The penultimate episode of Hannibal! You see, I thought if I dragged out these reviews, they would surely have a fourth series ready by the time I finished the whole 39 episodes (in three weeks from now); after all, I’ve been reviewing Hannibal episodes since October 2018! There is certainly talk of a fourth season or a movie, a discourse reignited by the fact that Netflix has just started streaming the series in the USA and some other countries (not Australia – here it’s on Stan).

#savehannibals4 

What do you do when you can’t go home?

It’s a very contemporary question, Hannibal has told us he cannot go home to Lithuania, although we don’t know why (but hopefully will find out in Season 4). But in this episode, made in 2015, the threat is not a pandemic but a serial killer, “The Great Red Dragon”, who slaughters families and puts broken pieces of mirror in their eyes so he can watch them watching him changing them. Will Graham’s family have fled after the killer came for them, their address supplied by the ever-helpful Hannibal. He told the Dragon “Save yourself. Kill them all”.

You and I don’t want to catch COVID-19, but Will certainly wants to catch the Dragon. But he is broken – his family is gone, in hiding, unlikely to see him again, or certainly not until the threat has been eliminated. In dreams, Will sees himself killing the Dragon’s victims, but each woman is his wife. This was Hannibal`s design. Will asks Bedelia:

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

Bedelia is quoting, or paraphrasing, Dante, the sonnet that Hannibal quoted in the movie Hannibal to Inspector Pazzi’s wife, Allegra:

“He woke her then, and trembling and obedient, she ate that burning heart out of his hand. Weeping, I saw him then depart from me. Could he daily feel a stab of hunger for her? Find nourishment in the very sight of her? I think so. But would she see through the bars of his plight, and ache for him?”

Is Bedelia paraphrasing Dante because she also loves Hannibal? Or do all psychiatrists do a unit in fourteenth century Italian literature? We know her Italian is good enough to order Bâtard-Montrachet (Chardonnay) and tartufi bianchi (white truffles) – there’s a clue! Anyway, Bedelia now loves Hannibal being in the asylum – because he wants her dead, but only if he can do the actual killing,

Will is not contemplating love in any form, gustatory or otherwise, he is plotting destruction. As Hannibal puts it,

“Will’s thoughts are no more bound by fear or kindness than Milton’s were by physics.”

Well, now we’re getting somewhere, and it’s not medical but metaphysical. John Milton was a seventeenth century poet who wrote Paradise Lost, a fair description of Will’s current domestic situation – neither he, his wife or his step-son can go back to their idyllic estate until the Dragon is caught or, preferably, killed. Rather than getting lost in empathy, as he usually does, Will is now drowning in rage, and is “free and damned” – Hannibal is paraphrasing Sartre’s insistence that humans are “cursed with freedom” – other animals are bound by their instinct, but we always have to make choices, often between less than ideal options.

Hannibal sees Will more clearly than anyone, and quotes the Book of Revelations to Jack:

Yes, it’s Armageddon coming up – and it starts with confrontation. Will is going to make himself a target for the Dragon, to draw him out. He calls together Freddie Lounds, who will publish anything if it sells her magazine, and Frederick Chilton, who will spout his pop psychology to anyone in order to get publicity for his new book, which is called (honest) “Hannibal the Cannibal”. Chilton is furious with Hannibal for publically repudiating the book as nonsense, effectively disproving the insanity defence by which he was saved from execution. Why would Hannibal do that? Because Frederick doesn’t have “the proper stuff” to write about either Hannibal or the Dragon.

Now he’s quoting Goethe. Imagine what else he could find to enrage people with if Alana hadn’t taken away all his books!

There are a lot of allusions in this episode, both to the Classics and to the Hannibal books, particularly Red Dragon – lot of the dialogue comes verbatim from that book, although often from different characters. There is a good analysis of the intertextualities on the Hannibal Fandom page.

During the interview, Will translates Frederick’s pretentious psychobabble into real insults, the ones that your regular alpha serial killer might reasonably object to:

Then Freddie takes a photo, showing the Dragon where Will is, and with Will’s hand on Frederick’s shoulder.

Frederick has two security guards to ensure his safety, but their brains are splattered on the back of his car while he is still gloating on the phone about his new book. He is captured, and learns that the Dragon is “becoming”, he is “Other”

Hilariously, blind Reba comes to visit in the midst of Frederick’s torment. She can’t see Frederick (although she must be able to smell him; he’s been shitting himself since the Dragon took the stocking off his face), Frederick can’t say anything (or she’ll be killed) and the Dragon can’t hear her concern, her love, as she gives him some soup she made because he took the day off work. They are the three wise monkeys.

Yeah, it’s not the flu.

Like COVID-19, the Dragon’s psychopathy is worse than the flu. It’s more serious, and Frederick has caught it bad. He is shown slides of the Dragon’s work: before and after shots,

The Dragon opens his mouth and puts in his falsies, a set of his grandma’s dentures, the grandma who screwed him up by threatening to castrate him with her scissors when he was an incontinent little boy. He wears them whenever he goes killing. Both Hannibal and Freud would love to meet this guy.

He jumps over the couch, growling, a predatory animal, and bites off Frederick’s lips, which he posts to Hannibal, who in turn eats one of them.

The Dragon sends the FBI a video of Chilton’s forced confession, including the screams during the lipectomy. Will is less than thrilled as he watches. But, as Bedelia tells him, quoting the words Hannibal used to her, “that’s participation”. Will knew what would happen: the Dragon always kills the pet first.

With that photo op, Will might as well have lit the match that sent Frederick, burning, rolling down the hill.

Burnt flesh, eaten lips. At last, a trace of cannibalism. This is a cannibalism blog (I quickly remind you, and myself). And Hannibal never disappoints.

Next (and, sob, final) Hannibal blog in three weeks – June 28. 

In case you’re wondering, yes, this is a cannibalism blog, and yes, there were plenty of human body parts consumed in Hannibal Seasons 1 and 2. Season 3 is different, because Hannibal Lecter is locked up in the Baltimore Asylum for the Criminally Insane for most of it, so cannot offer us a lot of gastronomy. But there’s more to eating than flesh, and there’s more to Hannibal than just eating. Hannibal believes he is the Übermensch and so is all about becoming, and becoming requires the use of others to fuel his radiance, and the radiance of those he chooses to mentor.

In the previous episode, Francis Dolarhyde, a.k.a. The Tooth Fairy (Freddie’s name for him) or The Red Dragon (his own preferred moniker) had killed two families, each event happening on the full moon. Besides the date, though, there seemed to be nothing in common between the victims, so Jack called on Will, and Will called on Hannibal, to get the old murder scent.

In this episode, Francis finally contacts Hannibal, breaking into the office of Hannibal`s lawyer so the call will go through to Hannibal’s cell. He visualises Hannibal in suit and tie, a master rather than a captive. He wants to be recognised by Hannibal in his becoming of the Great Red Dragon, he wants to “meld” with Hannibal (eat him). Hannibal is happy to play along, stroking the killer’s ego, telling him how magnificent he is, quoting Blake, who of course painted the Great Red Dragon in the early 19^th century.

Bedelia is back in town, no longer claiming to be Mrs Fell, now being bugged by Will Graham to admit she lied about her identity confusion. But she has her own philosophy of subjectivity now. She tells Will, and an adoring audience of psychiatrists (?) that everything we see and believe about ourselves is just a mental construction. When she was under the control of Hannibal, she was metaphorically in Hell – Hell before Dante turned it into an urban environment, Hell when it was portrayed not as the “gates of Hell” but the “mouth of Hell”

Will scorns her story of…

“suffering inside Hannibal Lecter’s bowels for what must have felt like an eternity”

Thank goodness, we finally got to the alimentary canal.

Francis, meanwhile, is trying to go straight, falling in love with Reba, his blind colleague, who cannot see what, he imagines, is his abhorrent deformity. He takes her to a zoo to feel a sedated tiger, tying her to another Blake image:

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Just as Reba can ‘see’ the tiger with her hands, so she can see the radiance (or at least the nice part) of Francis, with those same hands, which she proceeds to use to seduce him, when they get home. He experiences probably his first time with a woman that does not involve blood and biting and broken mirrors in eye-sockets; he is falling in love. She is part of his fantasy now – if he is the Dragon, she is the “woman clothed in the sun”

He decides to solve the problem of the Dragon, who is not going to want him to get all soft and mushy, the way Hannibal solves a problem – by eating it. He tricks his way into the National Gallery of Art and eats the original Blake painting, stopping on the way out to beat the shit out of Will, who has come to find out about this Red Dragon business.

Bedelia has told Will to make an appointment and guess what – he did! Now they spar in easy chairs in her office.

B: I can’t blame him for doing what evolution has equipped him to do.
W: If we just do whatever evolution equipped us to do, murder and cannibalism are morally acceptable.
B: They are acceptable, to murderers and cannibals.

The moral of the story, children, is that we are all capable of love and mercy, and capable of murder and cannibalism. Bedelia has a flash-back to killing a patient sent to her by Hannibal, no doubt to see if she would help him or save him. She explains this theory to Will, in one of the seminal aphorisms of the series. She asks Will what he thinks if he sees a wounded bird on the grass. Will would see the bird as vulnerable, and try to save her.

“A primal rejection of weakness which is every bit as natural as the nurturing instinct. Of course, I wouldn’t crush it, but my first thought is to do just that.”

Hannibal explains Blake’s Red Dragon to Will, and to us. The Dragon stands over a pleading woman who is caught in his tail. Few images in Western art radiate such a unique and…

“I like this dragon Will. I don’t think he’s crazy at all. I think he might be quite sane. A magnificent thing, to watch the world through his red haze.”

We’ve met the Red Dragon, AKA “The Tooth Fairy”, AKA Francis Dolarhyde. We’ve seen what he does.

Will Graham has been reluctantly dragged back into the team, trying to find this new serial killer. But where’s Hannibal, and why hasn’t anyone been eaten for a while? This is a cannibal blog, after all. Well, cannibalism is about incorporation of the bodies of others, and this episode is about the way people incorporate into families, friendships or alliances. This episode is also very much a reimagining of the book that started all this, Red Dragon, and its sequels, The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal. Much of the dialogue comes straight out of the Hannibal canon.

Three years after his arrest, Hannibal is locked up in a glass cage in the Baltimore Asylum for the Criminally Insane.  Will has come to see him, to ask for help catching the “Tooth Fairy” killer; he says he wants Hannibal’s ideas on how he picks his victims. But Hannibal sees right through that, and reminds Will of his earlier prognosis that they are just alike. All of us have the elements to make mercy, or murder.

“Came to get the old scent again. Why don’t you just smell yourself?”

Alana is his jailer. She has the keys. Remember that Hannibal has promised to kill her, and he always keeps his promises.

But he agrees to help Will. Because they are family, even after Hannibal killed their “child”, Abigail, and cut Will open.

Families do terrible things sometimes, but “we still help our families when we can”. Yep, it’s all about families, and how we need them, to remain sane, to torture us, or to escape reality.

In the age of coronavirus, we are all learning the need for connection, and the pain of not being able to access it. Hannibal has a flash back to Abigail, when she asked if he was going to kill her, and now he grants us some more detail of how he faked her death, by transfusing her blood and spraying it around the room, then cutting off her ear.

Will’s superpower, of course, is imagining himself in the shoes of the killer, seeing himself committing the murder. Hannibal is happy to talk him through this.

“Could you see yourself in their eyes Will? Killing them all?”

None of the families in Hannibal are terribly functional. Think of the Vergers. Think of Hannibal eating his sister! Think of Will, now with a wife and step-son, and still vainly trying to deny his love for Hannibal. Think of Alana and Margo, who have now given birth to a son, the heir to the Verger fortune, whose conception resulted from an electric shock they delivered to Mason Verger’s prostate before they killed him. Think of Reba McClane (Rutina Wesley from True Blood), who thinks she has found ‘Mr Right’ in Francis Dolarhyde, because he doesn’t pity her blindness, and she doesn’t judge his appearance (being blind helps there).

Think of Abigail’s dad killing (and respectfully eating) girls who looked like her, so he could control his desire to kill her. Hannibal has dug him up and preserved the body, so she can make peace with his corpse, using a sharp knife to pay back the unkindest cut he performed on her. Somewhat similar to the scene where Hannibal digs up Clarice’s dad in Hannibal (the book).

“We have a basic affinity for our family. We can detect each other from smell alone.”

Think of the murdered victim families, sleeping in their beds when Francis Dolarhyde killed them, broke all the mirrors in the house and stuck pieces in their eyes so they could be his audience as he raped the mother. Think of Will, coming apart as he tries to re-enact the murders. Just like Hannibal’s teacup, he will not come back together so easily.

Think of Francis as we see a flashback to him as a boy, at a table of old people with his abusive grandmother. Cuts to him now, watching movie of dead families. Think of Jack, whose wife Bella, has died; now his family is the FBI, who doubted him when he was ready to catch Hannibal. Consider Jack’s dialogue with Hannibal as he visits to discuss his use, his consumption really, of Will, in his plans to find the killer.

Who is eating whom here? Hannibal is sad that Will is cold and unforgiving, but he is also angry that Jack is cynically using Will as bait for the killer, who they know has seen Will in Freddie’s scandal-sheet.

“It would be more honest if you ate his brain right out of his skull.”

Hannibal remembers getting ready for his new family, Will and Abigail, who hunted with her father, and now agreed to hunt with Hannibal. We find out why she defenestrated Alana.

Even Francis Dolarhyde, the serial killer that the press is calling “The Tooth Fairy”, is looking for a family to understand him and help him grow. He calls Hannibal.

“The important thing is what I am becoming. I knew you alone would understand this.”

“What are you becoming?” asks Hannibal.

Yes, in some very twisted ways, we are all looking for family.