Dolce, the title of the episode, refers to dessert, but there certainly wasn’t any sweet course served here. With Will and Hannibal about to be served up for Mason Verger, it seemed more like an appetizer than something that should cap off a great meal. Maybe it’s because Hannibal is getting his just deserts one way or another.
In fact, that big reveal at the end, when Will and Hannibal are shown hanging with a coterie of pigs in the back of the meat truck, is the biggest question in an episode that was surprisingly straightforward by the standards of this show.
We start with Hannibal making his way home from his nearly deadly encounter with Jack, covered in blood and scratches. He’s carefully bathed by Bedelia (including tending to a wound on his palm that looks uncomfortably close to a stigma). Will is also covered in bruises and cuts, after Chiyoh threw him off the train (is that like throwing someone under the bus?) at the end of the previous episode. There’s no explanation given of how he ended up in Florence – I guess he … walked? – but he has some contusions around his eyes that show he got banged up after the fall. Chiyoh spent the better part of the episode trying to kill him, so if she was so adamant about getting him away from Lecter, why didn’t she finish the job on the train?
We see Will as he confronts Jack in the aftermath of the attack and asks, “Why didn’t you kill him?” Jack responds, “Maybe I needed you to,” which isn’t very satisfying but is a provocative answer. Why would Jack need Will to kill him? Maybe he didn’t want to rob him of the pleasure or maybe he just didn’t want to take the blame. Maybe he was just incapable and let Hannibal through his grasp by accident? So many maybes!
Back at home, Bedelia tells Hannibal that she knew he intended to eat her, but she isn’t going to stand for it, at least not yet. She’s going to stay in Florence while he leaves to avoid capture by the police and she seems a bit ambivalent about the arrangement, telling him with an erotic charge that he might make a meal of her yet, as if she’s waiting to be eaten as some sort of culmination of unquenched sexual desire.
Their relationship certainly doesn’t seem to be over when Chiyoh arrives at his apartment and finds only Bedelia there. The two circle each other like lions with blood drying on their whiskers, jealously wanting to be Hannibal’s pets but also the one that finally does him in. It’s a conflicting desire that is both confusing and delicious; this show that is all about the emotional forbidden feasts we allow ourselves. Bedelia says that she thought Will was Hannibal’s biggest mistake, but that it might actually be Chiyoh. Does that mean she thinks that his former plaything will really be the one to finish him?
Hannibal isn’t done with Bedelia either. Instead of leaving Florence, he’s at the painting of Primavera waiting for Will to show up and sketching Will and Bedelia as the ill-fated figures in the painting. He is ready to kill both of them himself, but he also loves them both so much as prey that he wants to exalt them to art. They are in some way his ultimate prize.
While Margot Verger and Alana have a gorgeously choreographed, kaleidoscopic roll in the hay, Will gets shot – presumably by Chiyoh – and is taken off to a private place so that Hannibal can prepare to feast on him. He’s given some drugs that make him fade in and out of consciousness, seeing people as swirls of blood and everything blurring into the antlers of the stag, the symbol of their enduring friendship and collaboration.
When Jack arrives, Will tries to warn him to escape, but it’s too late and Hannibal has them both sitting at opposite ends of the table, reading for a meal that he is still preparing. It’s what was supposed to happen at the end of season two, but much delayed and with a totally different configuration.
Bedelia is cooperating with a vaguely menacing but sexually charged police officer (you know that he’s a little bit creepy because he’s sporting a moustache) and she helps him figure out where Hannibal must be hiding before he leaves Florence. Does that mean it’s the cops that find Hannibal and sell him off to Mason Verger?
What happens between Hannibal slicing open Will’s skull – the blood spraying like dew from a sprinkler but defying gravity as it flies out of his head – and his waking up in the back of a meat truck is still a bit of a mystery. As I said before, do the police sell him out for the $3m bounty? Did Chiyoh, who Jack saw getting off the elevator at the same time he did, take him down and then ship him off? That seems unlikely, but she does seem to have a great ability for not being able to go through with murders essential to her cause. It seems unlikely that Margot and Alana figured out how to get the job done, or maybe once they harvested his sperm they had little use for the rest of his body and shipped it off to Mason.
I think that Hannibal might have done it to himself, packaged himself up so that he could get close to Mason just in time to escape, and finally remove one of his opponents from the chess board. Knowing the way this show operates, we’ll get all the answers of what happened when revisiting these events in the future. But for right now, this doesn’t seem like dessert at all, just the beginning of something very sweet indeed.
