Ron Does Stuff

There’s only five episodes left until the end of this season! My goodness, does time fly. Especially since this show stopped airing a decade ago!

At the end of the previous episode, Chilton found himself framed for the murders done by the Chesapeake Ripper, while Will restarted his ~therapy sessions~ with Hannibal. Where do we go from here?

Where we go is on a frozen…lake? river? A frozen body of water, where Crawford and Will are fishing. It is, of course, a metaphor. Crawford and Will are looking to catch Hannibal, and they’re going to do it by appealing to his nature, which is to be a predator.

What looks to be the first step is Crawford and Will having dinner at Hannibal’s, where the food, as always, looks both exquisite and grotesque at the same time. Will and Crawford make it sound like they believe Chilton is the Chesapeake Ripper, but of course, they really don’t. Whether Hannibal believes that or not is up for debate.

From there, we go from Hannibal’s home to a stable, where a mare seems to be depressed since it gave birth to a dead foal. The vet checks up on it and…there’s a dead woman inside. We’re back to the monster of the week episodes!

After the opening credits, we see Hannibal with the rest of the FBI team looking at the crime scene. He assesses it and says that he understands what’s been done, but doesn’t understand why it’s been done. Hannibal says Crawford needs someone who doesn’t think like everyone else, and who would that be but Will? Honestly, I think Hannibal knows why the killer did this, but getting Will back his job with the FBI is part of his apology.

And then we get Margot Verger and Mason Verger! I didn’t think we’d get them this early, because these characters appear post-The Silence of the Lambs. But I guess this is before Mason Verger is mutilated. Maybe we get to see that this season! This season that everybody else has seen a decade ago! Margot is Hannibal’s new patient, and he’s already planting the seeds of murdering Mason in her head.

Okay, you guys know I’ve had very positive things to say about this show since I started it, but this wavy cloth sex scene is one thing I do not like. I feel like it went on too long, when they could have achieved the same effect in a shorter time frame. Anyways, Hannibal and Alana are having a post-sex discussion about Will being back in therapy, and Hannibal says Will only tried to have him killed because he wanted to protect Alana. Of course, Hannibal is going to defend Will’s honor.

At the FBI, they’re looking at the body of the woman that was inside the horse, and it seems like her heart is still beating, despite her looking very dead. They open her up and a bird flies out of her chest. That startled me! Obviously, that bird means something.

It’s now Will’s turn to look at the stable crime scene, and after he does what he does, he deduces that this wasn’t meant to be a murder, and that whoever killed the victim was grieving her death and wanted her to be reborn. He also deduces that the killer was familiar enough with the stable, so it might be one of the workers.

The first suspect is Peter Bernardone, who looks like he is neurodivergent. Will doesn’t think he’s the killer, or at least didn’t mean to kill the victim if he did. And if Peter isn’t the killer, he definitely knows who did.

Whether Peter is the killer or not is something we’ll have to get back to, as we’re now watching Will in therapy. Or more accurately, Will pretty brazenly telling Hannibal that he knows what he is, that he fantasizes about killing him. Hannibal wants to know if Will is going to have him killed again, but Will says that’s not going to happen because now he finds Hannibal interesting. Pretty sure Hannibal got a little chubbed up from that.

Back to the investigation of the corpse inside the horse, we find Zeller apologizing for not questioning the evidence framing Will the same way Katz did. Will this change a lot of things moving forward? We’ll see! The FBI has also found a mass grave with more than 10 bodies in it, so obviously this is where the killers been dumping his victims.

While that’s happening, Margot is in another therapy session with Hannibal, where he is definitely influencing her to kill Mason. Since Will is a no-go now, Margot is the mind he’s playing with, although I think he’s doing this with less love than when he did it with Will. Love as Hannibal understands it, anyhow.

Will, meanwhile, is talking to Peter again, and he’s sure that Peter knows who killed all those girls, and that Peter was just trying to give the corpse inside the horse some dignity, in his own way. Peter says he’s being framed and that no one will believe him, which of course immediately earns Will’s sympathy.

The person that’s framing Peter is his social worker, who has this too clean look to him that just makes you immediately distrust him. At least, that’s how I feel when someone is just too clean. But while Alana is questioning him, there’s another drama happening behind the observation window, where Will and Jack are making it look that they aren’t conniving to entrap Hannibal.

The FBI doesn’t have enough on Peter’s social worker to keep him detained, so they have to let him go. Of course, the social worker’s first trip is Peter, who he is going to frame and maybe even kill.

While that’s happening, Hannibal and Will are headed over there to hopefully prevent it from happening, and inside the car they have a talk about perception and saving themselves from how they perceive each other. Maybe because I’ve been watching Interview with the Vampire, and at one point Bryan Fuller was going to be a showrunner for that show, but this just reminds me of the “You are a killer, Louis!” scene, with less shouting. From both the show and the movie.

By the time that Hannibal and Will arrive at the ranch, Peter is already sewing the social worker inside a horse. Will thinks that Peter’s killed him, and during that conversation we get to see the complexity of Will’s feelings for Hannibal. He thinks Peter’s “simpleness” — not a term used in the show or a term I prefer, but I’m not articulate enough to think of a better one — makes it easier to kill someone, BUT Peter reveals that he hasn’t actually killed the social worker. Just sewed him up inside a horse. Well.

The social worker crawls out of the horse, and tough luck for him, Hannibal and Will are waiting for him. There’s a tense conversation, as Will considers killing the social worker as some sort of substitute for Hannibal, but Hannibal stops him from doing it. He then tells Will that as much as he tries to influence Will within his ~chrysalis~, what comes out of it is entirely Will. You are a killer, Louis Will.

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