Spoiler alert: this blog is published after Hannibal airs on NBC in the US on Thursdays. Do not read on unless you have watched season three, episode four, which airs in the UK on Sky Living on Wednesdays at 10pm.
There’s a sense of melancholy heading into watching this episode of Hannibal. It’s one unlike the typical sense of melancholy, the sense of steeling oneself for the dark and twisted turns of the series. This time around, it’s the fact that, no matter how good the episode could be (and of course ends up being), it will have to take a back seat to the fact that NBC just cancelled Hannibal.
And it’s oddly fitting, because Aperitivo is suitably depressing, with so many characters who have been broken by the man they call (or at least Dr Chilton calls, thanks to his copyright) “Hannibal the Cannibal”. Aperitivo may be the fourth episode of the season, but it actually takes place before episode two, Primavera, and takes a closer look at the aftermath of the destruction Hannibal left as he departed the country; not just to Will’s psyche but to everyone, physically, mentally and emotionally. Leave it to Hannibal (the series) to wait four episodes to give the audience the episode it needs after something like the season two finale’s bloodbath.
The episode begins with two characters who weren’t part of the finale, but are still very much victims of Hannibal Lecter’s machinations (to varying degrees of deserving): Dr Chilton and Mason Verger. While Hannibal has always been a series full of doublespeak and characters never really showing their true selves, these two appear the only characters willing to do anything about that (only resorting back to that old habit as quickly as they can). Verger addresses the obvious makeup Chilton wears to cover up the bullet wound (among other disfigurements) from when Miriam Lass shot him, plainly stating: “You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine.” They remove their literal masks, which in the case of Chilton boils down to the entire left half of his face, even his teeth – to “talk face to face”, which is more than most of the characters on Hannibal can say. It’s also a reminder that Hannibal’s body horror is unlike anything else on television, and it really is remarkable that the show has made it as long as it has on NBC or network television in general.
Mason is offering a million dollars to anyone who can give him relative information on Hannibal, not to have him captured and locked behind bars by the authority, but to have him for himself. “I want to understand Hannibal Lecter to better understand myself,” he tells Chilton, and even with the removal of the masks, he won’t go as far as to tell him about the real reasons for that. Verger, for all of his insanity, is still a smart man, of course. He knows that Hannibal wanted him to “live” with his suffering, the same way characters like Will, Jack and Alana now are. That is his design. Death is too easy.
But for all of Chilton’s eccentricities, even he claims he’s not willing to go down Mason Verger’s rabbit hole, and he balks at the fact that the man clearly wants a profiler and not a therapist. Chilton bows out of the employ of Verger, but he spends the rest of the episode setting up the pieces to a puzzle that will still lead to this action being taken. No one wants to be Team Chilton, but still, they find themselves all doing what he wants them to do, without him being around to benefit.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, with regards to how they want to handle Hannibal, there is of course Will Graham. As we saw the reintroduction of the character in Primavera, his first scene waking up in the hospital carries on a new meaning and context completely, as we know Abigail isn’t really there. In fact, the scene is shown again here, this time with the blurry Abigail vision, only immediately replaced with the very real Dr Chilton (the man is all over the episode). It was Chilton, even though Will was “expecting someone else”, that told Will that Hannibal knew how to cut him so as not to kill him. Chilton speaks as though he and Will are the same, with Hannibal playing them both as “suckers”, “both of them eviscerated and accused”, but it doesn’t work. Surely the fact that they were both framed for Hannibal’s crimes makes that true, but that’s only a surface-level similarity, like their scars. Will fantasises about a scenario in which a version of him doesn’t make the call to Hannibal and instead helps him kill Jack, which isn’t exactly the type of thing you’d want from you hero, is it?
It definitely wouldn’t fit the “official narrative” Jack wants them to feed to their bosses and the world, of them being “officers of the FBI, wounded in the course of heroic duty”. Will even admits to Jack that he told Hannibal to run because they were friends, and he wanted to run away with him, which makes all of this even worse. How exactly do you accept something like that? Season two saw Will’s friends turn on him as they thought he was the Chesapeake Ripper, and for that, he hasn’t truly forgiven them. Here, he admits that he was willing to forgive (which, again, he does in Primavera) and just plain ignore Hannibal’s wrongdoings out of loyalty to him. It’s something Jack just can’t seem to really understand, nor does he want to, but it’s something that helps fuel Alana’s new, vengeful attitude.
As Chilton tells Alana while she’s recovering from her injuries from defenestration, “Will has not had his breakthrough yet. He is saving that for Dr Lecter.” Again, planting the seeds but reaping none of the fruits, Chilton explains to Alana how Will needs to reconnect with Hannibal, thus leading them all to him. If there’s any part of Alana who’s not on board with this, it’s seemingly squashed when she asks Will how he can still “ignore the worst in” Hannibal, and he sends her away, with no answer. Alana (now with a cane to go with her keen fashion sense and limp) then has no qualms about working for Mason Verger, unlike Chilton, making it clear she only wants revenge. Whatever Verger’s endgame for Hannibal, Alana doesn’t care; she just wants it to come to fruition, because there’s no way it has a happy ending for Dr Lecter.
“You’re preparing the theatre of Hannibal’s death. I’m just doing my part of getting him to the stage,” she tells him. She cuts the crap, for lack of a better term, and she sees through the nonsense Mason Verger speaks when he tells her he has found religion in all of this chaos. He says he is a man of God now and claims to have forgiven Hannibal – an approach he probably should have taken to keep Chilton under his employ – no longer seeking revenge, not realising he doesn’t need to use the pious approach with her. At this point, even in Alana’s agnostic mindset, she finds great comfort in the Old Testament’s teachings of revenge.
It’s all very jaded, but there is a reprieve from that when it comes to Jack Crawford. His survival allows him to spend time with his wife Bella in her last days of life, and he even retires (a forced retirement but one he seemingly welcomes) from the FBI (a point Chilton considers a loss of focus). Again, as we saw in Primavera, this retirement doesn’t stop him from following Will to Italy. Chilton even says that “Will is going to lead him right to you,” but Jack simply states that he’s “let them both go”. It’s another scene where honesty is the key factor, and he’s let it go, unlike the rest of Hannibal’s victims. That is, until he gets a letter of condolence from the man at Bella’s funeral. Michael Corleone says it best: “Just when I thought I was out … they pull me back in.” Jack Crawford is probably the one person who could have been content – or at least something like it – not to search for Hannibal, but he is not allowed even that convenience. He easily become caught back in the web of violence and manipulation (a fate he wants Will to avoid but is too late to stop), and while he knows it’s what needs to be done in some twisted way, he was ready to close that chapter.
But even though NBC is ready to close the book on Hannibal (the series), neither Jack nor any of the characters can do the same when it comes to Hannibal (the character). As the episode closes, Jack looks for Will, but a housesitting Alana informs him of the new situation: “He’s already gone. Will knows what he has to do. Do you?” Now that we’re supposedly all caught up on what led us to the past three episodes, what now? Hannibal is drawing his enemies to him, but to what end?
