#hannibal speculation

I believe it was Hannibal who promised Bedelia he would eat her (pls correct me if I’m wrong, he may have also not directly said so but it was implied). If only Hannibal survived the fall, he would have eaten whatever he could find or hold on to of Will, and then gone on with his life and promises (Alana, Bedelia, etc).

I really hope that it’s focused on Will and Hannibal’s memory palace(s). A memory palace in a memory palace...or where they intersect, shared rooms and all of that. 

It might be an interesting place where Will can explore his desires to go Dark!Will. 

I am very entertained by this unorthodox suggestion. Hey, you never know, Jodie Foster has totally (and thankfully) backpedaled on her alarming suggestion, originally made during her thank you speech for the Cecil B. DeMille award, that she was retiring from acting. Perhaps if you caught her in the right nostalgic mood, or just got her really drunk, she’d be interested in reprising her role as Clarice. What really lights my fire isn’t just an older version of Clarice, but an older Clarice who is a continuation of movieverse!Clarice. Who is Clarice after her experiences with Hannibal? What is her relationship with the FBI and with the concept of justice in general? Especially if you were to rewrite movie canon to include Clarice and Hannibal’s elopement to Argentina, that would open up all sorts of very dramatic possibilities for an older Clarice. Clarice reclaiming her identity and finding her place in the world– yes yes a thousand yeses. So if Jodie wants to talk to MGM and Lifetime about reprising her role in that erstwhile Clarice show, I would so watch that. That is a premise that would hold my interest 1000%.  

But would I like Jodie to play Clarice as an older person on Hannibal? I’m not sure. She’s a superlative actress but despite what I’m sure would be her best efforts of course her presence is going to be distracting–and confusing! Timelines collide! Who is Clarice if she’s not a trainee? Is she someone who has risen through the FBI ranks; maybe she’s even Jack Crawford’s rival– or replacement–at the BAU? How does she come into contact with Hannibal? How does her level of experience change their relationship? Would he seek to guide and mold her, or level with her as equals, or what? Maybe she’s a pencil pusher stuck behind a desk whose true potential has never been acknowledged or unlocked–that is, until she enters the dark basement of the BSHCI and looks her future in the eyes. That would be a delicious narrative, yes indeed.

I would very much like to see Jack in S4. So far he’s really only held himself accountable for manipulating and using Miriam and Will - they both let him off the hook, you’re not responsible for my choices sort of thing. I can see a Clarice making him realize his own culpability which leads to a more direct look at whether the means justify the ends. And then Will being torn about feeling angry at Jack for bringing him back vs realizing he always knew he’d come back etc. etc. 

So yes, I’m not sure how I’d like it to go, but I definitely want Jack in the S4 picture. Similar to how Chilton’s role got changed for the Red Dragon arc, I suspect Jack would have to be in a different position. 

It might be a fun take if he’s now retired, and somebody (Clarice? Sassy Science Bros? Alana) have to come to him for advice on how to catch Will and Hannibal. 

You’re not alone in missing Will and Jack’s friendship; that was definitely a notable, and eventually defining, absence in late-S2 and S3 for me (and wow, that’s half the show – no wonder I missed it so much!). The triangulation between Jack, Will, and Hannibal lent the story a lot of contrast and emotional texture back in the day. When Bryan Fuller used to describe the show as being about male friendship, he wasn’t trying to platonic-ify the Will/Hannibal relationship – he was broadening the focus to include Jack, so important a presence was he in the goings-on. 

In a story so focused on the boundary-busting intimacy between Will and Hannibal, Jack’s uncomfortable friendship with Will serves as an important counterpoint. At times it is almost as messed-up as Will/Hannibal; Jack’s vision of Will is the diametric opposite of Hannibal’s, but the way Jack forces that vision on to Will, and refuses to see any of the personality traits that contradict it, is so very like Hannibal’s commitment to Will’s ‘Becoming.’ 

But as manipulative and fraught as Jack and Will’s relationship often is, there is such loyalty there too, true respect and trust. I love those moments when Will sees Jack as a human being in need of emotional support, even when those moments are subtle and strained – like Will refusing to leave Jack’s office until he tells him what’s wrong, and later Will attending Bella’s funeral, as you mentioned. I was always struck by that moment in Coquilles where Jack says, “I’m not your father, Will;” Jack figures Will sees him as a parent substitute, someone he’s desperate to please, someone he can’t disappoint. Like the hard-to-break bond of a close familial relationship, Jack and Will stay in each other’s orbits even when their relationship becomes strained and the emotional distance between them builds up to unscalable heights. And yet there is always something there, even if that something is weighed down by resentment and guilt.

I got very excited in early S3 when it seemed like Jack was going to learn from his mistakes and finally treat Will not as a means to an end, not as someone to aid him in protecting and saving innocent lives, but as an end in himself – for by S3 Will’s innocence needed someone to fight for it and win it back, Will’s life was the one that truly needed saving. Where once Jack didn’t blink before thrusting Will into danger, Jack was finally standing up and nominating himself Will’s protector. I really wanted that for Jack – I think it would have been a great way to capitalize on his human core that had been so achingly exposed by Bella’s death. But alas, Jack’s resolution to save Will from Hannibal quickly turned back into Jack all but pushing Will into Hannibal’s arms. In a way that’s par for the course with S3. In it the characters were almost never learning from their mistakes; they all tried to resist their worst instincts but inevitably ended up falling prey to them. As much as I wanted more for Jack, Jack kept insisting on being just the man he always was and nothing more. His best self vanished into the Arno with Bella’s ashes. 

I would have liked more detail about Freddie, absolutely. 

I feel like she took the pictures of Will in the hospital because she felt it was her right, him having promised his story to her, and this was part of the story.

But did the book ever come out? Frederick coos about being a best selling author, but you’d think Freddie’s tell all would do at least as well. She was supposed to move to Hollywood based on the money she was going to get from her movie deal. How much more so after the Red Dinner! 

Instead, she’s added a print edition to her web site and is still bumming around crime scenes. Which makes me think she didn’t publish that book. Maybe she did and she just enjoys the beat. 

But if she didn’t, I think it would be because she decided to honor Will’s request to let Abigail rest in peace. Possibly because she feels some regret/embarrassment at discovering Abigail had been alive all that time. How can she tell Will’s story without telling Abigail’s, and how can she respectfully tell Abigail’s? I’d love to see how that played out. 

Honestly, she wasn’t really cruel to Will in the ways she had been in the past. We see much more him lashing out at her. She’s really just being herself and giving as good as she gets. 

She’s no longer jabbing at him about being unstable or someone who should be in the BSHCI. It’s petty insults at his size that he can easily deflect, almost pro forma. It’s Will who brings up “Murder Husbands,” and she merely states the obvious in response. 

Will’s still angry—and will have even more reason when he learns his relationship with Walter has been affected by her articles. 

But he’s also the one that suggests going to Freddie to get her help in the plot to track the Dragon. 

Oh boy do I feel you, anon; I feel you hard. I had such an intense connection to Will in S1, and ever since then I’ve been jonesing for that emotional link to renew itself, just one more sweet hit of it please. I’ve likened watching S2/3 Will to listening to a broken radio; the sound is warped, and I keep tuning it and tuning it trying to find that signal, and occasionally I find it and my heart leaps, but then it’s gone again and the search continues.

The honest truth, anon, is no. Will will never find his way back to himself, not if we define ‘himself’ as Will-circa-S1. The show is a chronicle of Will’s Becoming; it started in S1 with Will meeting Hannibal and attempting to resist his influence, and it kicked into high gear in S2 as Will began acting under that influence, using it for what he saw as his own ends, and by S3 there was no resisting Hannibal’s influence any longer. By S3, Will was someone else. And he accepts that, and uses the strength he buys himself via that painful acceptance to end himself and Hannibal both. With this, Will put a hard stop on his Becoming. He did find a way to resist it in the end. He resisted in the only way left to him.

If we get a S4, Will can’t return to who he was, but he can continue to Become, because Will’s Becoming is never-ending, and that Becoming isn’t on Hannibal’s terms: it’s on Will’s. Even if his new life is by Hannibal’s side, he can find ways of preserving his compassion, his gentleness, his courage to resist. If Hannibal has been, and will always be, the story of Will changing under Hannibal’s influence, it will also always be the story of Will resisting that influence. He is never going to stop fighting Hannibal. That’s just who he is, and who he will always be.