptations can bring Will ever to believe again it might somehow gather itself together once more, under pressure or otherwise. Will’s faith in Hannibal is forever broken, converted instead into knowledge and — to some degree — acceptance of Hannibal’s black miracle of a personality, his endlessly malign capacity to create pleasure out of awfulness. At the end of season two, as he’s already admitted to Jack, there really was a moment in which he wanted to run away with Dr. Lecter; that moment has passed, and nothing will bring it back again.

“Your memory palace is building,” Hannibal tells Will, almost pleading. “It’s…full of new things. It shares some rooms with my own. I’ve discovered you there, victorious.” But Will no longer wants his mentorship, even as a vigilante rather than a serial killer, and on some level, they both understand that since Will only fell into Mason’s clutches because of Hannibal in the first place, no gratitude is necessary; this deal was struck without Will’s participation, and Hannibal only made good on it in the first place because it amused him to do so…or is that really all of it? He might have needed a reason to rescue Will, to admit that he wanted to rescue him, to retain him as a human mirror, someone he can always rely upon to be astounded by and insightful of his spectacle, if not admiring of it…

“I miss my dogs, but I’m not going to miss you,” Will says, knows his only way to punish Hannibal now is to retreat, stop fighting. “I don’t want to think about you anymore.”

“You delight in wickedness, then berate yourself for the delight.”

“You delight. I tolerate. I don’t have your appetite.”

So Hannibal gives himself up, surrenders, aware it’s the only way Will will always know where to find him: “You finally caught the Chesapeake Ripper, Jack,” he offers, to which Jack almost spits. And Chiyoh lets him do it, no longer having to feel obligated to protect him for Mischa’s sake, now that he’s finally admitted to having eaten her.

The second half of season three sees a return to the series’s original model, opening on Francis Dolarhyde (Richard Armitage)’s discovery of William Blake’s “The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun,” an artwork which mimics his internal geography so well that it causes him to remake himself in its image. Fuller shows us Dolarhyde’s evolution through body-building, tattooing, and mimicry as he tries to hammer himself into a walking Blake engraving — he has a fresh new set of teeth cast from his abusive grandmother’s hideous dentures and develops weird bodily movements possibly derived from Japanese butoh dancing, moving fluidly back and forth from human to inhuman as he makes his daily devotions to a print of the creature he wants to Become. Armitage is so good at meeting these physical challenges, he even makes Dolarhyde eventually having a solo fist-fight work (the ultimate game of “Why’re you hitting yourself? Huh? Huh?”); he rolls on the floor punching himself in the face, and we just marvel. Eventually, Dolarhyde begins to hear the Dragon’s sibilant hissing voice directly, to feel its radiance shining inside his skull and out through his eyes. And soon enough he finds himself standing naked in some poor family’s backyard, covered in moon-black blood.

Hannibal, meanwhile, is enjoying his captive notoriety (“Hannibal the Cannibal” — Dr. Chilton copyrighted the term from his recovery suite, and has since written the book that “proved” he was insane enough to escape Death Row) while sliding back and forth into fantasy which repurposes the world around him, literally living inside his own memory palace to escape the everyday boredom of incarceration. Unlike Will’s time in solitary, his cage is less a mediaeval dungeon than a bright, empty, bulletproof plastic shell full of books and drawings; he’s even allowed to cook now and then, for “friends.” (One wonders if Chilton has to sign a waiver in order to join Hannibal at the table; Alana, certainly — now occupying Chilton’s old spot as head of the Baltimore Psychiatric Institute, playing the role Chiyoh once wanted as Hannibal’s keeper — would never be that stupid or that hubristic.) Chilton floats the idea that Hannibal’s novelty as a worthy subject has waned; the Tooth Fairy, as Dolarhyde is currently known, is “the debutante,” and Chilton’s next subject.

“He does have a much wider demographic than you do,” Chilton points out. “You with your fancy allusions and your fussy aesthetics, you will always have niche appeal..but [he] strikes at the very core of the American Dream.” Chilton diagnoses him with “competitive vanity,” but what Hannibal actually sees in Dolarhyde’s rampage is not just a chance for self-amusement, but a way to strike back against Will — by teasing Jack Crawford into teasing Will into coming back for thirds (or fourths). After all, Lecter has infinite patience, and knows all too well that the world is full of monsters so baroque-grotesque that he’ll be the only person to whom Will can turn when he needs extra insight into their inner landscapes.

And he’s not wrong. In the years since Hannibal’s grand gesture, Will has withdrawn from the FBI and made himself over into the most normal version of his intrinsically-abnormal self he believes might be possible: Boat motors and fishing, a cabin, dogs aplenty, a ready-made family composed of already-widowed Molly (Nina Arianda) and her son, Walter…hell, he’s even wearing glasses again. (Arianda and Hugh Dancy were already very at home with each other, having performed together in a stage version of Venus in Furs; her vague resemblance to a rougher-featured and shorter Katharine Isabelle is probably just a bonus, suggesting that Margot may have stuck in Will’s mind, but what she actually rings like is a blonder, more down-to-earth version of Alana, practical and sympathetic.) “He kills families,” Molly reminds Will after Jack’s made his pitch, and Will answers: “If I go, I’ll be different when I come back.” “I know,” she says, not really understanding what that’s going to entail. That night Will takes Hannibal’s latest card out and reads it, unsurprised when an article about the Tooth Fairy falls out, before burning it. It’s a dare he can’t not take.

It takes a walk through the Leeds home and a lot of sweaty shaking before Will’s old metronome kicks back in and he’s able to start thinking through the Dragon’s “design,” figuring out that Dolarhyde must have left viable partial prints on either the eight-ball haemorrhages of Mrs Leeds’ eyes or the mirror pieces left on her dead family’s faces, positioned so that he can see them admiring him as he rapes her corpse. Soon after that, the old gang is back together, under Jack’s guidance. Will retreats to a motel and drinks, knowing that to chat over the phone with Molly is only staving off the inevitable nightmares. But when the prints lead nowhere, everybody knows what the next suggestion will be. “I can wait until I’m driven to it by desperation,” Will says, “or…I can do it now. There’s a mindset I need to recover.”

Hello, Dr Lecter.

What I find so hilarious about Fuller bringing the Great Red Dragon in at the end of a series inspired by Red Dragon is just how simple Francis Dolarhyde seems, after two and a half seasons of Hannibal Lecter. He just wants to be magnified and loved, like all of us, but his background has convinced him no one will ever offer him that sort of acceptance unless he kills them first. “He needs a family to escape what’s inside him,” Hannibal observes. “How is he choosing them?” Will asks. “How did you choose yours? Ready-made, [a] stepson to absolve you of any guilt…you know better than to breed. Don’t want to pass those traits you fear along.” Every family loves differently, as Hannibal once told Abigail, but some don’t love at all, and Dolarhyde is the result. No wonder he wants to reach out to Hannibal, to be recognized by him, the only person Dolarhyde considers capable of appreciating his ongoing self-deification. But here, again, we see the difference between them — Hannibal’s well aware that the Dragon wants to consume him in exactly the same way Hannibal would want to consume the Dragon, except raw, not cooked. Besides which, Dolarhyde thinks he’s a god and Hannibal knows he isn’t, so they’re never going to get along.

Meanwhile, newly-crowned tabloid star reporter Freddie Lounds (Lara Jean Chorostecki) is finally back onscreen, for the next to last time, and much missed — I’d hate to have spent an entire season without her. As my husband observes, Chorostecki’s Freddie is pretty much the opposite of her male self, a secrets-sniffing firecracker who always provokes for a goal, with no presumption of immunity; what powers her is naughty chutzpah cut with punk anti-establishmentarianism rather than patriarchal sleaze, which rings as oddly inspiring in context when coming from a tiny little bear-poking redhead. “You pulled back the covers and snapped a photo of my temporary colostomy bag,” Will complains; “I covered your junk with a black box,” Freddie snaps back. “A big black box. You’re welcome.” “If you’re smart you’d use me,” she also tells Will, but that’s a dangerous proposition, and he knows it…and unlike most other Will Grahams, he feels ambiguous enough about her to actually care about it.

Back in what’s left of his normal human life, Dolarhyde becomes attracted to Reba (Rutina Wesley), the blind film processor at his workplace. Racebent from the last two actresses who played her, there’s something wonderful about a gorgeously dark lady being cast in Dolarhyde’s fantasies as the Woman Clothed in Sun, the Great Red Dragon’s consort. (I love the attention paid to Reba’s sense of her own integrity and agency, both as a blind person in a sighted world and a black woman in a white one.) When Dolarhyde shows Reba an anesthetized tiger and watches her weep while stroking it, what he sees in her is the kind of pain that’s sympathy, not suffering. She offers him human love, potentially redemptive, but the Dragon part of him — that spectre of apocalyptic sexuality — will never allow him to accept it. Not even if, say, he tries to gain power over the Dragon by stealing Blake’s original artwork, on loan to a local museum, and eating it.

We then get to watch Bedelia performing a chapter from her own tell-all book, riffing off Hannibal’s Dante lecture in the first half of the season, with a huge Hieronymous Bosch hell-scape projected behind her. “Before Dante we spoke not of the Gates of Hell but the Mouth of Hell. My journey to damnation began when I was swallowed by the Beast,” Bedelia declaims. “Or maybe you just crawled so far up his ass you couldn’t tell the two of you apart anymore,” Will suggests. A narcissist like everybody else, Bedelia has found a way to elevate herself through her interactions with a monster. “You’re the Bride of Frankenstein,” Will notes, to which she replies: “We’ve both been his bride.” Unlike Will, however, Bedelia — quite possibly high as balls, even now — says she’s “seen enough of [Hannibal],” and seems to mean it. Nevertheless, she offers this morsel of therapy to Will: “You are capable of righteous violence because you have empathy,” she tells Will. “Extreme acts of cruel require a high level of empathy. The next time you have an instinct to help someone, you might consider crushing them instead. It might save you a great deal of trouble.”

Inevitably, Hannibal sees to it that Dolarhyde and Will collide, by slipping Will a hint that the Chinese mah-jongg symbol he found carved into a tree in the latest dead family’s backyard might also mean “Red Dragon” as in William Blake. Confronting each other in the museum elevator, Dolarhyde is startled by the idea that Will can somehow see far enough inside of him to predict his movements; he throws Will first up against the wall and then across the room, causing him to lose the glasses he’s been wearing again since he told Hannibal to get lost…his last shield against the craziness, his last wall between him and the Dragon. “Hannibal knows who the Dragon is,” Will realizes, suddenly able to make that intuitive leap. By the time he reaches Hannibal’s cage again, however, Hannibal’s already told Dolarhyde to “toss [to] the Dragon” Molly and Walter instead of Reba: “[Will Graham] has a family. Save yourself. Kill them all.” When Will begs Lecter for a clue about the next family on the Dragon’s list, Hannibal simply reminds him: “They’re not my family, and I’m not letting them die. You are.”

After the Dragon’s assault on Molly and Walter, Will quickly understands he can’t go home again; he’ll never see anything when he looks at them but the possibility of them as collateral damage, which makes Hannibal — and Abigail’s ghost — his only remaining family. “How do you have no scars?” Will asks Bedelia. “I’m covered in them.” “You have paid dearly,” she agrees. “It excites him to see that you are marked in this way.” Then she waits for him to do the emotional arithmetic, which he eventually does, though slowly.

“Is Hannibal…in love with me?”

“Could he daily feel a stab of hunger for you and feel nourishment at the very sight of you? Yes. But do you ache for him?”

That’d be the question, definitely.

Our parallel storylines come together swiftly after this, in a rush of fire — Will uses Freddie Lounds to draw the Dragon back out, allowing Dr. Chilton to back up the lies Will feeds her in an intentionally insulting interview, which then leads to Chilton getting the starring role in the assault originally suffered by (male) Freddie. It’s Raùl Esparza’s genius that we feel for Chilton even though he’s done everything but gift-wrap his own fate. “Oh, I hope, dear God, that I am not burned…” he murmurs, coming out of unconsciousness, thus giving Dolarhyde the idea to set him alight. Their conversation has an existential edge to it that I don’t remember from any other version, and Fuller pumps things higher by having Reba intrude halfway through, bringing Dolarhyde soup for his “flu.” Then she plays out this wonderfully sad declaration of love in front of poor Chilton, superglued to his wheelchair. “I have a deep vein of cripple’s anger in me,” she says, “but I don’t want to think I’m incapable of love.” After she leaves, Dolarhyde reverts to form, taping Chilton reading a threat to break Will’s back before biting his lips off in a bright, gooshy parody of a kiss. “[Muffled continuous screaming],” as the Netflix subtitles put it.

“You were curious about what would happen, that’s apparent,” Bedelia tells Will, after getting him to admit he knew he was putting Chilton at risk. “Is this what you were expecting?” “I can’t say I’m surprised,” Will replies, looking Hannibalian as all hell. (The lips later arrive in a package as part of Hannibal’s mail, allowing him to grab one and eat it before anyone else has time to react.) Nevertheless, there’s enough left of Chilton to pass on the fact that the Dragon has a girlfriend, a blind, black woman named Reba — the same name Alana and Jack overheard him mention in conversation with Hannibal, right before Dr. Lecter slammed the phone down on yet another call from his nonexistent “lawyer.”

Once Dolarhyde uses Reba as a “witness” to his own fake death, things really start to change. By letting Reba go, he’s able both to save her from himself and to open a channel to Will. And Will reacts to finding the Dragon in his motel room by doing the only thing he can — using his hard-won ability to talk serial killer-speak to turn the Dragon towards Lecter, cooperating with him in order to get Hannibal out of his cage so he can play them against each other, getting Jack to help him “fake” an escape he knows Hannibal can make real. Describing the plan to Bedelia, Will calls it his Becoming. “You righteous, reckless, twitchy little man!” Bedelia erupts. “Better to have just cut all our throats too, while you were at it.”

“Maybe I can’t save myself,” he tells Hannibal, eventually, as they wait for Dolarhyde in the same cliffside vacation house where Hannibal apparently brought Miriam Lass (and Abigail). “Maybe that’s just as well.” But in the end, the combined strength of mongoose and snake is enough to bring even a Dragon down, yet more facial wounds aside — they attack together, mutually driven by Will’s hunger to punish the unrighteous instead of Hannibal’s instinct to eat the rude. “It really is beautiful,” Will says, afterwards, admiring his black hands in the moonlight, before folding into Hannibal’s arms. And: “This is all I ever wanted for you,” Hannibal agrees, as Will caps off a last night of monster-killing by shoving them both off into the sea.

“You and I are both alike, problem-free,” Hannibal once told Will, back in the pilot episode; “Nothing about us to feel horrible about.” Translation, potentially: If you knew yourself the way I know myself, you’d be just as happy with what you are. Except that assumption springs from Hannibal’s twin beliefs that he can always see others better than they can see themselves, and that once Will understands him, he won’t want to change him anymore. And even if Will accepts that he can’t by the series’s end, that’s not quite the same thing.

So I guess the wrap-up question is: Is Hannibal Lecter really capable of love, the way most of us in the audience understand it? Self-sacrificial love, love in which the idea of the object of your affection surviving beyond your appreciation for them becomes more important to you than mere consumption or cohabitation? Will tries to “save” Hannibal by changing him; Hannibal tries to “save” Will by changing him. In Hannibal’s world, letting Will kill him may very well be the nicest gift he could ever give Will, but I’m not sure he’s quite there yet, or ever will be. Or to put it another way: I do think the reason Hannibal ate his sister Mischa after she was murdered was because the depth of his own love for her and his grief at her loss scared him, on some level. By eating her, he processed that love, that grief; he mastered it, emerged triumphant and became the beast he was meant to be. Is that something he can put aside, even for Will?

But then again, “I think that’s part of the reason the ambiguity of the ending over the cliff feels like a satisfying culmination of their relationship instead of just another literal cliffhanger,” my friend Sonya Taaffe says; “I don’t think Hannibal understands how to exist apart from something that he loves, only how to make it inseparable from him — and in this one case vice versa, because he really does allow Will to burrow inside him, haunt him, become part of him while they’re both alive in a way that I don’t think he has granted any other person, no matter what he felt for them. If it’s a parasitic relationship, he lets himself be parasitized. But I don’t think ‘if you love it, let it go free’ makes any sense to him. Symbiosis, being an ouroboros with Will, has much more appeal. And I’m not sure either that he wouldn’t still want to be, in the end, the one taking the last bite.”

That’s if Will and Hannibal survive, of course, but I’m pretty fucking sure they did. I mean — the song playing as they fell (Siouxsie Sioux’s “Love Crime”) basically says so, and it’s not like we see any bodies. And one way or another, wherever they end up, from now on…they’ll be together.

THE END

P.S.: Apparently, I’m the only person in the world who didn’t just assume that Bedelia Du Maurier cooked her own leg in the coda, on the faint hope that Hannibal might drop by and eat it with her. Silly me. 😉