Hannibal Season 3, Episode 1
"Antipasto"
Original airdate: June 4, 2015
Writers: Steve Lightfoot, Bryan Fuller
Director: Vincenzo Natali
Cast: Mads Mikkelsen, Gillian Anderson, Suzy Eddie Izzard
Hannibal Lecter is a dead man.
A part of him has always known this, of course, because he's too smart to avoid the reality. A part of him is fascinated by it, and a part of him revels in it. But now that his entire life, a life he carefully built from the ground up in Baltimore to perfectly suit his purposes, is ashes, he's even more aware of it. And if he's going down, he's going to do it his way.
"Antipasto," the first of the Italian courses of Hannibal Season 3, picks up not with Will Graham or Jack Crawford, not with the wreckage Hannibal left behind, but with the new world he's building for himself in the Old World. In Paris, he corners an academic, kills him, and takes his identity before absconding to Florence, where that same academic already had a job lined up. He is now Dr. Roman Fell, a world-class expert in Dante, working in the gorgeous Palazzo Vecchio amid the stone and plaster that birthed the Renaissance.
And with Hannibal's new identity comes a new identity for his series. Apart from flashbacks (which we'll get to), the Season 3 premiere unfolds entirely in Europe, as Hannibal and his paramour/hostage/situationship Bedelia du Maurier (Gillian Anderson) settle into their new lives and new names. For a moment, it seems the only real tribulation Hannibal must endure is questions from his new colleagues over his qualifications as a Dante lecturer, questions he is happy to rebuff in flawless Italian as he quotes The Divine Comedy and Dante's sonnets from memory. That leaves returning director Vincenzo Natali to bask in the new production design opportunities of this setting, blending everything from giallo films to 1960s European capers seamlessly into Hannibal's style.
With Will and Jack out of the way (for now), the narrative tension rests on two key pillars. In the past, we see that Hannibal did not simply kill Abel Gideon (Suzy Eddie Izzard) after eating one of his legs. He kept him around a good deal longer, barbecuing his other leg and even cutting off one of his arms, not to eat it, but to feed a colony of snails for escargot. And of course, Gideon is an unwilling participant in all of this, kept alive so he can taste himself. At the same time, Gideon functions as a kind of Greek chorus reacting to Hannibal's actions. He still sees Hannibal as the Devil, but in his captivity, as he comes apart literally piece by piece, he sees something else as well. Eventually someone will come along to "eat" Hannibal. His time is limited and the clock is ticking. Hannibal, meanwhile, simply smiles and says things like "It's only cannibalism if we are equals."
But Hannibal knows that, metaphorically if not literally, Gideon is right, which brings us to the second key dramatic pillar of the episode. As they settle into life in Florence, "Dr. and Mrs. Fell" must simultaneously keep a low profile while Hannibal retains a place among the city's academic elite. This gets much more challenging when Antony (Tom Wisdom), a man Hannibal met in Paris just before he killed Dr. Fell, emerges in Florence. Antony, you see, knows the real Dr. Fell, and knows Hannibal by a different alias. Bedelia, who dines on oysters while Hannibal eats meat because she's trying not to taste "anything with a central nervous system," points out that this is an obvious snare, made more complex by Hannibal inviting Antony to his first "Dr. Fell" lecture. Hannibal's largely abstained from killing in Italy so far, so why start again now? This world of the Renaissance, positioned amid the work of Great Men, agrees with him. He could stay quiet. He could find a way.
But Hannibal's not going to do that. Antony turns up at the lecture, finds that Hannibal has taken Dr. Fell's place, and confronts him not with questions, but with friendship. He's not at all concerned about what happened to the real Dr. Fell, whom he despised, but he is very fascinated by Hannibal's presence, intellectually and perhaps even sexually. There's a tremendous sense of flirtation between the two of them, and Hannibal seems to relish having this kind of tete-a-tete with another man. But Antony is not Will Graham, lacks his substance and complexity, and so Hannibal ends up eating him anyway.
But because this is Hannibal we're talking about, he can't just corner Antony in some dark alley. As Bedelia plans to flee from him again, she remembers the day Hannibal helped her when she shoved one of her own patient's tongues down his throat in a fugue state, and remembers the day she helped him escape Baltimore. They are linked inextricably, and this might be her last chance to escape before they're linked fatally. Then Hannibal comes home, Antony in tow, and mere seconds pass before Antony's on the ground, bleeding from the head, crawling and begging for help. Hannibal's old life is gone, but he has lost none of his infernal power, and this is precisely what he wanted.
"Observing or participating?" he asks Bedelia, as Antony tries fruitlessly to escape. Bedelia, of course, says "observing," but Hannibal points out that she knew exactly what would happen from the moment Antony turned up in Florence, and yet she stayed around just long enough to watch Hannibal do this. That is participation, whether she wants to admit it or not. The trap is strung, and Bedelia's flight is halted.
"I made my own house be my gallows" is, appropriately, a line from Dante that appears in Hannibal's lecture as Dr. Fell. It's from Dante's famous encounter with Pietro della Vigna in the forest of self-murderers in Hell, but it also speaks to Hannibal's state of mind. Here in Italy, thinking of his time with Dr. Gideon and trying to forge a new path for himself, Hannibal is nevertheless also barreling toward oblivion. You can see that he senses it in little snatches of feeling here and there, a creeping need to reach back out toward what would be his gallows: Will Graham back home in America. The episode ends with Hannibal leaving Antony's corpse in a church, bent into a wounded origami heart. It's a Valentine for the world Hannibal left behind, and exactly the kind of thing FBI agents pursuing a serial killer turned international fugitive would look for. The gallows are calling, and Hannibal is listening. His life may be almost entirely new, but some things never change.
Next Time: "Primavera"
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