Ron Does Stuff

We’re edging closer and closer to the end of this season and the start of a new one! Let’s get into it!

The previous episode saw Hannibal consider the possibility of friendship with Will, but that is going to have to be relegated to the back burner at the moment as Will is contemplating the tower of bodies on the beach. I remember my first reaction to watching this years ago was “Gross” but also “Wow”. Repeating myself again: the production has done a great job at making these grotesque images look good!

Will does his “This is my design” thing but ends up at Hannibal’s office without knowing how he got there. Hannibal is surprised he’s there and so is Will. Hannibal tells him that he’s disassociating because of the “repeated abuse” he’s received as Jack Crawford’s investigator and we know this is Hannibal lying because he smelled Will’s illness back in episode five.

And I guess in some twisted way Hannibal thinks this is him being a friend? That is if we take his declaration that he cares about Will’s life seriously. Perhaps Hannibal saw that this job was destroying Will and maybe letting the illness take its course would give will an out, since he wouldn’t take the one Jack gave him. Or maybe Hannibal is just laying the foundation for the twist he’s going to enact later on in the season. This is a rewatch for me, you guys! The next season is when everything’s going to be new for me!

Meanwhile, Abigail’s subconscious is not letting her rest and continues to confront her with the crimes of her father. I can’t remember the exact details know but I think this pushes her to dig something up? I don’t know if it’s in this episode or in another one.

Over at the FBI, Will finds out that to everyone else, he wasn’t acting weird and apparently did his job like he was supposed to do. It’s only him that has this three-hour hole where he doesn’t know what he did. To Jack’s credit, he does ask Will to tell him if there’s a problem. It’s Will who’s hesitant to talk about it.

Back with Abigail, she’s finding out from Freddie that she’s essentially penniless since the proceeds from the sale of her family’s house will be going to her father’s victims. Of course, Freddie is there to goad her towards writing a book, or at least push Abigail into letting her write Abigail’s story, where both of them will profit.

Back at the FBI, the team is working through the 17 bodies that make up the gory totem pole. Will is sure that they’re all murders, even if eight of the bodies have been traced to grave robbing.

But that scene in the image above is another display of Will’s unraveling. There aren’t actually any students in the room, he’s all by himself and the projector isn’t even on. It’s Alana that pulls him out of whatever it is he’s in.

Alana’s here to talk about their kiss and while I appreciate her being honest and upfront with Will about her feelings, it is confusing for the other party when you tell them you’re switching back and forth between regretting and not regretting the kiss. But that’s just me! Some people may find more clarity in that. What is especially clear is that Alana thinks Will is unstable and that is something that I would appreciate but also be stung by. I’m sorry, I feel stuff!

After that truth bomb, Will and Hannibal now have to deal with Abigail’s decision to have Freddie Lounds tell her story. Will tries to tell Abigail that she’s important to him but Abigail just crushes him by telling him that just because he killed her father he doesn’t get to be that for her. Hannibal has to swoop in and remind Abigail that they went through the traumatic event together, with the underlying subtext being “I know you killed Nicholas Boyle.” He also threatens Abigail that she better be ready for what happens when she decides to do this.

Abigail isn’t taking that shit from Hannibal, so she digs up Nicholas Boyle’s body and now Jack wants her to identify the body. Of course, Will and Alana are mad about this because they think it’s going to re-traumatize Abigial, without knowing that Jack is totally on the nose with his thoughts about Abigail and her involvement with her father’s killings. Hannibal, I like to think, is a little impressed at how Abigail is standing up to him to get what she wants.

Then we’re treated to this great tension-filled scene where Jack interrogates Abigail in front of Nicholas Boyle’s dead body and Abigail sorta passes? At least in Alana’s opinion, which she conveys in another great scene where she confronts Jack about his methods and how she has reservations about Hannibal’s role in all of this.

Of course, Hannibal is not happy about this as all. He wants assurance from Abigail that he can trust her to keep his secret since she’s freed herself from hers, but what can she do to prove that to him?

Meanwhile, I gotta admit I don’t understand how they made the jump to finding Lawrence Wells but they did it anyway, and we find out that Lawrence Wells was unaware that his final victim was his own son. They didn’t fully explain how the other people were murdered as well. But then again, Hannibal is less about the monsters of the week and more about the twisty relationships that Hannibal has with the people in his orbit.

Later that night, Will begins to question Abigail’s innocence and when he looks at Nicholas Boyle’s body the next day he realizes that it’s Abigail who killed him and not some random murderer. He tells Hannibal about this and now gets to find out that not only did Hannibal already know, he also helped dispose of the body. For a second there, when he touches the scalpel and the camera focuses on it, I think Hannibal considered killing Will but decides to talk about it with Will instead.

It’s scenes like this that makes me curious about what the Interview with the Vampire show would have been like if Bryan Fuller ended up as its showrunner. This is almost the same as Louis and Lestat having an argument about how to raise Claudia.

And just like Claudia, Abigail isn’t all that innocent either. She finally admits to Hannibal that she helped bring her father’s victims to him. She knew what his father was doing and knew that if she didn’t deliver those girls to him it was her that was going to die. And it’s the perfect moment for Hannibal to further his family agenda with Abigail and Will.