“It’s only cannibalism if we’re equals.”

Since the airing of “Antipasto,” people have continued to debate Bedelia’s relationship to Hannibal. If she knows what she’s getting into, why does she seem so traumatized? She’s killed before, after all. She’s not trying to save him—she expects him to kill and knows what he does with the remains. Why does she use these “passive aggressive” means to draw attention to herself, instead of just getting out? Does she really think she’s in conscious control of her thoughts? Is she really in conscious control of them?

What have you gotten yourself into, Bedelia?

“Antipasto,” which frames itself as a fairy tale, is far more about disillusionment than it is about fantasy, in keeping with the meat of fairy tales as they existed before the last couple hundred years stripped away their more unsavory aspects in order to make them fit for children’s consumption. Hannibal was never a children’s fairy tale, and it isn’t likely to start now.

Hannibal’s own disillusionment is easy to trace: he has begun his new life abroad. He immerses himself in life in the upper class heart of Europe, in all of its intellectual and artistic pursuits, as well as its decadence and opulence. He has a companion who knows him for what he is, so that he is—ostensibly, at least—not “dining alone.” Framed within the flashbacks of dining on Abel Gideon with Abel Gideon, the emptiness of Hannibal’s new life quickly emerges: like Gideon, Bedelia is not the companion that Will Graham would be, and Hannibal himself may have begun to face for the first time that his own philosophy may catch up to him: “Everybody gets et.”

Hannibal has trapped Gideon completely. There is no escape and no feasible means for literal fight or flight. But Gideon points out to Hannibal that “There’s absolutely nothing I have to do,” and within that realization, he reclaims his power. Gideon cannot control his circumstances—he will get et—but he can choose to engage in this experience that he “allows.” He finds that “knowledge is far more powerful”: in knowledge, he can torment his tormentor, from the discordant tapping of his silverware on the table to his reminder that Hannibal would be far, far happier with Will Graham supping across the table from him, when both of them know that Will Graham would be happiest at that point to see Hannibal Lecter in hell.

And so, in the present time, Hannibal submits to the truth. The fairy tale life is not enough; Bedelia’s companionship, like Gideon’s, is not enough. He is as doomed as the snails who prefer eating with company. In this realization, Hannibal must also come to the acceptance that he too, is going to get “et,” just as Gideon says all along, and therein Hannibal also regains his power. “All this,” as Gideon says, is happening to Hannibal too: there is no really feasible means of fight or flight, not merely because he has been unmasked or is too vain to hide effectively, but because he hasn’t the heart for it. Thus he may do as Gideon has done, and accept his probably inevitable capture, but on his terms, under his control, and may he stick in the craw of those who feed on him.

Against that backdrop, it may be easy to lose the thread of what Bedelia herself experiences. Bedelia has no intention of allowing herself to be eaten—either literally, or in the sense that she will allow herself to get caught up in Hannibal’s schemes and cannibalism. She makes her gestures to allow la polizia to draw near, should they be looking, and she avoids eating “anything with a central nervous system.” Whatever game she is playing and regardless of her ultimate goals, “on a good day,” she believes she is in “conscious control of her actions.”

And in spite of the fact that much of “Antipasto” is Bedelia having a very bad day, she is, in fact, very much in control. That is the point Hannibal makes to her and the source of her disillusionment.

Bedelia entered into her unholy alliance with Hannibal out of what she preferred to think of as “almost entirely” professional curiosity, but what Hannibal calls nothing more moral than bald “greed.” She believes she can observe without participation, and in her flashback of killing her patient, she lays a good deal of the blame on Hannibal, rather than the woman who had her arm down the man’s esophagus up to her elbow. “He was your patient before he was mine,” she says.

Bedelia has been colluding with Hannibal for a long time, and within the course of this episode, she continues to lie to herself about her involvement in Hannibal’s crimes. Even without the scene of her meeting with Dimmond and only its implication in the dialogue, she has knowledge of Hannibal and the power to move against him. But instead she plays her game, and because she does, whether she likes it or not, she is participating, not observing. She anticipated their thoughts, counter-thoughts, and rationalizations, and she was able to predict with some accuracy the course of events that naturally followed. She knew, when Antony Dimmond stepped into Hannibal’s lecture on Dante, that Hannibal was likely to kill at least Dimmond, if not others. She knew enough to run away, to pack her bags and get out. She knew enough to try to prevent it.

Hannibal points out her complicity even back in their dinner with the unsuspecting Mr. Dimmond. She is surprised that Hannibal lets Dimmond go, and he even asks her, “What would you have me do, Bedelia?”—implying that, in fact, she is encouraging him to kill. This implication also comes through slightly when Bedelia asks whether or not Hannibal is planning on eating Professor Sogliato.

Hannibal is right about Bedelia, but her involvement is worse than just guessing what Antony Dimmond might do, or that she might passively permit atrocities to take place at her dining room table, when she might influence the course of events to different outcomes. Dimmond may have died because he knew too much, but he also died to help make this point. Bedelia encourages Hannibal to kill where he otherwise might not, just by her very presence.

Hannibal had targeted Roman Fell not only because of his position in academia—Hannibal even admits with a blink that Roman Fell’s work is not necessarily work he admires—but because the man has a wife. He needs to kill Roman Fell because he needs a place for a Mrs. Fell, a place for Bedelia to assume next to him. The woman died specifically for Bedelia, and the show makes a point out of making sure that the audience doesn’t miss it, by showing Hannibal’s polite greeting as she comes home. Antony Dimmond draws attention to it again when he asks Bedelia if Lydia is a friend of hers. “Not really,” Bedelia responds, missing Hannibal’s gaze as it flickers up to regard her disregard of her role in the woman’s death.

No, Bedelia du Maurier was no friend of Lydia Fell.

Morally speaking, just how damning Bedelia’s involvement in Hannibal’s life is remains to be seen and will probably always be a matter of opinion. But the show opens up the issue and asks Bedelia herself to examine it. Until Hannibal killed in front of her, she might have been able to ignore her role in what he does, but not from this point forward. Yes, it was traumatizing, and yes, she’s in over her head in many ways. But the worst aspect of that, and the course of her story in “Antipasto,” is that she can no longer tell herself that she’s involved just merely out of professional curiosity or greed, that she can observe without participating. This is the end of that illusion and the horror of these events for her. Now, she cannot deny that she is in conscious control of her actions—good days and bad.

She participates because she chooses to.