Hannibal Season 3, Episode 3
"Secondo"
Original airdate: June 18, 2015
Writers: Angelina Burnett, Bryan Fuller, Steve Lightfoot
Director: Vincenzo Natali
Cast: Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen, Gillian Anderson, Laurence Fishburne, Tao Okamoto
Hannibal is a love story. It's not a secret at this point, if it ever was, but now that we have reestablished the ongoing game between Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham, the series' sense of romance has blossomed again. And in typical Hannibal fashion, it's anything but conventional.
At home in Italy, Hannibal has forgiveness on his mind. How could he not, after Will whispered "I forgive you" to him in the catacombs beneath his latest crime scene? He's mulling what it means to forgive, and to be forgiven, as well as what it means to be betrayed, and to be the betrayer. Bedelia, resigned to her place at his side if not entirely relaxed into it, offers an observation: "Betrayal and forgiveness are…best seen as something akin to falling in love."
Hannibal's response: "You cannot control with respect to whom you fall in love."
Hannibal has fallen in love with Will Graham, is still in love with Will Graham, and to prove it, he's having a hard time keeping himself quiet amid his European exile. At dinner, after serving the last dessert ever offered to First Class Titanic passengers, Hannibal murders yet another local academic, the same man who questioned his fitness as a Dante expert in the season premiere. He does it quickly, with an ice pick through the skull, then watches as his enemy, still twitching and laughing as his brain injury takes hold, struggles to comprehend what's happened to him. It's all too much for Bedelia, who stands up and rips out the ice pick to put an end to this poor man's suffering, leaving Hannibal to remark that, "technically," she's the one who killed him by letting him bleed out. Bedelia, shocked but still sharp as a tack, arrives at the inevitable conclusion: Hannibal's murders are not simply "impulsive" acts, as he remarks. He's calling out to his old friends. He wants them to come looking for him.
And he's getting his wish. While Jack Crawford arrives in Italy, going over the crime scene so far and meeting up with Inspector Pazzi, Will goes looking where it all began: the Lecter family estate in Lithuania. Director Vincenzo Natali uses the moment as an opportunity to play with the show's style yet again, shifting from the '70s Italian thriller style he sharpened in Episode 1 to something more Gothic, more akin to Mario Bava's period horror pieces like Black Sunday and Kill, Baby, Kill. When Will finds what he's looking for, he discovers an estate in ruins, its grounds dead and fog-swept, its iron fences bent and untended. He's gone looking for Hannibal's origin story and found a haunted house.
Three ghosts occupy the hollow shell of the Lecter estate. One is Mischa, Hannibal's sister, whose grave Will finds on the grounds. Another is Chiyoh (Tao Okamoto), a beautiful woman with an unclear relationship to Hannibal (though we know from tales of his "Aunt Murasaki" that he has perhaps some connection to East Asia) and a hunter's eyes so sharp she spots Will long before she meets him. Their meeting comes later, in the cellar beneath the manor house, where Will finds a bone-thin, dirty prisoner (Julian Richings) in a cell, the third ghost of Lecter Manor.
After establishing his Hannibal Lecter bona fides by literally showing Chiyoh his "smile" (the scar across his stomach), he does his best to interrogate her. The man in the cell, she reveals, is the man responsible for killing Mischa long ago. Instead of killing him as revenge, Hannibal left him alive for Chiyoh to kill, and because Chiyoh doesn't wish to kill anyone, she has simply kept him prisoner, in the cellar with Hannibal's snail colony, with only "the sound of water" to keep him company. She also offers a piece of wisdom courtesy of author Karen Blixen: "All sorrows can be borne if you put them in a story."
Hannibal, Will reckons, has been telling himself a story, with him as the hero and Will as his love interest. The story is not over, which is why Will's hunting Hannibal and Hannibal's leaving breadcrumbs, but because it's a story, it's also not all completely true. Hannibal has enhanced his own legend, building it brick by brick in the same way he built his memory palace, and that means it's possible that the man in the cell is merely a scapegoat, Hannibal's effort to hide from the truth. In the night, with Chiyoh asleep, Will returns and lets the man free, but the man only returns to his cell, not out of fear, but out of a sense of revenge. He ambushes Chiyoh, who soon kills him in self-defense. Why? Because Hannibal wanted her to, but also because Will wanted her to. Despite this, Chiyoh agrees to assist in the hunt for Hannibal, because she too is part of this story, whether she likes it or not.
But what truth is Hannibal hiding from? Though Will goes deep into his mind to imagine his conversations with Lecter at this point in their relationship, it's Bedelia who actually roots out the answer. Hannibal might not have killed Mischa, but he did eat her, and he does not place the blame for that on anyone else. "Nothing happened to me," he tells Bedelia. "I happened." Perhaps in an effort to reason away something he'd rather not think too long about, he explains that eating his sister was an act of forgiveness for a betrayal she'd visited on him. Of course, because we know that there are few people Hannibal actually cares about — remember "it's only cannibalism if we are equals?" — we know that he is less likely to lie about his feelings regarding Mischa. This, of course, brings up the natural next step in this thought process. Hannibal's latest betrayer is Will Graham, which means there's only one way out for them: "I have to eat him."
With this confession, the love story of Hannibal enters perhaps its most erotically charged moment so far. It's eroticism built on transgressive behavior, to be sure, but we are once again witnessing a courtship. Will, who feels most understood only when he's with Hannibal, wants to understand the man he lost, while Hannibal wants to reunite with the man he lost and offer the supreme act of forgiveness. Most of the time Hannibal eats humans because he sees them as cattle, but there are those rare people in whom he sees the opportunity to devour them, to live with them inside him like new organs, as a profound act of love.
Next Time: "Aperitivo"
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