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Will wakes from another of his stag-themed nightmares and vomits up a human ear. Not certain that it's real, he calls Hannibal, who confirms that, yep, it's a human ear. They call in Jack, who comes with the rest of the team to take in Will. Tests confirm that the ear was Abigail's. More damning evidence soon comes to light: Will also has Abigail's blood under his nails and several of his homemade fishing lures contain bits of the recent murder victims. Hannibal may be evil, but it's hard not to admire just how damned thorough the guy is.
He might be just a bit too thorough, though, as Will begins to grow suspicious. He could have believed that he killed Abigail in the throes of his recent breakdown, but the other murders took place before he was sick. He knows he's not guilty. While Jack, Alana and Hannibal try to figure out which of them screwed up the worst, Will escapes captivity. Determined to learn just what happened, he has Hannibal drive him back to Minnesota.
While he's standing in the Hobbs kitchen, looking at the stain of Abigail's blood on the kitchen floor, certain truths start to become clear to him. He sees Hannibal as a human-stag hybrid and understands just how the good doctor has been planting the evidence against him. Will draws a gun, but Jack barges in and shoots him before he can shoot Hannibal. Luckily, it's not fatal, and Jack carts him back home for recuperation and incarceration.
Hannibal visits Dr. Du Maurier a couple of times in the episode -- the first time to tearfully confess his failed attempts at "saving" Will, and the second to bring her a feast of tender, young meat. Is it veal… or Abigail? Du Maurier may suspect it's the latter, but she doesn't decline the meal.
In the end, Hannibal visits Will in jail. He's told Du Maurier that he means to bid farewell to Will, but we know it's not time for goodbyes just yet. Will -- having recovered from his fever and gunshot wound -- seems to remember all his recent epiphanies as he greets Hannibal not as a friend, but as the man who framed him. Stay tuned for the full weecap.
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!Will hunts the stag in the dark woods, thankful that the hunting predilections of Garret Jacob Hobbs have offered him such rich and majestic dream symbolism. What if Hobbs had hunted squirrels or muskrat or chipmunks? Will's dreams would be populated with Alvin, Simon and Theodore. Instead, he finds a man in black body paint and antlers and it is beautifully creepy. When Will looks again, the man vanishes. Blood soaks the ground. When Will touches it, the stag-man appears again, looming over him with glowing eyes.
Will wakes with a start, his vision shaky. His dogs have gathered around his as if bed for an intervention: "Just because you're losing your grip on reality doesn't mean we don't still need walkies." Will struggles out of bed and sees that his feet are muddy to the ankles. He heads to the kitchen for some water and aspirin. He soon vomits them into the sink, along with a human ear. He stares at it in horror and confusion, perhaps wondering as I do how he managed to get the whole thing down without utilizing nary a chew.
Will is sitting on his front steps, shivering in the cold, when Hannibal arrives. "I went to Minnesota," Will confesses. He says he took Abigail, but that she didn't come back with him. Hannibal helps Will up, wraps him in a woolly blanket, offers him the gestures of comfort as real people ought, then takes a look in the kitchen sink. The ear exists. Will didn't hallucinate it. Hannibal looks a tad disturbed. Raw human ear? How déclassé. At least braise it with a bit of fennel and vermouth first. Will tells Hannibal about taking Abigail to her father's cabin and having an "episode." "I hallucinated that I killed her, but it wasn't real," Will insists. Hannibal makes a show of thinking it over for a while, then says they have to call Jack. Cue the opening title sequence that always makes me thirsty for Ocean Spray.
Jack soon descends upon Will's house with half the FBI. Will is led away to a waiting car while his dogs are taken by local animal control. One of them slips away to go whimper outside Will's window. Oh, it's almost too much to bear. Luckily, we soon cut to Will being processed by Beverly and the rest of the team. This includes going through Will's pockets while he stands around in his underpants, hearing them as if from a considerable distance. Later, Beverly scrapes under Will's nails. Flakes of dried blood flutter down like confetti at the saddest party ever. He doesn't seem surprised to see it, but neither does he remember how it got there. When asked to interpret the evidence as he would for any other case, he shakily admits it looks like he killed Abigail.
Alana sits down with Jack in his office. I'm having a hard time hearing over her dress, but it sounds like Jack is saying they have a tissue match for Abigail. Tears fill her eyes. "You said you would cover him," she says. "You could see he was breaking." Jack doesn't deny it. "I kept pushing him because he was saving lives," he says. He gets snitty about Alana not doing better at protecting Will, which, you know, not her job. They eventually get around to blaming Hannibal for not seeing the warning signs, who, after all, was Will's psychiatrist. Alana excuses herself to go have a slow-motion breakdown in the privacy of her car.
When she's done with that, she visits Will in the FBI interview room. Will's surprised Jack let her see him, given their almost-romance. Jack, watching through the mirrored wall, is learning of this for the first time. "Guess you dodged a bullet," Will says to Alana. "I don't feel like I dodged a bullet," she says. "I feel wounded." At least you still have both your ears, lady. She tells him she's going to take care of his dogs for as long as it takes. Thank you, Show, for mentioning this so that everybody (or just yours truly) doesn't spend the entire hiatus worrying about those adorable mutts. Now she gets down to the business of administering a few tests. He volunteers to draw her a clock, as he did for Hannibal. As always, the clock looks completely normal to him and like a Dali sketch to everyone else.
Meanwhile, Hannibal has a session with Dr. Du Maurier. "Despite the overwhelming evidence, I find myself searching for ways Abigail could still be alive," he says as tears roll down his cheeks. To him, this is not a lie. He can kill her and still wish she were alive. Even the tears aren't necessarily false; it's just that instead of crying for Abigail, he's crying for his own loss. Du Maurier remarks on the impact Abigail has had on him. "You seem surprised by that," she says. He talks about thinking of Abigail as his own child - his own cannibal baby on to whom he could have passed the family recipes. Not in those exact words, of course, but that's the gist of it. I think his mourning is genuine, even if he's the cause of it. Abigail was a rare prize. How often is he going to find a kid who eats human flesh? Du Maurier brings up Will as another loss for Hannibal. "I haven't given up on Will," he says. "I was so confident in my ability to help him, to solve him." This, too, isn't necessarily a lie. It's just that Hannibal has a different definition of "help" than most of the rest of us do.
Back at the lab, Jimmy has taken apart Will's homemade fishing lures. Four of them contain human remains. Beverly points out a lure made with Cassie Boyle's bone fragments, another with Georgia Madchen's hair. "He took trophies of all his victims," Brian says to Jack and Alana. Alana's having a hard time believing that Will is a serial killer.
Jack goes to the interview room, where Will is busy hallucinating the shadowy figure of the stag-man. "You're sick, Will," Jack says, pulling him back to the present. "I wasn't consistent with taking my antibiotics," he admits. That's how you get drug-resistant superbugs. And craziness. Jack assures him he'll get whatever treatment he needs, then tells him about all the gross fishing lures they found. The fact that they were made with human bits is news to Will. "I wasn't sick when Cassie Boyle was murdered," he says. He realizes somebody has to be setting him up. Jack, of course, doesn't buy this, and places him under arrest.
Will is then loaded into an ambulance bound for the hospital. While his guard isn't paying attention, Will dislocates his own thumb and pulls free of his handcuffs. The guard never sees him coming.
After a commercial break to recover from that badassery, Jack and Alana go to Hannibal's office. They tell him that Will disarmed the guard, then kicked him and the driver out of the ambulance. "These are not the actions of an innocent man," Jack says. "They're the actions of a man who's impaired," Alana says. Alana shows Hannibal the wonky clock drawing. In turn, Hannibal shows them a clock that Will drew two weeks earlier. It's completely normal. And completely forged. Alana, still searching for a medical explanation, hits on encephalitis as a cause for Will's behavior. Jack is still convinced that Will is a psychopath and that he warned Abigail's father. Hannibal plays into Jack's suspicions, saying that Will was alone in the office and had the opportunity to make that call. Even Alana has to admit that Will could have faked his most recent clock test.
After Alana and Jack have gone, Hannibal's keen senses pick up on some minute smell or sound, or shift in electrical current like a shark does. "Hello, Will." He's taken up residence between Hannibal's bookshelves. He says he's feeling self-aware. He says he could have believed he killed Abigail, but knows he didn't kill the others. Hannibal talks him through the series of murders. As he does so, Will sees blackened versions of the victims, their bodies painted like the stag-man's. Every time Will offers up a reason he couldn't have committed the crime, Hannibal counters him with careful evidence to the contrary. He asks Hannibal to Minnesota. "I want to see where Abigail died." So they get their Winchester on and hop into Hannibal's car for a thousand-mile road trip.
Alana and Jack question Dr. Du Maurier, who notes that Hannibal missed his appointment with her. She thinks Hannibal may still be trying to help Will, but Alana fears Will could end up killing his doctor friend without realizing it. This could have all been accomplished on the phone, but then they'd miss out on seeing Dr. Du Maurier's gorgeousness in person.
As Will makes his way through Abigail's house, he sees back to the moment that Garret Jacob Hobbs got the warning phone call. Will himself takes the phone and hears Hannibal's voice calling to him. It's a dream, but a helpful one. When he wakes, he and Hannibal venture through the house for real. What luck that the doors are unlocked. Will remembers the night they brought Abigail back to the house with Alana. Abigail suggests they reenact the crime, casting Hannibal as the mystery caller. Another helpful tidbit.
He leads Hannibal to the kitchen where Abigail's blood still stains the floor. Hannibal points out that the body hasn't been found and suggests that Will, thinking himself Garret Jacob Hobbs, has "honored every part of her." That's a lot of Abigail to eat all at once. "Perhaps you didn't come here looking for a killer," Hannibal's suggests. "Perhaps you came here to find yourself." They acknowledge that each is as alone as the other. Hannibal wants not to be alone, so he pushes hard the idea that Will has been harboring these urges all along and only hid from them. But Will is not to be seduced. "I know who I am," he says. "I'm not so sure I know who you are anymore." He pulls out a gun and aims at Hannibal. He knows Hannibal was the one who made the phone call, and Abigail knew it, too. It's taken him this long to see Hannibal for who he really is because he has no traceable motive, as Will says. Unless you count a fancy dinner party to be motive. While Will sobs and trembles at these epiphanies, Hannibal regards him with almost alien cool. He's curious, but unafraid, even when Will gets ready to shoot.
Jack interrupts this tense standoff and shoots Will. Will falls to the floor, wounded but alive. Over Jack's shoulder, he sees Hannibal as the stag-man, antlers nearly brushing against the ceiling.
As Will recuperates in the hospital, Hannibal sits at his bedside. If you don't mind him secretly putting human meat in your omelets and framing you for murder once in a while, Hannibal is a pretty good friend to have. When Jack comes in, Hannibal tells him that Will is an induced coma while the antivirals and steroids get to work on his inflamed brain. Will is expected to recover - physically, at least. Hannibal makes like Will forced him at gunpoint to go to Minnesota. "I believe I've failed to satisfy my obligation to Will," he says. His self-assigned obligation to turn Will into a killer like himself, of course. "He's not your victim," Jack assures him. "Nor is he yours," Hannibal says. They sit together and watch Will sleep.
Later, Hannibal arrives on Dr. Du Maurier's doorstep with an elaborate meal under glass. No disposable plastic ware for him. Du Maurier has asserted in the past that she is not Hannibal's friend, but intimate dinners are apparently not out of the question. Hannibal says he's going to visit Will one last time: "As a farewell, of sorts." As they dig into their smoked veal, Du Maurier notes that it's a rather controversial dish. She gives him an odd smile and makes happy sounds as she eats. "Those who denounce veal often cite the age at which the animal was killed," Hannibal says. How old was Abigail? 18? 19? Du Maurier tells Hannibal to be careful, as people are starting to see his pattern. She mentions his penchant for patients who are prone to violence, but one wonders if that's the only pattern to which she's referring. She's nearly as cool as Hannibal; it makes her hard to read.
The morning, Hannibal goes to the Baltimore State Hospital. With his back to the guards and where he need not don his person mask, he makes an odd expression. For several seconds, he just closes his eyes and breathes. Is he steeling himself? Savoring the moment? He walks down a glum hallway to stand before Will's cell. "Hello, Will," he says simply. Will gets up from his meager bed, faces Hannibal through the bars, and says, "Hello, Dr. Lecter." Will looks neither glad nor angry to see him, but something has changed. It makes Hannibal smile just slightly -- a tease that will have to tide us over until season.
Tippi Blevins enjoys a good veggie burger, with or without a nice chianti. Email her at b_tippi@yahoo.com, or find her @TippiB.