One of the most fascinating things about the way Hannibal is constructed is that instead of a straight line it is more like a series of spirals, always bringing things back around to revisit the past and cast new meaning on the future. The backward swing of the spiral informs where the spiral will swing in the future.
This episode started off revisiting Francis’ – I guess we should start using the Tooth Fairy’s real name now – phone call to Hannibal, exactly the way the last episode ended. But instead of seeing Hannibal receive the call, we saw Francis making it, not only detailing the lengths he went through to get in touch with Dr Lecter, his hero, but his exact mental state at the time of making the phone call.
What I couldn’t ascertain, however, was whether the conversation that Francis and Hannibal have after he tells Hannibal that he is becoming the Great Red Dragon (which is where the conversation left off in the last episode) happened in real life on the phone or just in Francis’ head. It’s depicted as Francis and Hannibal sitting across from each other, which is clearly Francis’ imagination (especially because another version of himself is stalking the doctor as he is talking), but is it pure figment or just an artful way of staging their real conversation?
The meat of their conversation is Hannibal teasing just how magnificent Francis has become through his deeds. He may struggle with speech and deformity, but he is seizing power for himself with the killings. That’s why, at the end, he sees himself as the Great Red Dragon, a being of great majesty and destruction. But really it’s all just a trick, the creature that Francis had to create because he loathes his appearance, shyness, and powerlessness so much that he has to act out as the Dragon in order to feel whole.
I loved the first part of the episode about him and Reba (which, according to IMDb is his girlfriend’s name, though I’ve never heard it on the show). It’s all about Francis wanting to get close to her and expose himself but also afraid that, when she really knows him, she’ll reject him, even though all signs point to the fact that she isn’t afraid.
The scene of them at the zoo petting the tiger was amazing and, of course, was a metaphor for their whole relationship. When Francis is with Reba, he’s like a sleeping beast, sedated while a woman gives him affection. Reba, of course, is scared of petting the beast and getting to know it, but she still reaches directly for its fangs, knowing the exhilaration that comes along with danger. When she does this, Francis freaks out because he knows that at any moment things can change and the tiger can snap, killing her and possibly injuring himself.
That scene was shot so well, with her hand lingering over the glowing fur as he described it. The other great scene was their impressionistic sex scene, where we see blurry parts of Francis’ tattoos and Reba’s hands exploring his body as the two morph into one. It looked like what sex must feel like to a blind person.
With the visuals blurry it was all about sight, sound, texture, and the sort of heat that seems to emanate from the screen. But just as she is blind to him, he is blind to her, imagining her as some sort of saint or pure being. She is the woman bathed in sunlight, the victim of the Red Dragon’s all-consuming hunger but one who is entirely innocent. That’s not the real her either, just as he isn’t really the Red Dragon.
In the morning Francis wakes up with a jolt and panics when he doesn’t see Reba in bed next to him. He bolts through his crazy, insane Gothic mansion (seriously, where is this house and how can he afford to live there and can I buy it from him when he’s dead?) and goes up to the attic where he keeps his portrait of the Red Dragon. He immediately assumes that she has figured out who he really is, but seemingly she hasn’t.
She’s downstairs and still enamored with him, but her cryptic, “I have to go home now,” could be interpreted a number of ways including, yes, she has figured him out and she needs to get out of there or a much more innocuous: “I haven’t changed my clothes or brushed my teeth and I need to go home and wash the smell of sex and tiger fur off my hands.”
Another way that the show looped back to revisit scenes we’ve previously considered was Bedelia imagining her interview with Neal (Zachary Quinto) the former patient of Hannibal that Bedelia “killed”. We’d heard Hannibal and Bedelia discuss him and we know that Hannibal influenced Neal’s depression and insomnia to get worse. When Neal asked for a new doctor, Hannibal sent him to Bedelia who also mishandled his case. Neal was there when he choked on his tongue during a seizure.
The retelling of this story is directly connected to Will and Bedelia’s contentious discussion with each other. She is telling him about an injured bird on the side of the road and Will says he would help the bird. Bedelia says that she would want to crush it, not because she’s destructive, but become the impulse is a certain kind of empathy, the same kind of empathy that Hannibal has toward most of humanity. It is just putting the poor thing out of its misery rather than letting it suffer the rest of its life injured and alone.
“Extreme acts of cruelty require a high threshold of empathy.” That is why Bedelia let Neal die, because he had been injured by Hannibal already and was too weak for life. She did the kind thing and reached all the way down into his gullet to dig out his tongue.
This doesn’t seem to be about the way that she is going to treat Hannibal. She has no desire to end his reign of terror or else she could have turned him in back in Italy. Instead she is threatening Will, letting him know that he has been hurt by Hannibal and that given the chance she will take him out of his misery because she knows that his involvement with Hannibal can’t possibly end well.
While we also got a small loop back to see just how Hannibal got Will’s address to send him a letter, the final scene of the episode looped back to the beginning where Bedelia was talking about the “mouth of Hell”. Francis goes to the Brooklyn Museum to see the original painting that he loves so much. It’s not enough to touch it, he has to consume it, making it a part of him but really transforming himself into the painting. This, of course, is akin to Hannibal’s impulse to eat all of his victims, to try to make them part of himself in some way.
Coincidentally, Will goes to see the painting at the same time and knows that something is amiss. He sees Francis get in the elevator to leave but is attacked by him as he makes his escape. The damage, however, was done and Will has seen Francis’ face, so it’s only a matter of time before he can spiral back to who Francis really is and catch the killer in 11 days, before he kills again.
Or three episodes, when the series ends for good.
