Note: spoilers up through last week's Hannibal -- the second episode of Season 2 -- follow.

Mads Mikkelsen as Hannibal Lecter.

Hettienne Park as Beverly Katz, Laurence Fishburne as Jack Crawford, Mads Mikkelsen as Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

Hettienne Park as Beverly Katz, Laurence Fishburne as Jack Crawford, Mads Mikkelsen as Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

Hannibal returned two weeks ago for another incredibly creative and fascinating season. I sat down with the show's executive producer, Bryan Fuller, to discuss the approach he took in Season 2 and the big role reversal for Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter. We also talked about the conception of last week's oh-so memorable sequence involving those bodies inside that silo, the fate of Gillian Anderson's Dr. Bedelia Du Maurier and more... including the novelizations for the Friday the 13th movies!Yeah, I think there was fun in subverting what people would expect from a Hannibal Lecter show. Because Will's the first person who figured it out in the first season, we've kind of had to deal with him. You don't just get knowledge without consequence. So Will being put into Hannibal Lecter's shoes, where he is consulting unofficially on FBI cases, was exciting, because it gets us to shift the dynamic around. We're still doing interesting murder cases that you don't get to see on a traditional procedural. It was really about subverting expectations, shaking things up, keeping them interesting, not only for us, but for the audience who has seen five Hannibal Lecter movies. So we have to put up orange cones of where everybody else has gone to make sure that we're valid; because if we're just doing the same thing, there's no point. There's a great Judy Garland quote, "You don't want to be the second best version of somebody else. You want to be the best version of yourself." So we want our version to be unique.Yeah, and I think there something with Jack, particularly early on in the season, there is the concern of "This is really complicated work for somebody to do. That is insane." So Jack is actually savvy enough to know that this doesn't make sense. This doesn't fit with how psychopaths work or think. So he knows that there is this dead zone, this discrepancy of a blind spot in his investigation that he can't fill in. That's unsettling for him. Then for Alana, she is absolutely convinced that Will did do these things, but just not of his own free will. So Jack doesn't know still, and he's struggling with that, but Alana does know -- but she's wrong. So there are two different things happening, and I think it's, no two character can have the same point of view, because then you just need one of those characters to tell the story.Yes. It's also because there have been so many different versions of the story and, also, there could very easily be a complacency with the audience in watching it and thinking, "Oh, they're just going to be doing this." We want to make sure [people get], “No, you need to watch the whole thing," because this is where we're going, and there's a lot of steps to get there. So we wanted to make sure that the audience was engaged from the get-go and knew that were going to be consequences this season that were going to be huge and dramatic. It was essentially blackmailing the audience into watching the whole season, because this is where we're ending up, and you have to dig in.Yeah, so we're seeing the end before we see the beginning. For me, I love that device. I love it. It's an old cliche of a narrative device, but I thought, "I don't want to wait." So this was very satisfying. Otherwise, we'd be starting with a lot of talk, a lot of people's feelings, and it was a great way to energize the season and also just tell the audience, "We're gonna put you on a ride."Well, three characters have terrible fates, and there are three characters that you know and love. So I don't think you should make any assumptions. I think everybody's in danger.Yes. That's sort of the fun, because we wanted to make sure, particularly in the second episode… I was like, "Okay, what does Hannibal bring to an investigation?" So for him to be able to smell a body and get a clue that nobody else would was sort of fun for me. Then to actually be able to visually communicate that process and how that works in his mind if he smells something -- then what does he see? Our senses are so heightened and effective that I thought, like, Hannibal using smell to solve a crime and get ahead of the FBI was a really fun device for me.

More with Bryan Fuller on Page 2.