The relationship between Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter is the core of Hannibal. That relationship was inexorably changed by the events of season two. Will cozied up to Hannibal following his framed imprisonment, presenting himself as a serial killer apprentice. Will's ultimate intentions were always on the mysterious side, especially to himself, but we saw that he ultimately turned on his "friend," which led to the catastrophic Red Dinner - Hannibal's ultimate declaration of his own nature.
But Hannibal still retains a deep connection to Will, and it seems that he realizes - in a way that is plain enough that Bedelia can read it in his behavior - that ultimately, he will be caught. It's a question of how he wants that to go down. Hannibal is like a chess player who can see that his opponent will checkmate him, but for now, he has control of just how that defeat comes.
And of course, given that this is still technically in the pre-Red Dragon period of the story, there's a certain inevitability - we need to actually get to the point where the Thomas Harris novels start, and that requires a caged Hannibal.
We get a reveal in this episode of another survivor of the Red Dinner (and the previews for next week give away the last,) with Jack arriving in Italy, speaking briefly with Pazzi. Jack's primary concern is Will - we don't know exactly what kind of communication occurred between them before Will's trip to Italy, but I'm guessing it wasn't a mutual decision. The scene here, to my mind, really just indicates to us that Jack is back in play, but what his role will be in the events of the season remain to be seen.
Will and Hannibal have diverged - Hannibal has re-created his image as a respectable member of high society with Bedelia playing the part of his wife, but his heart doesn't seem to be in it - he has been killing more frequently than he needs to. Perhaps he knows he will be caught, and so he sees no need to cut back. Inviting a colleague to dinner, (the same Italian professor who seemed upset that Hannibal would become their primary Dante expert) he serves the man a cocktail that passengers drank on the Titanic right before it sank. Damn, Hannibal, that's not the most subtle foreshadowing you've done. Yet when he jams an ice pick into the professor's head, he claims it was impulsive. Perhaps this is Hannibal at his "not-giving-a-fuck"-est. In a moment of intense dark humor, when Bedelia removes the pick, ending the professor's broken-brain rambling, Hannibal quips "Technically, you killed him." Yes, Hannibal has drawn Bedelia into participating, rather than just observing, but this is hardly his A-game. Bedelia's action is clearly an act of matter-of-fact mercy, and one could hardly imagine that this is the moment that is going to give her the taste for killing. It's horrifying in that she is so desensitized to the violence that she can carry on a conversation afterward, but personally, I don't fear (for now) that Bedelia's going to join team Hannibal, at least in any capacity beyond her current status.
Yet even though their paths have diverged, Will and Hannibal share something - both technically force a woman to take a life this week. However, Will's version is oddly more similar to something Hannibal might have done. Was he sure that this is how it would have gone down? I don't think he was. Yet it is Will, and not Hannibal, who creates a corpse-sculpture at the end of the episode.
Ok, let's back up and explain Will's story, which continues this season's intensely surreal experimental style. Will has traveled to Lithuania, to Hannibal's family estate. And of course, OF COURSE Hannibal grew up on an estate with a freaking castle. Again, the Devil-by-way-of-Dracula imagery continues (not to mention the mixing of blood and wine - damn, Hannibal, even when you're hundreds of miles away you're always blurring the line between food and human matter.)
Will hops the padlocked gate and wanders into this haunted manor. There he sees a Japanese woman, Chiyo (and forgive me if I'm doing that white person thing of confusing Japanese and Chinese - I know Hannibal has a Japanese aunt, so that's where the assumption is coming from,) who hunts game birds. Will avoids her and wanders into a wine cellar that is filled with snails (a motif I imagine we'll continue to see this season) and a caged-off alcove covered with strange, almost voodoo-like skeleton charms and containing a dirty, almost feral man.
Chiyo confronts Will and they go up to the gamekeeper's house where she apparently lives to talk about why he's there, and why she is. Hannibal's history prevents him from returning to this home. His claim is that the man in the cage murdered and ate his sister Mischa. He has left Chiyo there because he expects she will eventually kill the man. We really don't get a specific date for when this happened - there's a date on Mischa's tombstone but I couldn't read it - but for all I care, it could have happened a thousand years ago. This is a fairy-tale land, and Chiyo stands committed to remaining innocent of killing another person, yet because of the man's crimes, she cannot simply allow him to go free. And thus, Chiyo is as much a prisoner as the man is.
Will sets the Eternal Guardwoman free by liberating her prisoner. He sends the man on his way, but of course this is too easy. Chiyo goes to check on her charge, but the man breaks free of the unlocked cage and attacks her. She smashes a bottle of wine and drives the bottle's neck into his. (Correction - it's actually the chicken bone Will stepped on in an earlier scene.)
Will, perhaps inadvertently, got her to commit the act that Hannibal had wanted her to do for so long. At least through Will's machinations, it was an act of self defense and not of murder.
Of course, we discover that Hannibal's story was a falsehood. As he says, "Nothing happened to me. I happened." The implication is that this man was innocent, at least of that particular crime. Hannibal presumably ate his own sister, but he has spent the rest of his life trying to replace her. Oddly, this re-frames his relationship with Will, not as a patient or a not-technically-sexual lover, but as a surrogate sibling. In many ways, I think Hannibal wants Will to be his little brother. Rather than being the object of his attention - a kind of "facing each other" relationship, he wants Will to occupy the same vantage point - to share a background and home ground in the way that only siblings can. Is Mischa's murder the only one that Hannibal actually regrets?
While the general rule for writing characters in any situation is that more fleshed-out characters are better (personally I think that this mainly makes them easier to write,) when you are dealing with an iconic monster like Hannibal, retaining mystery is important. Horror is in the unknown. Yet in a clever way, this exploration of Hannibal's past seems, on the surface, that it will help explain his motivations - to see a perhaps traumatized child who internalized the violence he was exposed to and continues to inflict it on the world. Yet that's not the case. The root of Hannibal's evil remains unknown, and that helps to blur the line between whether he is really a human at all, or truly a monster wearing a person suit.
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