Hannibal Season 3, Episode 8
"The Great Red Dragon"
Original airdate: July 25, 2015
Writers: Nick Antosca, Steve Lightfoot, Bryan Fuller
Director: Neil Marshall
Cast: Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen, Laurence Fishburne, Caroline Dhavernas, Richard Armitage
If Hannibal were a modern streaming series, Season 3 would already be over and everything that happens from this point forward would probably count as Season 4. Hannibal's back in America, the Italian adventure is over, and everyone's doing their best to move on and shift to new roles now that the saga of the Chesapeake Ripper seems finally closed. It's like a fresh start.
And with that fresh start comes a fresh monster, one signaled by this episode's title: "The Great Red Dragon." We have reached, at long last, the Hannibal Lecter story as laid out by Thomas Harris, with appropriate tweaks to match Hannibal's own playful remix of Harris's characters and narrative. It's time for Red Dragon.
And what a monster. In the opening five minutes of this episode, we get to know Francis Dolarhyde (Richard Armitage), a loner with a cleft palate and a fascination with the art of William Blake, as he transforms from quiet outsider to bestial superman, using Blake's The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun painting as his avatar. We watch him exercise to build his strength, see him purchase false teeth, and of course, watch as he tattoos Blake's imagery on his entire back, transforming himself into the Red Dragon. It may as well be a werewolf movie, and director Neil Marshall (best known for horror films like The Descent and Dog Soldiers) films it with appropriate awe and terror.
By the time we move back to the characters we know, sufficiently dazzled, three years have passed since we last saw them. Hannibal's now firmly ensconced in the Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane as a patient, in a beautiful cell meant to mimic something of his home life. He's even allowed to cook food for himself, though he of course can't get his hands on human meat anymore. Alana runs the hospital, and Dr. Chilton, who's somehow still alive, told his story to the world in a bestselling book. As we catch up with everyone, Chilton has dinner with Hannibal in his cell, and decides it's time to taunt him with news of the killer everyone's now calling "The Tooth Fairy."
Dolardhyde, you see, has his own cosmology in his head about why he kills and what he wants, but he's never announced himself as the Great Red Dragon. What he has done is leave pronounced bite marks on his victims, the final touch of his string of family annihilations, leaving the press to come up with the "Tooth Fairy" name. Chilton brings him up with Hannibal to get some insight, of course, but also to point out that the legend of the Chesapeake Ripper is fading. "Hannibal the Cannibal" is old news, a killer with "niche" interest from the public. The Tooth Fairy, on the other hand, is a "Four-Quadrant Killer," whose crimes against entire families asleep in their beds make him a monster with mass appeal.
We get precious little in this episode to explain Dolarhyde's motives, and in fact we only see the aftermath of his crimes, when he's covered in blood and roaring at the sky. What we also see, just as importantly, is how he chronicles his own rise in the public imagination. In the attic room where he's created the Great Red Dragon, Dolarhyde has also created a scrapbook for his crimes, a massive tome that looks more like a medieval codex than a modern book. In it he keeps Blake's Red Dragon paintings, along with his own writing, and of course, newspaper clippings commemorating his crimes, blacking out references to the "Tooth Fairy" along the way. He is, quite pointedly, something entirely unlike Hannibal, killing not to possess or to prove superiority, but to transform, to become something beyond the feeble human shell he must present to the world. He longs for transformation, and he believes he's getting closer.
This is, of course, a big problem for the FBI and Jack Crawford, who's back in the saddle after almost walking away from it all earlier in the season. He needs Will Graham, but Will has spent the last three years distancing himself as much as possible from the life he once led. He's still got his dogs, and his love of the outdoors, but everything else is different. He's married to a lovely, patient woman named Molly (Nina Arianda), he's got a stepson (Gabriel Browning Rodriguez), and he hasn't gone into the head of a killer in a very long time. But of course, here comes Jack, with his black SUV and his cool hat and his wry smile. He needs Will, because the Tooth Fairy is poised to strike again and no one has yet come up with any clues that will point to a suspect.
And just like that, we're back where we started with these two. Jack could respect Will's wish to step away from the darkness for three years, but then he's back in his life, guilting him with stories of family annihilation, praising him as the only solution to an increasingly violent problem. The one thing that perhaps makes Will agree more readily is the presence of Molly, who stands by him and promises she'll be there when he's done. "I'll be different when I get back," he warns her, and she replies, "I won't."
So, Will Graham heads back into the fray, back into the mouth of the beast, opening the door to a crime scene left by the Tooth Fairy, a beautiful home where a mother, father, and two children were gunned down. Trembling with fear, his eyes looking for an exit, Will forces himself back down into the mind of a killer, placing everything from the blood spatter on the walls to the broken mirrors all over the house into fresh context. It is perhaps the most frightening sequence the show's given us, not because it's particularly graphic but because Will has more skin in the game than he's ever had before. He's a husband and a father, and he's imagining himself dragging little boys from beneath their beds and shooting them in cold blood. He is glimpsing the fury of the Great Red Dragon, and it's shaking him to his very core.
Though Will does glean certain key details from the crime scene, including the presence of talcum power which suggests the killer touched one of his victims with his bare hand, he's still missing something. He is in search of a "mindset I need to recover," a patch of darkness where he hasn't roamed for years, and he can't get back there alone. For that he has to go to the one place he never wished to go: Back into Hannibal's den.
And it's here that this new version of the show, this Season 3.5 or Season 4 incarnation of Hannibal, leaves us, with Will at Hannibal's doorstep, with the romance poised to resume. Can Will Graham ever truly leave Hannibal Lecter behind? Will this visit open the door to a deeper madness from which he'll never escape? We'll find out soon enough.
Next Time: "...And the Woman Clothed with the Sun."
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