Hannibal
“The Wrath of the Lamb”, Season 3 Episode 13
Requested By
MacabreMagpie on Reddit
What do I know about this series going into it?
It belongs to the Silence of the Lambs franchise. I’m familiar with the basic plot of that film, though I’ve never seen it, nor any of the other films in the Hannibal Lecter franchise.
I know that this series takes place prior to that film and has a younger Hannibal Lecter as the main character. I don’t know where it fits chronologically with the other installments.
Previously On
Clips are thrown at me too fast to really absorb:
“The best way to bait him.”
Somebody spoke about the Dragon in a magazine called Tattle Crime.
One man bites another man’s tongue out.
“I AM THE DRAGON,” he declaims.
Recap
The Dragon from the opening - I assume this is Hannibal - orders a woman named Reba to stand up. He confirms that she knows where she is and knows where the front door is. The vibe is weird: it feels like he has her under some kind of hypnosis, or at least presenting before her a choice.
He orders her to come forward and feel his chest. She does so, then moves her hands upward to try to grab his throat - but he grabs hers, harder, and orders her to stop. Instead, he tells her to remove the key he has around his neck and go lock the front door. “Don’t try to run,” he orders. “I can catch you”.
She walks towards the front door, shuddering every step of the way, barely able to put one foot in front of the other. When she reaches the front door, she does not lock it - perhaps he doesn’t have full control over her - but rather opens it and tries to run. But she immediately finds that Hannibal is already on the other side, blocking her exit, and pushes her back into the house.
(I kid; he probably snuck out the side door or something while she was moving so slowly. But picturing him doing that makes for a pretty hilarious image.)
He orders her again to lock the door, which she does, having no other choice, and to return the key to his neck. Then he orders her to go to her bedroom and sit on the bed.
“Sit still,” he says, “or I can’t keep Him off of you.” Interesting use of the capital letter in the caption. Are they proposing that the serial killer side of Hannibal is a separate personality? Was that in the original film?
Then he orders her to lift up her hands and feel the shotgun that he is holding. Huh. Is Reba blind? That might explain a great deal.
“I wanted to trust you,” he says. “You felt so good.”
“So did you, D,” she says. Then she says either “Please don’t hurt me” or “Please don’t let him hurt me” - I’m not quite sure which.
He starts pouring kerosene on the floor. “It’s over for me,” he says. “I can’t keep Him off of you. Better you go with me.” Then he lights a match.
Reba starts screaming in horror, and he suddenly looks pained: “I can’t stand to watch you burn.” He cocks the gun and shoots himself in the head.
So this isn’t Hannibal?
Reba crawls toward the dead body - which has an enormous hole in the head - and takes the key off his neck, then crawls out of the house as the entire building goes up in flames.
The opening credits have a lot of very famous names in them: Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen, Gillian Anderson, Laurence Fishburne. I had recognized Laurence from the Previously, but none of the others.
Some time later, Reba is sitting in a hospital bed, sucking on some kind of gemstone1. She’s freaking out: “He shot himself. I put my hand in it. He set fire to the house. I put my hand in it!” Her visitor reassures her: In the end he couldn’t kill you, and he couldn’t watch you die. He seeked you out because he was trying to stop killing, and you helped him do that for a time.
She isn’t as happy with the scenario as depicted: “I drew a freak”. She tells her visitor that blind people often attract those who want others to be dependent on them2.
That visitor leaves the hospital room and enters a church, where he meets with Mads Mikkelson, who is giving off a major Head-Of-A-Secret-Society kind of vibe. “Ding dong, the Dragon’s dead,” reports the visitor, whom I now recognize as Hugh Dancy.
It’s way too early in the episode for that to actually be true. I bet it’ll turn out that the Dragon faked his death and actually shot somebody else, with Reba unable to see the difference.
Mads Mikkelson congratulates the visitor for “the job you did on Dr. Chilton”, whatever that means, and praises him for being cunning. The visitor, named Will, isn’t inclined to take that as a compliment: “Is that some sort of accusation?”
“Your family is safe now,” Mads points out. “You can go home again, if there is any point. Is there any point?”
This conversation is really strange, and not just because the dialogue is vague: when it started, they were standing next to each other in a church, but in mid-sentence the scene changed and they’re in a plain room, separated by some sort of plexiglass barrier. Mads isn’t Will’s superior, he’s a prisoner of some kind - probably some other serial killer? “You turned yourself in so I’d always know where you were,” says Will. I have no idea what is happening.
Mads Mikkelson asks if it’s good to see him, which Will of course denies. They have some sort of complicated history, I can tell…
That night, Will enters his hotel room and is immediately ambushed by the Dragon, lying there in wait.
When Will comes to, some time later, the first thing he says is not “Where am I?” or “You’re supposed to be dead!” but rather a surprised and perhaps disappointed “You didn’t break my back.”
“Your face is closed to me,” the Dragon replies.
“If I can see you, you can see me.” says Will. I have no idea what is happening.
Will quotes something that Hannibal once said to him about “blood” and “breath” and “radiance”, establishing that the Dragon is not Hannibal. “I would like to share with Hannibal, but he betrayed me,” the Dragon in fact says.
“He betrayed me too,” agrees Will.
It’s very curious that Will doesn’t seem in the least bit surprised that this man is not as dead as he believed. Is he just extremely genre savvy, that you don’t think the bad guy is dead unless you not only find the body but the face as well?
Meanwhile, Laurence Fishburne is at a lab, where a pair of comic-relief pathologists are describing just how they’ve figured out the dead body isn’t the Dragon after all but some random guy named Arnold Lang. The whole rigamarole with the key was so he could put it on around the neck of his patsy, shoot him in the head, set fire to the body, all to convince a blind person that he was dead so she could convincingly relate that to the police.
Laurence consults with Will about the news - so, aha, this is a flashback! Will already knew the Dragon wasn’t really dead, long before he returned to his hotel room. They had come up with a plan: they want to tempt the Dragon with the opportunity to meet, eat, and ‘absorb’ the legendary Hannibal Lecter, by taking the latter into custody and faking his escape.
This explains why Will wasn’t surprised to see the Dragon alive in his room, why the Dragon didn’t kill him, and Will is expected to help the Dragon meet Hannibal Lecter.
Next, Will has a conversation with Gillian Anderson, playing a woman named Bedelia. The conversation is amorphous, full of metaphor and unclear accusations; whatever they’re talking about, she’s not happy with what he’s planning.
An almost entirely burned man named Frederick, lying inside some sort of therapy chamber, greets a “Dr. Bloom”. She is visiting him to see “what Hannibal is capable of”. But he corrects her: “what Will Graham and you are capable of”.
Frederick asks who Will his helping her “rope” now. “Hannibal,” says Bloom. Frederick points out that he’s getting skin grafts and would love Hannibal to be among his donors.
This is another very vague conversation.
Later, Dr. Bloom visits Mads Mikkelsen. Aha: He is Hannibal, and she is here to offer him a deal. Hannibal asks why Jack didn’t offer him the deal himself: “Because I know you better, and you would just torment Jack.” Hannibal admits this is true.
To twists the knife a little bit, Hannibal wishes Frederick (surname Chilton) a speedy convalescence and sarcastic hopes that he won’t turn out very ugly after his treatment ends.
He then asks to get his books back. “If you agree to catch the Red Dragon,” says Bloom, “you’ll get your books, your drawings, your toilet, your other privileges.” He warns her that as part of this fake-escape plan, he might end up escaping for real, and reminds her that she once died in his kitchen. In doing so, his tone isn’t that of exaggeration; was she at some point clinically dead?
Bloom reports to Laurence Fishburne that Hannibal agrees to help, but only if Will asks him in person and says “please”. Will is happy to do so, and even offers that the media report that Will helped Hannibal escape.
Which makes me wonder if maybe he’s planning to do so for real.
Anyway, the plan - assuming Will is going to stick to it - is to kill Dolarhyde (the Dragon’s real name) and then kill Hannibal. Forget imprisoning either of them; we’re not messing around anymore.
So Will contacts Hannibal again, and once again the scene starts in a church but switches mid-sentence to the prison cell, this time with Hannibal in a straitjacket and on a hand truck. I guess the church is some kind of metaphor, though I have nowhere near enough context to understand it.
Will starts to explain the plan to Hannibal: they’re going to set up a ‘mail drop’ with observation points… I don’t have enough time to jot it down, however, because the plan goes south immediately. The Dragon pulls up alongside the prison transport vehicle and shoots every single person involved. The scene isn’t even shot properly, just brief snippets in between fades to black, because otherwise it would be too unrealistic. Not a single one of the dozen FBI agents even manages to draw his weapon?
And then, just like that, we cut to some time after the attack, with the prison transport run off the road, Hannibal free from his cage and restraints, and everybody dead except him and Will - with the Dragon nowhere to be seen. What? Why did he attack and then leave? Why didn’t he kill Will? Why didn’t he capture Hannibal? What was that all about?
Hannibal gets into a cop car, and invites Will to get into the passenger seat.
Cut to that night, with Laurence Fishburne arriving at the scene of the incident.
The following morning, Dr. Bloom is seen with her wife and son leaving a truly enormous palace and getting into a helicopter. Is she some kind of queen?
It’s nighttime again,3 and Hannibal and Will arrive at a house on a cliff in the middle of nowhere. I’m completely confused. Why did they come here? Why does Will trust Hannibal? Why isn’t Hannibal trying to escape? Why are they working together? What does this have to do with the Dragon? And does all this still take place before the Dragon ambushed Will in the hotel room? The timeline is really confusing.
Hannibal opens a bottle of wine and pours a glass for himself and Will. He mentions how inconvenient it is that he has compassion for Will - I guess the reason he isn’t going to kill him.
Suddenly, however, there is a gunshot from outside: the Dragon has shot Hannibal through the back, and the wine bottle explodes as the bullet passes through him.
Hannibal collapses. The Dragon steps through the glass door behind him, into the house. Gasping, Hannibal greets him: “Hello, Francis.”
So I finally have his real name.
“You were seized by a fantasy world with the brilliance and freshness and immediacy of childhood,” says Hannibal. If you say so, I guess?
Francis kneels before Hannibal and pulls out a camera. He wants to kill him and “meld him with the strength of the dragon”, whatever that means (I guess eat him), and capture it all on film.
Will tries to draw his gun, but Francis spots the movement easily and stabs him in the face.
Will indeed pulls the knife out and uses it to stab Francis.
Francis decides turnabout is fair play and stabs Will.
Hannibal tries to intervene, but Francis overpowers them both and tosses them around a bit. In fact, as he approaches Will, Will hallucinates Francis with enormous dragon wings.
Finally, however, Hannibal manages to get hold of an axe that’s lying around for firewood, and with Will holding the knife they stab and slash Francis repeatedly until he is finally dead.
There’s a brief flashback, or possibly an imagine spot, where Francis is burning a book of some description.
Hannibal helps Will up, and Will comments his blood “really does look black in the moonlight”.
“It’s beautiful,” says Will. So he has, in fact, turned Will into a serial killer just like him in the end?
Ah, but as he and Hannibal embrace, Will pulls them both over the cliff into the ocean.
I bet one or both aren’t really dead.
After the credits, Gillian Anderson - whose character’s name I’ve forgotten by now - sits down at dinner alone.
Lingering questions
Are Hannibal and Will really dead? (No.)
Is Francis really dead? (Maybe.)
Where was Dr. Bloom headed? Is she coming back?
Will Frederick recover?
Is Will’s reputation permanently marred as the man who helped Hannibal escape? If they are dead, will the bodies ever be found?
Ratings
I evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. This will likely differ greatly from how the episode works in its proper context. And it should go without saying that the following does not apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.
The rating system is from 0 to 10, where 5 is considered average for television. These are intended to be measurements, not judgements; a low rating may reflect low quality, but it may also reflect a deliberate choice. For example, a strong character piece may have no plot, or a finale may intentionally provide no closure - neither of which makes an episode bad.
Story: 4/10. The plot was gripping enough to deserve a relatively high score despite its relative lack of complexity, but it is marred by a few dirty tricks. The contrivance of the Dragon managing to kill literally every member of the police convoy, yet deciding (for some reason) to leave both Will and Hannibal alive and wait to encounter them later was necessary for the plot but made absolutely no sense.
I’m happy with the reveal that explained why Will wasn’t surprised to find the Dragon alive (that was very well done), but struggle to fit the hotel room scene into the episode’s timeline. Did it come after he and Laurence Fishburne were briefed about the Dragon but before he offered Hannibal the deal? Did it come after he took Hannibal out of his cell? But surely there’s no gap between then and the convoy ambush.
There were a few subplots but they didn’t have much substance to them. One scene with Frederick that was left hanging; three very brief scenes with Dr. Bloom; one scene with Bedelia (I looked up her name again); two scenes with Laurence Fishburne. It didn’t feel like those subplots were brought to a conclusion. It felt like a pro forma ticking of the boxes: “We have to touch on each of these before the episode ends”.
Writing: 7/10. I’m grading this very generously because I am assuming that all of the metaphorical and confusing conversations had meaning for long-time viewers. I didn’t understand half of the dialogue in the episode at all, but with only a few exceptions it didn’t feel like nonsense. It felt mostly deliberate.
Production: 5/10. Excellent acting from literally every person on the screen. The makeup effects were fantastic.
The score was unnoticeable. The aforementioned dirty tricks with the camera affect this rating as well; I’m not happy with their use at all. And why does everything need to be so dark?
Characterization: 8/10. This is where the episode shines (metaphorically, of course). Hannibal is a famously complex and three-dimensional character and we can see that here; Hugh Dancy does an excellent job getting the various warring sides of Will across even without my having any context. I got to know Reba very well in the few minutes I saw her; she was great.
I’m knocking off a point for the overly silly pathologists, because they felt like they were in the wrong series.
Accessibility: 3/10. Other than the basic main plot, this was very difficult to follow for a first-time viewer. The confusing conversations; the messing with the timeline; the extremely dark color scheme that often made it difficult to tell who was doing what. It’s like a perfect storm of confusion for the newbie.
Closure: 6/10. I’m scoring this above average because of the finality of the ending for the two main characters - but it felt like literally every single sideplot was left dangling, from Reba to Frederick to Laurence Fishburne. As mentioned above, it felt like they were merely fulfilling a contractual obligation to tick off the boxes of each subplot (we mentioned this one, we mentioned that one) but made no effort to conclude them, much less bring them to a conclusion4.
Do I want to watch the series now?
It’s hard to tell, but probably not. Even if all of the metaphorical speech was justified - which, as stated above, I am assuming it is - it’s not something I would enjoy watching week in and week out. Overly philosophical discussions just aren’t my cup of tea; I prefer concrete dialogue I can sink my teeth into.
I would, however, be open to trying the series if I’m told that this was a one-time thing and that most episodes didn’t wax eloquent about radiance and empathy and moments of decision.
Is there a series finale you’d like me to try? Join our Discord or leave a comment below.
Or possibly a large piece of ice. If there’s one major criticism I have so far, it’s that the lighting is extremely dim.
In retrospect this seems to be the reverse of what her visitor was talking about. He described the Dragon as being dependent on her. But maybe I just didn’t follow the conversation fully.
What is with these scene changes?
There is a subtle difference between concluding a plot and bringing one to a conclusion. I’ve gone into it often enough before, and the distinction is not relevant here.