A look at the intimacy that Will and Hannibal shared in the first half of season two, in the context of their physical separation

The first chapter of the third season operates in a manner in which everything that happens physically also happens metaphysically, and this is key to the resolution of both the events that occur and of Hannibal and Will’s relationship.



On the surface, the story divides itself into multiple main locations: Florence, Palermo, Aukštaitija, and the United States. But, within all these locations, there’s only one real location, and within that location, time moves both backward and forward. It is the landscape of Hannibal’s mind.

All of the characters of significance to Hannibal operate in the literal world in some relation to his memory palace, such that the distinction between what literally happens and what occurs only within the confines of Hannibal’s mind loses significance. Bedelia envisions herself drowning in a copper bathtub that recalls bathtime with Mischa, and she challenges Hannibal with the question about how his sister tasted just as she sinks beneath the bubbles of same object in which Mischa was boiled into soup. Pazzi emerges from Hannibal’s past through the Cappella Palatina itself, the very door to Hannibal’s memory palace. Jack follows Will through this very same space with the quest to rescue Will not just physically, but psychologically and spiritually, from Hannibal and what intimacy with Hannibal’s mind has done to him. When a character crosses through one of the significant places of Hannibal’s memory palace in the “real” world, they are also moving through Hannibal’s mind.

The notable exception to this is Alana Bloom, who remains behind to fall in with the Vergers. It isn’t that she hasn’t any place within Hannibal’s mind–he will later imagine her sitting across from him in his office as they discuss the results of his insanity plea–but evidently that she herself cannot or will not cross this threshold of her own will, being too far removed from the “hot darkness” within.

Within this chapter of the story, time is as slippery a concept as place. We see this in the organization of the episodes: “Antipasto” moves back and forth over four or five separate time periods (depending on how you define them); “Primavera” explores again the shattering of the teacup and thus the reversal of time, as Will grapples with losing Abigail and hanging onto her, much as Hannibal continues to grapple with losing Mischa and recreating her. “Secondo” seems to take place in simple forward motion, but as Will moves forward in his own time, he retreats back into Hannibal’s past, looking at “after images” of Hannibal in places he hasn’t been for years. “Aperitivo” explores the same time periods repeatedly from varying characters’ points of view.

The transition that comes from Hannibal announcing that Will intends to look for Hannibal in the one place he can never go–home–plays as one of Will’s crime scene reconstructions. To quote meself, “Like the ‘time did reverse; the teacup that I shattered did come together,’ concept, Will’s empathy and crime reconstruction process has always been predicated on the concept that his powerful imagination can overcome entropy and the permanence of death. Whether it be mushrooms receding into the corpses they grew from, or a throat closing on the neck of a cello, or sheets of plexiglass collapsing together and lifting away to reveal Beverly Katz made whole again, Will’s gift is the reversal of time, to allow the victims of crimes to tell their murderers’ stories.”



So Will experiences Hannibal’s story through his own power to reverse time.

Will walks backwards through the Cappella Palatina, while traveling deeper into it: this trip down Hannibal’s memory lane is framed as a journey that itself takes place within the confines of Hannibal’s memory palace. As Will travels physically through the overgrown expanses of Lecter Manor, he also travels metaphysically through the innermost reaches of Hannibal’s mind.



In case the audience misses the visual cue, the dialogue in Will’s own mind, after he starts poking around the estate, reaffirms the concept.

“Is this where construction began?” “On my memory palace? Its door at the center of my mind, and here you are, feeling for the latch.”

While Will is at the estate, the Wendigo stalks and then guides him. It’s not the Ravenstag this time–the symbol of Hannibal and Will’s relationship–which typically had taken the role as guide in the past for Will, but the Wendigo, which corresponds more directly to Hannibal himself, especially the worst aspects of him. These worst aspects of Hannibal guide Will to the thing he needs to see on the estate: the fountain of snails and fireflies, watched over by the statue of a young woman, meant to symbolize Mischa.

Mischa herself–like she is in Hannibal’s “real” life–is everywhere and nowhere, through her influence over Chiyoh which is impossible for Chiyoh to escape, her name written on a grave, her face in every statue, her shadow over every snail-snacking firefly that lives its brief life in a flare of brilliance before dying out, her little handprint on the stonework–emphasized by a few bars from “Bloodfest.”

But what Will finds inside the estate is not Mischa, but Chiyoh. Will journeys into Hannibal’s past searching not for facts but for psychology. He knows, instinctively, that Mischa does not “explain” or “quantify” Hannibal. What Chiyoh’s presence gives Will insight into is the role that Abigail was supposed to play in reversing the teacup, that one integral piece of Hannibal’s design that eluded Will in the course of the second season, with such fateful results. Hannibal’s continual attempts to bring the teacup back together, to reverse time, are attempts to make the exterior, linear world come into concert with the blurry, elliptical timescape of his mind, wherein there is no clear distinction between the past and the future, and little Mischa both lives and dies forever.

In the conversation that Will and Hannibal have in front of La Primavera, Will tells Hannibal, “I wanted to understand you before I laid eyes on you. I needed it to be clear…what I was seeing.“ Through seeing Mischa’s shadow over Chiyoh, that Hannibal has cast on her life, Will has this clarity. He does not seem to come to full realization of what he intends to do once he meets Hannibal until he and Chiyoh discuss it in “Contorno,” but the purpose of traveling into Hannibal’s past is–for him–complete.

Will’s action of setting Chiyoh’s prisoner free to simultaneously set Chiyoh free is morally unclear, containing both noble and ignoble intent and means. Unlike Hannibal, he is not content to see this man caged and treated worse than an animal, and he does not know–and nor does Chiyoh–if the man is even actually guilty. He knows far too personally what that is like. Similarly, he does not wish to see Chiyoh as one of Hannibal’s caged birds, either, so going to the local authorities is no more an option than asking Chiyoh to let him go is (as if he had faith in any kind of legal justice anyway).

But his manner of handling the situation is decidedly Hannibalesque: he secretly sets the man free in a Xanatos gambit. If the man deserves to live, he will not attempt revenge on Chiyoh and will have a chance to escape, but if he attempts revenge, then he is guilty at least in the present, regardless of the past–and these two states are the same state, as this event occurs both in fact and, in a sense, in Hannibal’s mind, where this place both is real and memory. This is as close to justice as this situation can get, but the darker side is the final alternative: if Chiyoh should die, then too she would be freed, and her hands, at least, would be clean.

Will’s acceptance of that final potentiality and his means of putting the whole scenario into action–not unlike Hannibal calling Garrett Jacob Hobbs and giving him the jump on the FBI–are the final stage of Will’s transformation. Hannibal was proven right in that Will and he were “just alike” in three key areas: that they both enjoy killing, that they both can deceive and manipulate, and that they both are capable of using their curiosity and empathy to encourage others into their own becomings.

By Hannibal’s way of thinking, Will was in a larval stage in season one: the stage before metamorphosis. His occupation of the cell at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane was his chrysalis, and since he has been testing his wings under Hannibal’s guidance: first in murder, then in manipulation and deceit, and finally the encouragement of another’s becoming. Chiyoh has been “standing still” this whole time, not becoming anything, caught in the chrysalis of Hannibal’s design, from which Will “helps” free her.

“Do you know what an imago is, Will?”

“It’s a flying insect.”

“It’s the last stage of a transformation.”

“When you become who you will be?”

“It’s also a term from the dead religion of psychoanalysis. An imago is an image of a loved one, buried in the unconscious, carried with us all our lives.”

“An ideal.”

“The concept of an ideal. I have a concept of you, just as you have a concept of me.”

“Neither of us ideal.”

As Will has now fully assumed his true essence, this is why he creates the imago death tableau in the oubliettes below Lecter Manor–the very center of Hannibal’s own mind. When Will imagines consulting Hannibal about his memory palace, Hannibal tells him that the places closest to his beginning, at the center of his mind, are “static scenes, fragmentary, like painted shards of glass,” and this is exactly what Will replicates when he stages the firefly man at the deepest parts of Lecter Manor, and thus the absolute center of Hannibal’s mind.

I’ve received a lot of questions about what the purpose was in Will putting together the display of the firefly man, if Hannibal would never see it, since the estate is all but abandoned, the corpse will never be found, and Hannibal can never go home.

And all this is entirely true: barring some unforeseeable event, Hannibal will never see the firefly man. The man symbolizes not just Will’s final transformation into he creature, the imago, that Hannibal worked so hard to see come to life, but Will’s acceptance of this within himself. In that manner, the presentation was not for Hannibal, but for Will.

But in another way of thinking, Hannibal doesn’t need to see it because he already knows it, intimately. It is his imago for Will, his image of his beloved one, buried in his unconscious, carried with him all his life. It’s his concept of what he idealizes: the brief but brilliant life of a firefly, that flying insect living to its fullest purpose as a result of change, of transformation. It will never escape the innermost depth of the hole in the floor of Hannibal’s unconscious mind, the dark chamber, filled with screams that do not echo screaming, exactly where Will left it.

In a metaphysical sense, Will has journeyed to the center of Hannibal’s being and left his mark, and on the one hand he made the journey because Hannibal influenced him to, and on the other hand, within Hannibal’s indistinguishable past and future, this journey was made long ago, and Will’s imago has been buried in Hannibal’s unconscious mind for his entire life.

Like shattered teacups coming together, reality has finally caught up to Hannibal’s memory.

In “Dolce,” the meaning of this physical and metaphysical movement of time and space begins to take shape.



The clarity that Will found when he searched through Hannibal’s past is that Hannibal experiences no difference between the past and the future. Mischa became Chiyoh became Abigail, and even Bedelia and Miriam Lass and no one knows who else in between (even, potentially, Alana, but that is a meta for another day). All of his pretty birds, sitting quietly in their cages or dashing themselves to death against the bars.



“Where does the difference between the past and the future come from?” “Mine? Before you and after you. Yours? It’s all starting to blur. Mischa, Abigail, Chiyoh….”

Through his actions of seeking out Hannibal’s past and the places and people who have shaped him, Will has seeded himself–utterly–within the landscape of Hannibal’s mind. The more Will investigates Hannibal, the more “conjoined” they become–joined at the mind–and the more rooms they share in their memory palaces. By “Digestivo,” Hannibal has seen Will there, “victorious.” (As victorious as he was the day he freed Chiyoh?) Though Will only exists in Hannibal’s relative present, Hannibal’s blurring of time allows Will to invade all the spaces of his mind–past, present and future alike–through Will’s act of visiting those places from Hannibal’s past.

Will continues the thought of this closeness in the rest of their conversation at La Primavera, showing that it stretches–or has the potential to stretch, or has stretched in the past–to include Will as well as Hannibal.

“You and I are starting to blur.” “Isn’t that how you found me?”

“Every crime of yours feels like one I’m guilty of. Not just Abigail’s murder–every murder, stretching backward and forward in time.”



When Hannibal sees Will this time, Will has come home to him, and the two are closer, more bonded, more intimate than they have ever been at any moment. As Hannibal has violated and broken down every barrier that existed in Will in the course of the first season, so too has Will now violated and broken down every barrier that existed in Hannibal. No matter what happens elsewhere or elsewhen, Will will always be coming home to him in this instant.

At this same moment, each is intending to kill the other. Hannibal would kill and consume Will, but there is no conflict here for him. He will be with Will, either way, as Will lives and dies in his mind, forever.

But Will’s mind doesn’t work this way. In this way, they are identically…different.

Will doesn’t have a blurry concept of time, or at least he wills that he doesn’t. He defines the difference between the past and the future as before Hannibal and after Hannibal.

While Will’s description of this difference between the past and the future isn’t precisely linear, it’s clearly delineated. Hannibal is Will’s present, but there was a life before Hannibal, and there will be a life after Hannibal. Though at this time he expects “after Hannibal” to occur after he kills Hannibal (not after Hannibal escapes or goes to prison), Will’s mind is already prepared for an eventuality in which Hannibal does not exist for him.

Since Will has seeded himself so thoroughly inside Hannibal’s mind, Hannibal can separate himself from Will physically, but never metaphysically–but Will intends to do both. This is the “magic window” that opens for him, that has him walking away from Hannibal at the end of “Digestivo” but does not allow Hannibal to walk away from him.

For Hannibal, the return to Muskrat Farm was one of his precious reversals in time. He and Will were pitted against a common enemy, together again. He saved Will, but Will also saved him, by suggesting to Alana that she be willing to shed blood by freeing Hannibal, instead of some other course of action. Hannibal was able to mock, to manipulate, to turn Mason into one of his own pigs, to commit extensive murder, to get others to commit murder, and–above all–to share all this with Will. It was as close a return as possible to the happiest time of his life: that period when he and Will stalked Mason together (the Patrochilles stage) . At the end of this, he had dropped his forgiveness too (thankfully), and was ready to talk teacups coming together again, or, if he had to, he could settle for a return to the hunt, which once already afforded them a deepening of their intimacy and bond through their minds, in spite of their physical separation.

“Do we talk about teacups and time, and the rules of disorder?”

“The teacup’s broken. It’s never going to gather itself back together again.”

“Not even in your mind? Your memory palace is building. It’s full of new things. It shares some rooms with my own. I’ve discovered you there, victorious.”

“When it comes to you and me, there can be no decisive victory.”

“We are a zero sum game?”

“I miss my dogs. I’m not going to miss you. I’m not going to find you. I’m not going to look for you. I don’t want to know where you are or what you do. I don’t want to think about you anymore.”

For Will, that experience that culminated at Muskrat Farm was one of pain, fear, frustration, anger, and misery. He has been exhausted by the chase. One reviewer joked that Will essentially became the show’s Wile E. Coyote over episodes 305-307: getting thrown off of a train, shot, drugged, his head sawed open, transported over an ocean with a bag over his head, hung upside down, temporarily paralyzed, and almost had his face cut off. Hannibal didn’t fare stupendously well over the same time period, but he did somewhat better, and–moreover–he enjoyed himself. Will bit Cordell out of rage and frustration, not at all because it would be amusing. Will endured the episode at Muskrat Farm, and he freed Hannibal because he could tolerate Hannibal’s wickedness over Mason’s. But he did not delight in it, as Hannibal did.



Hannibal wants to tell himself that because Will can find pleasure in “savaging the sheep,” that he must always want to. But this is, perhaps, the one way in which Hannibal has been the most wrong about Will. As the sheepdog that Bedelia dubs him, Will really wants to savage the wolves, not the sheep. He is capable of righteous violence because he is compassionate. It isn’t that the urges or the instincts (or the pleasures) aren’t there, but the sheer delight in wickedness is not. The pure enormity of Hannibal’s appetite is not.

Thus, at the same time that Hannibal is learning that he is ready and willing to go back to what they were, through his capacity for blurring the future with the past, Will is discovering that he is ready and willing to walk away completely, to finally step from the past (before Hannibal), through the present (with Hannibal) and into the future (after Hannibal).

The severance that Will verbalizes–not finding, not looking, not knowing, not missing, not even thinking of Hannibal in those spaces that they now share–is as complete a severance as these conjoined two could get, and from Hannibal’s view, a hugely more drastic outcome than killing and cannibalizing Will would have been. Having implanted himself so completely in Hannibal’s mind, the threat to absent himself from this union would wreak havoc on the landscape. For Hannibal, with no real difference between the future and the past, as long as he bears the knowledge that Will isn’t going to think about him, then all of those places they share will become ghost towns. Reality–that Will has abandoned him–will invade, and hollow out their past and future. Hannibal will experience loss in a manner in which he never has before, as he has resolved all of those who have died or been killed into rooms of their own. Will will become a lie he tells himself, and that lie would be in every room and every shadow, and in spite of himself, he would know the truth.



They will just simply not be.

This separation, Hannibal cannot survive.



Even killing and eating Will now would be no remedy under this complete abandonment, because it would not arrest Will at a place of fixation on Hannibal, and it would need to. Had Hannibal killed and eaten Will when he intended, when Will was as close to him and obsessed with him as ever, Will would have remained a living force in his mind. But it cannot reverse Will’s turning away; it cannot fix the blight that Will is laying on Hannibal’s soul. It can only arrest it, and hold it forever. As genufa said here, “One person can’t make a consensual reality, but it also doesn’t take a thousand: two people will do.”

But though Will doesn’t function with regards to time as Hannibal does, he still can if he chooses to: we see this as he keeps Abigail alive in his mind in “Primavera.” As he ties Hannibal to him, he himself risks also being bound. Before Hannibal and after Hannibal are states that only exist if enduring Hannibal isn’t happening right now.



In the end, then, there is only one course of action left for Hannibal–he must keep his own presence alive in Will’s mental landscape, in the present, seeding himself there and laying dormant until the time comes for him to sprout and grow again. Will can walk away physically, but not mentally. As long as he knows exactly where Hannibal is, and where he can always find him, he does not have to miss Hannibal. He does not have to look for him or find him. He does not have to want to think about him. He will not have any choice.

When Hannibal abandons Will at the end of the second season, Will responds by deepening their connection and bond past the planes of the physical, sliding inside Hannibal’s deepest places. Hannibal cannot escape him and learns that he doesn’t want to. Hannibal may have surrendered, but Will surely did catch him.

At the same time, Will finally understands himself that he wants to let go of Hannibal utterly and thus be free of him for good. But as we find out later, in “The Wrath of the Lamb,” Will wasn’t really any more able to release Hannibal than Hannibal was to release him. Their bond, one of minds and souls, is just too strong. And so he utters those hurtful words to Hannibal–words which might have set him free–and in so doing, he gives Hannibal the answer to bind them together, perhaps forever. Hannibal responds to Will abandoning him by doing just what Will did to him: cementing their connection in their minds, past the planes of the physical.

Will didn’t surrender, but Hannibal caught him anyway, in the exact same way Will caught Hannibal.