Right, dying! And going off to his new life. There was a version of that as a finale for the series that I think could have been very bold and satisfying because it would have wrapped up the FBI tale, so that was the goal with that story, to kind of waterproof it for cancellation, or cancellation-proof it. We just wanted to make sure that we were ending on something that could feel like it had a finality to it. Because Hannibal is the first show I’ve done that’s made it into a third season…

Hooray!

Hooray, exactly! Every additional season is a bit of a gift, so we just want to make sure that we end things in a way that is satisfying for the audience in the event that we don’t get another season. That was also part of the reason to shore up the structure and get to Red Dragon in season three. Because so much of the tale of Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham was about seeding that novel and scattering those seeds across two seasons to set up the novel in a fun way. So there is a sense of like, oh, if we end on Red Dragon, there is a satisfying ending there. But preferably, we will go on and explore The Silence Of The Lambs and how that character, whether it’s Clarice Starling or ‘Shmarice Shmarling’ depending on how the rights shake out, which opens up a new chapter for Hannibal Lecter. The fun for us would be integrating Will Graham into the story of The Silence Of The Lambs.

There are other options these days for a TV show that doesn’t get renewed though, other buyers?

Absolutely, and that was one of the instances where we knew in the second season that if NBC didn’t pick us up for a third season there were other parties interested. The rules tend to change in those dynamics though. Whenever you go from network to network, if it’s an instance where a struggling show on one network is being picked up by another then it’s rare that the new network is going to say ‘let’s put more money into this show!’. Generally what happens in those instances is that it’s picked up because it’s been marked down and so if we had been picked up by another network, there would be no telling for us whether we would have the same budget or the same abilities to tell stories that we had with NBC. It’s never a guarantee, it’s always like, ‘that’s great, let’s look at that bridge and see if we can cross it’.