Hannibal Season 3, Episode 6
"Digestivo"
Original airdate: July 18, 2015
Writers: Bryan Fuller, Steve Lightfoot
Director: Adam Kane
Cast: Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen, Laurence Fishburne, Caroline Dhavernas
We've reached the end of Hannibal's European sojourn. Hannibal and Will are back in the States, bound and captive at Mason Verger's farm, where the meatpacking heir intends to consume his old nemesis in a full-tilt turn towards cannibalism.
But the show's called Hannibal, so we know the title character will likely survive, and we enter "Digestivo" with an inkling that Will, tied up beside Hannibal, probably won't shuffle off this mortal coil either. Too many loose ends are still dangling, too many forces jockeying for position in the battle over Hannibal's body and Will's soul. The question is not whether or not they'll survive, but what'll be left of them when they do, and to answer that question, the episode begins by taking us back.
We see the moment of Hannibal's capture, as a group of bought and paid for Italian police barge in on Hannibal's dinner party just as he's sawing open Will's skull. Hannibal is knocked out, bound, and carried away, and Will soon goes with him as an added prize for Verger. Jack, a horrified spectator bound to a dining chair, is the spare to be quickly killed and staged as the Chesapeake Ripper's final victim.
But remember, we have a lot of loose ends to get to, and one of them is Chiyoh, who posted up on a neighboring rooftop with a full view of the apartment. She shoots the men tasked with killing Jack, then pays him a visit. She frees him, but only after he reveals the location of Muskrat Farm in America. The chase is on again, but this time it's not catch Hannibal. It's to see if they get there in time to find anything left over.
Fortunately for them, Mason is keen on taking his time with his upcoming meal. Over dinner, attended by his physician and partner in crime Cordell (again, Glenn Flesher just knocking the evil out of the park), Mason explains his grand plan: He will eat Hannibal, piece by piece, keeping him alive as long as possible, but he has a different plan for Will. He doesn't want his body. He wants his face, a full-face transplant that'll turn him as handsome as Hugh Dancy while he devours Mads Mikkelsen's entire physical form. Later, with Hannibal tied up like an ordinary pig headed for slaughter, Cordell trades barbs with Lecter as they discuss the preparation of his flesh for consumption, right down to his genitals. Hannibal, ever bemused, is simply biding his time.
And no one understands that better than Alana, who's united with Margot in their quest to be rid of both Hannibal and Mason. She objects to his plan to eat Hannibal slowly, noting that playing with your food gives it a chance to "bite back," but Mason's also a few steps ahead of the ladies in his planning. Fearing that Alana might do exactly what she planned and call the Feds on him the moment he had Hannibal, Mason drops a new nugget of information: When he took Margot's uterus, he also harvested and preserved her eggs. Then comes the real kicker: He's already put those eggs, alongside his sperm, into a surrogate who's hidden somewhere on the property. It's a whole new set of cards Margot and Alana weren't expecting, so for a while longer, at least, they have to play Mason's game.
Once again we are drawn into a study of Hannibal and Mason as parallel monsters, both capable of thinking far ahead of their would-be adversaries. Hannibal's malevolence is quieter, more subtle, while Mason is anything but subtle, drinking martinis made of tears and robbing his sister of her own agency in childbearing, among other things. Alana and Margot must choose a monster with which to ally themselves, but they also must choose a method of monstrosity. They make the more daring choice, and force a promise out of Hannibal: They cut just one of the ropes binding him in a pig pen on the farm, and in exchange he'll clear out the rest of the property, leaving them alone to seek vengeance against Mason while also freeing Will.
The scene in which Hannibal is uncaged again is remarkable for a number of reasons, but it's especially remarkable for the way Alana plays it. Her injuries — injuries inflicted by Hannibal, remember — have made her more like her ex-boyfriend, more ruthless and cunning and cold. She stares him down, making a hard deal, and then allows herself a moment of vulnerability as she asks a single question: "Could I have ever understood you?" The answer, of course, is no. However bonded they could have become in another life, however close, Alana would've never breached Hannibal's memory palace. She could, in other words, never be Will Graham.
She cuts him loose anyway, and Hannibal springs into action just in time to stop Cordell from slicing off Will's face. Under anesthesia for what he thinks is a face transplant, Mason wakes up to find Cordell's face laying over his own, and Will gone. But that's not the only shocking discovery in this sequence. Searching for the surrogate mother, Alana and Margot find a sow on a surgical table, implanted with a human fetus that's grown almost to full term only to die, rejecting its unfamiliar host body. Margot cradles the body of what would have been her son and knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the time has come to do what Hannibal always wanted from her: She needs to kill Mason.
So, as her brother screams for them to call the FBI, Margot stands with Alana and reveals that, before he fled, Hannibal helped them to harvest more of Mason's sperm (a cattle prod up the ass apparently does wonders for this), and now that they also know where Margot's eggs went, they don't need him to produce an heir. Mason tries to fight back, but they plunge him to the bottom of his own eel tank, where one of the creatures slides right down his throat and ends him. The Verger saga is over. One monster is dead, but in his place stand the vengeful angels of Alana and Margot, who in their own way have now done exactly what Hannibal always hoped they'd do.
Hannibal, free of Muskrat farm, flees carrying Will in his arms through the snow, while Chiyoh picks off stray security guards from a nearby tree. Before long the trio is back at Will's home in Virginia, where Chiyoh insists that she will help Hannibal so long as she is free, because "some beasts shouldn't be caged." Will wakes up in his own bed and, at last, delivers the break-up monologue to end all break-up monologues. In the last episode, he wondered if he could ever truly separate himself from Hannibal, and earlier in "Digestivo" Jack Crawford observed that Will and Hannibal are "identically different," a sentiment Will clearly feels. It's a hard choice to make.
And yet, their differences are clearer than ever. Will can see them now with the clarity he once saw in crime scenes. Hannibal "delights" in all of these things, but Will can only "tolerate" them, because he's so close to Hannibal, because he admires the mind and the heart but not the deeds. They understand each other, and that understanding means that Will can, at least, try to let Hannibal go.
"I miss my dogs," Will says. "I'm not going to miss you. I'm not going to find you. I'm not going to look for you. I don't want to know where you are or what you do. I don't want to think about you anymore."
Here we see something rare pass across Hannibal Lecter's face: Shock. And more than that, hurt. He is wounded by the conviction in Will's words, the power of them, the sense that it really is, finally, over at last. Resigned to this, he turns to go, and by the time Jack and the FBI ride up to the house, he's long gone.
Or is he? Will tries to wave Jack off, only to see Hannibal emerge from the woods behind the house, hands up, prepared to surrender. When Hannibal tries to flatter Jack with the declaration that he finally caught the Chesapeake Ripper, Jack can only smile: "I didn't catch you, you surrendered." Hannibal smiles back, and cuts a look at way as he says:
"I want you to know exactly where I am. That way, you can always find me."
Just as we knew that Hannibal and Will wouldn't die at the hands of Mason Verger, so too do we know here that this is not the end of Hannibal Lecter. He was caught because he wanted to be, as people like Bedelia always predicted. Was he caught out of love for Will, out of fascination over what might happen next, because he just wants to see what will happen when he has an opportunity to escape? That's what we'll find out very, very soon.
Because a new monster is about to step onto the stage.
Next Time: "The Great Red Dragon"
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