Hannibal Season 3, Episode 2
"Primavera"
Original airdate: June 11, 2015
Writers: Jeff Vlaming, Bryan Fuller
Director: Vincenzo Natali
Cast: Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen, Kacey Rohl
It's no accident that Hannibal ended up here. Perhaps it wasn't the plan from the day the pilot was written, but the show's operatic style, coupled with its increasingly elaborate plotting, kept pushing the series into grander and grander territory. That it ended up in the cradle of the Renaissance, with Hannibal Lecter on the run and Will Graham in hot pursuit, feels like fate.
But that's not the only aspect of Hannibal's increasing grandeur and bombast in its final season. Visually the splendor has increased, as has the narrative, but what makes Season 3 special is its ability to raise the thematic stakes to match. If the first season was about sanity and insanity and the second was about life and death, we have now reached something more existential. This is a battle of primal, universal forces, and we have a front row seat.
The proof is all over "Primavera," the episode which sees Will return to the Hannibal narrative for the first time since the Season 2 finale. We get a brief flashback reminding us what Will faced the last time we saw him — Hannibal gutted him and left Abigail Hobbs to bleed out in his arms — and then Will wakes up in the hospital, bandaged up but quite alive, and he's not the only one. Abigail Hobbs has also somehow survived the second time in her life a person has cut her throat, and as upset as she is by that, she's also upset with Will. Her dependence on Hannibal has made her, if not brainwashed, then at least extremely forgiving, and she wants to seek him out. Will does too, but their purposes may be at odds.
Flash forward eight months, and Will starts to get an inkling of where Hannibal might have gone. He remembers a conversation they had shortly before everything came crashing down, in which Hannibal said that his "memory palace" would heavily feature the Norman Chapel in Palermo, which just happens to be where Antony's corpse from last week turned up, folded into an origami heart. Will was right, but he's not the only one on Hannibal's trail.
It's here that Rinaldo Pazzi (Fortunato Cerlino) enters the picture, and starts to question why Will's turned up in Sicily in such close proximity to a crime scene given his…history. Pazzi, a police inspector, then reveals that he's been after Hannibal Lecter far longer than Will Graham has. In early adulthood, Hannibal prowled Florence as "Il Mistro," killing frequently and arranging his victims in poses that reflected Renaissance paintings, most notably Botticelli's "Primavera." They're looking for the same person, but Will and Pazzi both suspect, just as Will does with Abigail, that they are seeking different things from the encounter.
But Pazzi and Graham share more than the same target. Like Will, Pazzi possesses tremendous empathy and "imagination," and considers them to have the same gift. For Pazzi, though, it's not the curse which Will always perceives. It's a blessing, and when it works out, it's a moment of ecstasy when the pieces all fall together. "Knowing," he calls it, and Will agrees. When Pazzi hands him crime scene photos and Will is left to disappear into the killer's private moments, he's greeted not with a solution but with a monstrosity, as the corpse unfolds, sprouts fresh limbs in the form of a stag, and starts towards Will. In flashbacks, this episode tells us that he saw a vision of his dream stag dying, bleeding out on Hannibal's floor. Now the stag is reborn, the primal, folkloric representation of death and the hunt, and it's more monstrous than ever.
And this isn't the only vision which soon greets Will. As he sits at the crime scene, pondering the evidence, Abigail joins him again. Earlier in the episode, the pair of them talked about multiverse theory, with Will noting that "everything that can happen, happens," and therefore there are worlds in which the two of them ran away with Hannibal and everything didn't end with so much blood. There are worlds where they are happy, and Abigail wishes she were in one of those worlds. It's then that Will realizes something, his empathy and imagination finally catching up with what his heart and mind wanted to deny. Abigail didn't come to Italy with him, and she didn't visit him in the hospital. She bled out on Hannibal's floor, and seeing her by his side was nothing more than Will Graham peeking, briefly, into a better world, one in which he still had the surrogate daughter he so craved.
In the same earlier conversation with Abigail, before he knew she was a figment of his imagination, Will continued his thoughts on the theory of multiple timelines, adding that "It has to end every way it can." It's fitting that he says this to Abigail, because what is he doing in that moment if not letting some frightened part of himself know that he can believe in a world where Abigail still lives, one where she wasn't sucked into a world of killers and madmen. We don't get the full story of what happened to Jack or Alana in this episode, but we do get reacquainted with Will, and by the end of the episode, one thing is very clear: He has nothing left to lose.
Which may be why, when Will and Pazzi head into the catacombs beneath the Norman Chapel to hunt for Hannibal, Will senses his old friend nearby, but pulls back. He could continue the pursuit and risk another knife in his gut, but instead he whispers into the darkness "I forgive you." Will Graham, the good fisherman, has cast his line again.
Next Time: "Secondo"
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