It's now been a week since Hannibal's third and possibly final season came to its breathtaking, blood-soaked and unexpectedly romantic ending, and we're no closer to an answer on the show's uncertain future.

Digital Spy caught up with showrunner Bryan Fuller on Friday (September 4), at the tail end of a day spent recording commentaries for the season three DVD, to look back on the show from its very first season through to its hypothetical fourth.

Read on for the full discussion, in which we also get into how Will and Hannibal might have survived that fall, the show's depiction of sexuality on a fluid spectrum, and how Will Graham became Clarice Starling.

NBC Universal

Hannibal just had its perfect ending, but should the show go on?

You've spoken a lot about taking your lead from the fans – if they're happy with this as an ending, you are too, and if not then you'll keep pushing for more. How do you feel having seen the reaction to the finale?

It's interesting, because a lot of people were very content. The feedback has been that they're satisfied, and if it came back around in another form they would watch, but they feel like the story had an ending for them. As always, I'll wait and see how the fates decide if Martha's able to raise money for a film – I'm waiting for instructions from above.

The way [the series] ended, I'm hoping that we're in a place where it could lie fallow for a year or two, and then we could return to the story in some unexpected way if there was appetite for it. Right now, it seems that everyone is willing to let it lie for the time being.

Has anything about the reaction to the finale surprised you?

I was surprised that everybody, or at least a faction of the audience, assumed that Bedelia chopped off her own leg and was cooking it! [laughs] For me, that was: Hannibal survived. The whole point of that tag is to suggest that Hannibal has lived, and there's three place settings at the dinner table, so interpret that how you will.

Are there any more clues in the episode as to how Hannibal and Will could have survived that fall? Anything around the house, the cliffs?

Well, the house being so relatively well-preserved, and well dusted, suggested that perhaps Chiyoh had been living there since we last saw her in episode seven. I did debate whether to involve her in the finale, but it felt like it needed to be between these three men.

You've mentioned some footage where Mads and Hugh went a little further with their final embrace than what we saw in the episode - "lips lingering over lips"?

Yeah, it was funny because I saw them just after they filmed it, and they both came running up to me kind of excited about what they had done. And Mads in particular was really enthusiastic about the level of intimacy that was conveyed on screen!

NBC Universal

Hannibal series finale recap: 'The Wrath of the Lamb' is a perfect romantic ending

Do you have any plans to make that footage available?

Yeah, I should talk to the post people and pull some of those shots together - maybe that is something I should talk to the DVD producers about including as an extra.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that would go down well…

So to speak!

At what point did you decide to take Will and Hannibal's romance from subtext into text? Was that always the plan from season one?

No, it naturally evolved because I guess I was absorbing so much of Mads and Hugh's performance, which felt like it was growing in intimacy, and it would have been inauthentic not to address it. Because all of these characters, and particularly Bedelia, was able to call out what she had witnessed [between Hannibal and Will], it seemed like a natural conclusion.

I remember when I turned in the rewrite pages where Will asks Bedelia if Hannibal is in love with him, I got a note from Don Mancini, one of our writers who was always pushing for more homosexual text – not just context or subtext but text, text, text – and he was like, "I'm so glad you put that in there! They said it! They said it!"

I was a little surprised by how excited he was because it just felt organic to me, so I guess I had been fooling myself about how obvious that element of the story was. Maybe I had been reacting to the feedback in the Twitterverse, where there was a lot of Hannigram wish fulfilment. I hoped that it wouldn't be interpreted as pandering to the hardcore Hannigram fanbase, and that it was felt to be an authentic, logical extension of everything we'd been doing thus far.

It definitely was. Another element of that was how you began to amalgamate Will into Clarice Starling's role from the canon, with a lot of the dialogue and visuals…

Absolutely. I still would like to tell the story of Clarice Starling in this universe, and so I didn't want to rob Clarice to pay Will, but I also felt that there was a lot of things that could be done with Clarice to distinguish herself from Will, in that romantic regard. Clarice never, until the end of Hannibal, submitted to that romance, whereas Will seemed to be on a slippery slope right from the beginning, so there's a contrast to be drawn between them.

Brooke Palmer

This season depicted sexuality as very much on a spectrum, with Alana falling for Margot and Hannibal for Will. Was that a deliberate theme?

I definitely wanted to do that with Alana and Margot because I feel that sexuality can be fluid, and there are so many stopping points on the spectrum that it seemed perfectly natural for Alana to be bisexual, and not make a thing of it, it's just who she is. She didn't have to explain it or rationalise it, and I think there was some criticism like 'Oh, now she's a lesbian just because you want her to be a lesbian'. No, she's bisexual, she's always been bisexual, and stop being so narrow in your perception of sexuality. There's this prejudice against bisexuality that I think just stems from narcissism, because people can't accept that someone could think or behave differently than they do, and that's pathological when it comes right down to it.

How did that development for Alana come about?

It was Caroline Dhavernas's pitch, initially during DVD commentaries for the second season. I think she was feeling what I was feeling, which was the need to shake up the story in some capacity, and give Alana a new direction, and it really was the beginning of re-conceiving the character. I loved that they were still together at the end – the love that they have was as close to a happy ending as we could probably pull off with Hannibal.

I had big plans for them in the fourth season, where they were going to essentially reform Verger slaughterhouses and make them all humane and decrease the processing of meat, I had a whole vegan agenda with what the ladies were going to be up to, and I'm shaking my fist at the cancellation gods at not being able to pull that off. To have the power lesbians accomplishing great things, and undoing all of the horrors of the Verger family and name, and being able to have a larger discussion about meat in America and how we process it, how we consume it, what it is, how it is treated before it becomes meat.

Other than gradually becoming the Black Knight from Monty Python, what would Chilton's season four future have held?

He was going to go back to running the institution, because since Hannibal had escaped, Alana would no longer need to make sure he was under lock and key. He would have burn wounds and this slightly marred face, but he'd continue on as chipper as he's ever been in the show. I love the idea of Raúl Esparza, underneath this trauma, still being Raúl Esparza.

Raúl has such facility with language, and the cadence of his speech is so much fun that I would have bent over backwards to keep him alive. I also find it very, very, very amusing to put him through those paces – all of the hardships that have befallen Frederick Chilton are representative of just how dark the comedy is on this show, and I wanted to make sure that you have permission to laugh at his circumstances! So he would have had to keep his spirits up.

NBC Universal

You've mentioned before that the show not being a hit was a blessing creatively – at what point did that become the case?

Well, initially [NBC entertainment president] Jennifer Salke made the promise 'I will let you make the show that you want to make within reason'. And she absolutely kept that promise, but I think it was easier for her to keep because ratings expectations were low. There wasn't anything to fight to preserve, if that makes sense. Whereas if we were doing Blacklist numbers, we would have to maintain a certain status quo with the storytelling and the format.

In season three I was itching to break out of the procedural model, just because I'm not a procedural storyteller, I'm a character storyteller, and unless I can have fun with the procedure in some way I'll resist it. And it felt like we, in the first couple of seasons, were allowed to really do some wacky storylines with Turduckens, and cello people, and human murals, that were on the surface procedural, but were also subverting the procedural at the same time. So season three, which was far less procedural, may have come with more challenges if the show was a huge hit whose ratings needed to be protected and preserved.

Looking back on the entire show, is there anything you wish you had done differently?

You know, I look back at the first season and there's a few episodes that are kind of growing pains, where we're trying to figure out the nature of the show, what exactly we're trying to say with the show, and it was leaning hard into the procedural. I wish I had been more diligent in making the show as esoteric as it became. It could have used a little bit more jazz, that first season.

Some people complained about the procedural nature of the first season, and then when we departed from it in the third season there were people who complained it wasn't procedural enough. You can't please everybody all the time, and therefore you should mainly be concerned about pleasing yourself as a storyteller, because if you try to anticipate what the audience is going to approve of… that way madness lies.

I was doing the commentary on some of the early episodes in the season today, and I was so proud of what we accomplished. I was so proud of the actors, I was so proud of the writers and the directors and the team that produced this show, because it doesn't look like anything else on television, it's weird as f**k, and I'm incredibly proud of that.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io