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Favourite Scenes - Hannibal Season 3

We can see in the first two gifs how Francis was supporting part of Will’s upper body weight with his arm and his hold on the knife in Will’s cheek, and how that resulted in Will twisting his head and neck around while impaled on the blade. This isn’t a typical in-and-out stab wound. This would be a very messy one with several slices back and forth throughout. Speaking of slices, the blade of Francis’s knife was around 6-7 inches at a rough estimate, comparing his closed fist to the blade using the width of the average adult male’s and rounding up.

The knife went in a few inches in front of where the jawbone hinges with the skull, so luckily the chances of it damaging his tongue and thus his speech are lower, but he’d probably need dental replacements for a few of his molars that would’ve been heavily battered and cracked or even sliced down. Tooth rot is a big risk here. We can also see that the knife tore through the buccinator and masseter muscles on his right side— the masseter helps us chew, bite, move our jaw and align it properly when relaxed. The buccinator muscles help us move our cheeks and aid in speaking, swallowing, and facial expressions that use the mouth.

Safe to say that without surgical intervention, Will’s going to have a whole host of problems on his hands. The surgical intervention in question would likely involve a tendon transfer/graft to replace the heavily damaged tissues and help the muscles grow and reattach faster and better, an insert like a surgical button might be used to help hold the high-tension facial sutures in place during recovery, and plastic surgery involving a skin graft would be needed after several months to a year of recovery time if Will wanted to obscure a massive section of indented scarring left from the injury and surgery to draw less notice on the run and feel more confident, in the novels he developed serious traumatic and depressive issues with the scarring from Dolarhyde.