Hannibal Season 3, Episode 9
"...And The Woman Clothed With the Sun"
Original airdate: August 1, 2015
Writers: Jeff Vlaming, Helen Shang, Steve Lightfoot, Bryan Fuller
Director: John Dahl
Cast: Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen, Laurence Fishburne, Caroline Dhavernas, Richard Armitage
It's never fun to run into an ex after a bad breakup, especially when there's nowhere for you to go because you're, you know, in a cell at a hospital for the criminally insane. That's exactly where Hannibal finds himself when Will Graham comes calling, setting off a tense conversation that's still dripping with sexual tension.
Will is here because he wants Hannibal's insights on the "Tooth Fairy" killings, and he's doing his best to keep things businesslike, even invoking the "Dr. Lecter" moniker instead of simply calling his old friend "Hannibal." Lecter picks up on this and immediately starts probing Will's new life, noting that his "atrocious aftershave" (a direct quote from Thomas Harris's novel) is "something a child would select." Even without Will's participation, Hannibal deduces that his former partner in crime is a family man now, and he's seething with jealousy. As much as Hannibal Lecter can seethe, anyway.
Still, there's nothing Hannibal loves more than meddling in things just to see what will happen, so he takes the Tooth Fairy case file and agrees to review, asking for an hour to go over the materials. As Will retreats, Hannibal meditates on Will's new fatherhood, and flashes back to his own. We get a little more time with Abigail Hobbs (Kacey Rohl) as we see adoptive daughter and adoptive father faking her death in the Hobbs home, the death that helped Hannibal point the finger at Will way back in Season 1. Together they draw Abigail's blood, and use a sprayer to launch it across the Hobbs kitchen in a perfect imitation of arterial splatter. It's a scene that feels ecstatic, almost incestuously orgasmic, and it's so clear how overjoyed Hannibal is to have someone else to share it all with. That old teacup that he used to shatter is, for one brief moment, wonderfully whole.
Back in the present, Will and Alana have a moment together while Hannibal goes over the case files, and it's clear that while her personality has shifted, Alana's protective instincts have not. She reveals that, like Will, she's also a parent now, as she carried the Verger family heir as his birth mother (yes, she and Margot had a boy), and she's also still deeply concerned about the impact the combined influence of Hannibal and Jack Crawford could have on Will's mental state. But there's something different about her concern this time. "I'm not worried about you," she tells Will. "Last time it didn't end with you." The impact crater left by Will's dalliance with Hannibal is still smoking, and Alana is still crawling out of it.
Back in Hannibal's cell, he calls the Tooth Fairy "a very shy boy," and shares a particular insight that Will hadn't quite pinned down: The killer has a "special relationship" with the Moon. Jack Crawford already pinned down the killings to the phases of the moon, the only real link between the crimes they have, but Hannibal points out that "blood in the moonlight" is a particularly striking sight, and the Tooth Fairy may be using the large yards of the affluent families he kills to essentially bathe himself in moonlight after each kill. It's more werewolf imagery, and it points Will in an interesting new direction.
Will leaves to explore the crime scenes, armed with his new information, leaving Hannibal in the care of Alana. She knows exactly what could happen if he continues to meddle with Will's mind, and Jack's, and she knows with him danger is always a blink of an eye away. She threatens him, reminding him that the lavish nature of his particular cell is a "courtesy," then goes further. Hannibal fears, above all else, "indignity," and Alana threatens to provide him with plenty of that if he "misbehaves." When she spoke with Will, she explained that the only reason she was still working in the psychiatric world, instead of counting Verger money, was to keep Hannibal locked up, to be the person holding the keys to his prison. A lot of wounds have healed since the end of Season 2, but Alana's got scars that'll never fade.
And her scars are getting to Will. In a fantastic sequence that merges Francis Dolarhyde's perspective with Will's own, we see him viewing home movies of the families Dolarhyde killed, while Dolarhyde reviews the footage he shot himself from the crime scenes. As it was in his inaugural episode, Dolarhyde's perspective is all about his transformation, what he's becoming and how he hopes to achieve his ends, but Will is transforming too. He can feel himself shifting back into the old darkness, but with an added twist. When we met Will Graham, he didn't want to disappear into a killer's mind because of what it would do to him. Now he's fighting the same darkness because of what it would do to his family.
Alana's threats send Hannibal back into his memories, to another moment with Abigail that we've never seen before. Secreted back at Hannibal's home after he faked her death, Abigail is confronted with her ultimate challenge: The corpse of her father, fresh from the funeral home, sitting upright in one of Hannibal's chairs. Insisting that she must "love" her father in the same way he loved her, Hannibal encourages Abigail to symbolically murder his corpse. The result visual, in which embalming fluid pours from Garrett Jacob Hobbs's neck, is one of the creepiest things Hannibal has ever given us, and it adds even more weight to Hannibal's memories. These scenes underscore, more than any others in the series, just how much he valued Abigail. She was never just a bargaining chip, and now with everything else taken from him, he can only reflect on what might have been.
Will's keenly aware of the threats to both his psyche and the wellbeing of his family, but as if he needed more reminding, Freddie Lounds (Lara Jean Chorostecki) turns up at one of the Tooth Fairy crime scenes, dredging up bad memories. Tasked with telling Will's story, Freddie instead took secret photos of him in his hospital bed, then dubbed Will and Hannibal "Murder Husbands" in the press, further driving Will into seclusion. Freddie, ever the manipulator, wants in on the Tooth Fairy story, and believes she can lure him out through TattleCrime, particularly now that she also knows that Will paid a visit to Hannibal. Another would-be puppeteer has stepped into Will Graham's life, but it's about more than that. Leave it to Freddie to remind Will that, in his own way, he still misses his Murder Husband, and his Murder Husband misses him.
But here we step away from Will for a moment to focus instead on Francis, and what he's doing when he's not flexing in his attic room or poring over William Blake paintings. In a search for infrared film that he can use to film "nocturnal animals," he pays a visit to a blind film developer named Reba (Rutina Wesley). Reba is kind, and welcoming, and even jokes that her blindness means his privacy is "guaranteed" if she develops his film for him. It's rare for Francis to feel welcomed by another human being, so when he sees Reba later that night, he offers her a ride home, and the pair start to bond. He likes her, in part, because she can't see his face, and because she, as a therapist and teacher in a past life, understands his speech impediment without a hitch. She likes him because, as she puts it, "I've felt no sympathy from you." In a life full of people treating her as a victim because of her blindness, she has found a man who passes no judgement and offers no special treatment. It feels like mutual respect to her, even if it's something else for Francis.
While Will talks on the phone with his wife (they've each taken in another stray dog while they've been apart), and suffers from the return of his darkest dreams, Jack finally pays a visit to Hannibal. They are deliciously catty with one another, with Hannibal ribbing Jack for his "younger" wardrobe and Jack ribbing Hannibal for, well, being stuck in a cell like a chump. More importantly, though, Jack's there to push Hannibal in the direction he wants because, surprise, he knew that Hannibal would push Will the entire time. We are back at square one with Jack Crawford, who's once again willing to go for broke to catch a killer because he's lost without Will Graham's turbulent mind, and Will is lost without Hannibal to hold his hand. Everyone may have moved on to other families, or perhaps abandoned their families altogether, but Jack still wants to play the Big Daddy and get the band back together, no matter who gets hurt along the way.
And it's working. We end the episode with Dolarhyde, having just read Freddie's latest article, calling Hannibal in jail, pretending to be his "attorney." He doesn't give his name, noting that "the important thing is what I am becoming." Hannibal, immediately enraptured, listens as Dolarhyde dubs himself "The Great Red Dragon," and the episode ends with a plunge into the kind of darkness we all remember from Season 1. The Stag is stalking them all once again, death is gaining strength. The question now is whether anyone will be left after this particular hunt.
Next Time: "...And the Woman Clothed in Sun."
