In a relatively short amount of time I worked through all three seasons of NBC’s show Hannibal. Again, I never watched this while it aired, and I feel shame for that now! This show was so, so good, and the third season got even better.
This season stepped away from the weekly procedural, mainly because we left off in the season two finale with everyone on the brink of death. Alana had a lot of shattered bones, so for the first half of the season she’s in a wheelchair and then walking with a cane. Jack seems to have recovered alright, and Will obviously survived because Hannibal wanted him to. The only true casualty of the bunch was Abigail Hobbs (for real this time). Although Will is living in some dream land for a time, because he follows Hannibal to Italy, seemingly with Abigail in tow, but then we learn her true fate.
Will doesn’t quite find Hannibal during his first go in Italy, so he heads back to Hannibal’s home, where he comes across Chiyoh, a woman who knew Hannibal while he lived there. The two of them (and everyone else, apparently) then head to Florence, where Hannibal and Bedelia du Maurier have been living under assumed identities. Hannibal seems to be getting a little sloppy with who he’s choosing to kill, but we all know that Hannibal’s actions have purpose. Jack tries and fails killing him, and then Hannibal and Will finally reunite. Unfortunately, Will tries one last time to betray him, so Hannibal decides he’s going to saw his head open!
Only that doesn’t quite work out, since the two of them are captured and brought to back to the states to the facially deformed Mason Verger. He wants to exact revenge on the pair, and as Will puts it, “you want to eat him with my face?” Indeed! Verger plans to get Will’s face surgically attached to his own, and then he plans on eating Hannibal. But backstabbing is so fun! Especially if you’re Margot Verger and Alana. They let Hannibal loose on the condition that he saves Will, and then they get to kill Mason themselves. The first half of the season ends with Will telling Hannibal that he doesn’t want to think about him anymore or know where he is. So what does Hannibal do? Turns himself over to Jack, so Will totally knows where he is!
That’s just the first half of the season people! The second half jumps ahead three years where Will now has a wife and step-son, while Hannibal lives semi-comfortably in the mental hospital that Alana now runs. Everything seems pretty calm, until a new psychopath enters the picture, a man/beast who refers to himself as “the great red dragon.” He eats paper and changes (kills) families. He also falls in love with a blind lady. Will gets pulled back in, and can’t resist getting back into it with Hannibal. Dr. Du Maurier confirms that Hannibal is in fact in love with Will (duh), but does Will feel the same?
I believe the last episode answers that question for all of us. The ultimate lure for the great red dragon is getting the chance to interact with Hannibal, so Jack and the FBI help Hannibal “escape,” much to the fear of Bedelia and Alana who both flee, because as Will put it to Bedelia, he doesn’t plan on Hannibal getting caught a second time. Does that mean he’s going to kill him or escape with him liked he’d hoped to do at the end of season two? The dragon finds them and gives the pair quite a run for their money, but Will finally embraces his brutality, and tells Hannibal what they did together was “beautiful” before they embrace and Will knocks them both off a cliff. We don’t see them as the camera pans to the water, but a large part of me believes they survive. I suppose this is their Inception moment, because the show didn’t get picked up for a fourth season, sadly. Work your reboot magic, powers that be!
This third season was quite the departure in terms of form compared to the prior two, but it was a natural direction for the show to go. They also didn’t spend the entirety of the season in a foreign country on a wild goose chase. They go back home and we get to see familiar faces like Price and Zeller (thank goodness!). I loved how nuanced Hannibal and Will’s relationship was played out, and that ending?! My heart. Despite all of the goodness of the season, there were things I wasn’t crazy about. Firstly, I’ve never cared for Bedelia’s character and the fact that she played a decent sized role this season didn’t make me any happier about her. Chiyoh also served next to no purpose in my opinion. She was more or less just a convenient shot when they needed someone to die from a distance. And finally, Will’s wife and child. Sigh. I understand they were actually following the book with this, but they were barely featured in four episodes! I suppose what they did provide was a rather blatant display of how Will can’t hide his true nature and that he loves Hannibal, as well.
Again, I’m abysmally disappointed that this show ended after three short seasons. It certainly shined in ways I haven’t seen other network shows ever do. I think Netflix dropped the ball on not picking this up, because they could take it so much further if they wanted to! Gore-wise and story-wise! Regardless, we may never get a reboot (which would be a tragedy), so I can say that I was pleased with how it ended. You could take it either way, but I think you’d be a fool if you think Will and Hannibal are dead. As Freddie Lounds calls them, the “murder husbands” are probably out doing what they do best: murdering.