ashtray

scale of 1-10

“The solitude of what you do is to be respected, and I intend to honor that. I’ve only come to offer you words of encouragement. You are becoming, Randall, and this beast is your higher self. Your bodies, voices, and wills are all one.”

This speech ends with the words

“Revel in what you are.”

The episode ends with Will killing Randall and Hannibal being visibly thrilled by Will becoming a murderer and that he pushed him to it. This marks the moment where Will seemingly succumbs to Hannibal’s influence.

The next episode shows that Hannibal and Will then dismembered Randall and hang his flesh on the bones of a sabertooth tiger with his face drapped over the tiger’s head.

This entire arc is detailing how Hannibal’s ”therapy” is destructive, egging people on to commit murder. These episodes debuted in 2014. I wonder if that’s why he’s been using the death’s head moth logo. Maybe understanding Hannibal’s therapy can give us insight to how Howdy has been pushing him to be a monster. I also remember a conversation with Will that he had about how sometimes he shatters a teacup on purpose and is dissatisfied when it doesn’t come back together by itself, referencing how he “breaks” people and is never happy with the result. the disabled man named Peter from episode 8 is briefly shown in episode 9. he has a pet rat named Kevin that he keeps hidden. I thought that was cute because Erick’s spider was originally going to be a rat. Thinking about it, in episode 8 he is almost driven to murder when the man who has been framing him kills his pets. Erick’s spider was also killed. That one is purely coincidence but if Erick came back I’d love to see how that plays out. Will asks Peter about the murders since the attack patterns seem like different animals and he thinks whoever the murderer is is training these animals. He asks if someone could get a bear and a wolf to hunt together and Peter says with enough training you can make an animal do all kinds of things. Makes me think of how Cult Leader Bray used Luke, Braun, and Erick. Could we see a more wolfish Erick in the future? A more bear-like Braun? Watching interviews with Erick and he mentions an unseen rivalry between him and Braun that they wanted to explore. There’s a lot of inspiration in this show. Even considering how because the show runners couldn’t stay true to their vision due to licensing restraints which ultimately led to the show’s cancellation. Maybe he chose to emphasize this show’s influence as a reference to the release and how the story never went the way they wanted due to outside interference. It even points to how I MIGHT BE RIGHT ABOUT ISLA! assuming Bray is playing in Hannibal’s yard, there’s a nice fat clue in the moths. did you know in The Silence of the Lambs the death’s head hawk moth was originally a black witch moth? Little bit of trivia I‘ve known since I was a kid. Well. The black witch moth has some relatives. The owl moth and the white witch moth. Vincent and Dutch have referenced owls a lot lately (which are TERRIFYING btw)

and Isla Dawn used to be known as the white witch.