Yes, the culinary title tradition stands, with Italian cuisine as the appropriate category this season.
Last week's Antipasto established Hannibal and Bedelia's new life in Italy. Hannibal has had Bedelia play the role of his wife, and Hannibal has been so energized by the classiest of the cultural elite in his new environs that even his murder-rate has slowed down (this is a guy who seems to off people on a weekly basis under normal conditions.)
But of course, the premiere left us all wondering WHO THE HELL SURVIVED THE RED DINNER!?!?!?
The only real guarantee was Will, who is the series protagonist (even if Hannibal is an Iago-level villain who is more central to the story.)
And what have we learned now?
The teaser of the episode is essentially the last few minutes of last season's finale - we watch as Hannibal once again eviscerates Will and then calls a deeply brainwashed Abigail over to him before slitting her throat along the exact same scar as her father had done in the series premiere (indeed, this seems like the third time she's been cut there, given the amount of blood Will found in her house at the end of season one.) Will sinks deep into the blood pouring out of him, out of a dead-eyed Abigail Hobbs, and out of the Ravenstag - that now-obsolete totem that represented the killer Hannibal truly was when he was still a mystery.
But when Will wakes up in a hospital bed, who is there to greet him? Abigail. She explains that Hannibal must have meant for them to live. She says the doctors who stitched her up considered the throat-slitting to be a surgically-executed cut - meant to leave a mark but avoid killing her. All in all, she seems much better off than Will, though he has clearly survived as well - this must have been Hannibal's design. Abigail is quick to forgive Hannibal, sure that he has a place for them in his life, and that with forgiveness, they will be welcomed back into Hannibal's fold.
What of Jack and Alana? We are left with no clue. Instead, we cut forward six months - Hannibal has transformed the corpse of the British academic he killed in Antipasto into an enormous heart-shape. It's a message for Will and Abigail. Will comes to the crime scene after the evidence has been taken away, but he imagines seeing it, and in his imagination, the person-heart-shape unfolds to become an unholy stag-mockery in what is a contender for the spot of "most batshit crazy disturbing thing I've ever seen on television," (all of its competitors are probably from this show.)
Will meets with Detective Pazzi - a Florentine investigator who pursued "il monstro," Hannibal, long ago in 1995, when Hannibal was just starting out as a young man, reproducing a portion of Boticcelli's Primavera using actual people he's murdered. Pazzi had a moment of revelation, seeing the young Hannibal make daily sketches of the painting in the Uffizi, and attempted to arrest him, but (big shocker) found himself outfoxed by Hannibal.
Pazzi isn't as mentally messed-up as Will, and thus wants to actually catch Hannibal, but it is in conversation with Pazzi that Will realizes, or perhaps remembers, that Abigail isn't actually there with him.
No, while Will (and maybe Jack and Alana...?) was undergoing surgery, Abigail was undergoing an autopsy. Hannibal has effectively destroyed their shared daughter, finally, once and for all. Yet she lives on in Will's mind, unfortunately as a voice that compels him to rejoin Hannibal, to return on the path Hannibal has laid out for him.
Two major themes get talked about this episode - Religion, and Multiple Universes.
Hannibal has always had a strange take on God. He sees God as the ultimate killer, but he doesn't see this as a negative thing. Much as Hannibal said last week that ethics become aesthetics, Will's take on Hannibal's religion is that God won't save humanity because it is inelegant. Will mentions that his own religious beliefs are more in the realm of science fiction than mythic fantasy, though we haven't gotten a total encapsulation of them. Will's empathy threatens to overwrite his own beliefs with Hannibal's - which is of course Hannibal's goal.
Hannibal is this show's Devil, but he is attached to the world in a physical way. In fact, I'd almost consider him more akin to Dracula - he feeds on those he considers less than himself (which is almost everyone,) but he wishes to convert those who he does deem worthy into monsters like himself. He sees this as a gift - not a corruption, but a liberation.
Consider that in many traditions, righteousness is the imitation of God. (In Christianity, there's a line drawn between imitation of the Father - which would probably be considered blasphemously arrogant - and imitation of the Son - which is arguably what Christ's entire purpose in being on Earth was, to serve as an example.) But Hannibal believes God is a murderer who delights in elegance and irony, and so that is the form he has decided to take. Oddly enough, this makes Hannibal a deeply pious man. It's only that his religion is heretical to anyone with the slightest moral or ethical sense.
Will hints at what might be his belief structure. He is torn between a desire to know what the many other versions of the world would be like - if he had just gone with Hannibal like he said he would, perhaps others would not have died. (We hear him asking this of Abigail before it is definitively revealed that she is dead herself.) Yet at the same time, there's a strong sense that whatever can happen will happen - the unabridged Murphy's Law. While it might not be true on a quantum-physics level (at least according to modern science,) there's an attractive logic to this worldview, and there's also a good chance that on the scale of human behavior, it's actually true.
But it does leave moral questions open. Abigail responds to this postulation, saying that if one can only behave in the way that a deterministic universe has laid out for you, there's no such thing as doing the wrong thing. It means that Hannibal does what he does because it's what he will do, and that she will follow him because it is what she will do.
(Actually, given that this is a subject matter I've given a lot of thought throughout my life, I could go on for ages about the various wrinkles and consequences of this stuff, but I'll spare you.)
Will finds himself compelled to find Hannibal, even though the logical thing is for him to cut his losses and lick his wounds and hope that he never sees the monster again. But he is compelled, like the Abigail in his mind (or perhaps by the Abigail in his mind) to find him. Yet he really doesn't know what he will do if he finds him.
The episode ends with Will and Pazzi entering the catacombs of the church where Hannibal left his victim. Surrounded by hooded skeletons of priests from centuries past that look just like the grim reaper - the memento mori - Will knows Hannibal is there, and he forgives his friend, even if he doesn't promise not to try to stop him again.
Where we go from there is really up in the air.
Post Script:
I found myself asking over and over, out loud, while watching this episode: "How are they allowed to do this on television?" By that I partially meant the violence, which is very, very gruesome (though they have some guidelines they stick to that tend to make it somewhat easier to take - like the fact that the violence is never sexual in nature and also that we tend to see the aftermath, rather than the actual act,) but the main reason I found myself asking the question is that Hannibal is so, so much farther into the realm of experimental, expressionistic filmmaking than what you typically get, even on premium cable.
Hannibal has had its procedural elements, primarily in the first season, but the show's makers have clearly staked a big claim here, refusing to make a CSI knock-off with the twist of Hannibal Lecter helping the team out.
What I am extremely curious about is how things will transition into the Hannibal Lecter stories we're familiar with. Supposedly we're getting essentially Red Dragon this season, with an incarcerated Hannibal helping Will Graham catch the Tooth Fairy killer, but damn do we have a lot of ground to cover before that's a remote possibility.
I don't know if the relationship between Will and Hannibal is this intense and close in the books - I get the impression that the answer is "no." I've seen parts of the Red Dragon movie (not Manhunter,) which portrays the relationship between the men as much more of a naive student and a mentor who is hiding his terrible secret.
The weird, pseudo-romantic relationship between the two on the show complicates a future of cooperation. Whether their attraction is literally sexual in nature or not, there's an intimacy between Will and Hannibal that I don't think the latter has even with Bedelia - even if Hannibal is maybe auditioning her for such a role. In a way, it's like a romance in which Eros has been replaced with Thanatos, but with all the same sensual exploration.
Of the films, the only one I've seen in full was Silence of the Lambs - which is of course the best-liked and the one that led to an inundation of psychological thriller movies in the 90s. Clarice does achieve a certain intimacy with Lecter in that, but the movie gives the impression that Hannibal has actually been good for her - helping her move past her insecurities and allowing her to save the day. Hopkins' Hannibal is certainly still a monster, but he's not really a corrupter. At least in Lambs, he helps Clarice because he likes her for who she is, not for who she has the potential to become (not sure how things go later on, but I'm told that the subsequent books and movies kind of suck.)
Mikkelsen's Hannibal is an insidious creature. The show casts him as literally the devil (with a strong hint of Dracula, as I suggested earlier.) There's plenty of talk of God, but none of the devil. In a Western, Christian context, that's slightly odd (especially when the show is dealing with the nature of evil,) but this reinforces Hannibal as a devil figure - he has no interest in talking about the devil because for all intents and purposes, it was Hannibal who approached Jesus in the wilderness (holy shit would that be a cool scene to watch.) Almost like a creature out of Lovecraft, he warps the minds of the people around him seemingly as a simple quality of his nature.
Hopkins' Hannibal I think succeeded by being underestimated. He was ultimately a human being, but one with an inhuman level of intelligence and willpower to commit fully to his gruesome plans. Even we are shocked at how effectively he breaks out of that cage in Silence of the Lambs. People see him as just a well-read, highly intelligent murderer, and not the killing machine that he is.
But with the way that Hannibal the show has portrayed him, how the hell are we ever going to trust him at all once he's behind bars (or glass?) We've seen the effect he's had on Will - making Will doubt his own sanity and whether he is, himself, really a killer at heart (the answer is no, Will. You've just been letting those mirror neurons fire way too much in Hannibal's company.)
Short of actually killing him, which I don't think the show will ever do, it's impossible to be safe in a world that contains Hannibal Lecter. Even locked up with no possible way to escape, I wouldn't be surprised if we see him manipulate one of his captors into killing for him.
One last note and then this postscript will be done:
I think there have been some copyright issues with Clarice Starling and the whole Silence of the Lambs cast of characters who weren't already in Red Dragon. I really hope that they manage to clear that, because I'm fascinated to see what the show does with Clarice. Clarice is, I think, the only other person to grab Hannibal's attention the way that Will does. Just seeing that level of intimacy between Hannibal and another character could be a way to explore many new avenues of his character.
And also because this show could probably use some more female characters. I mean, of the two that were in the last episode, one was a hallucination (or a literal ghost - which in this show would be indistinguishable.)
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