We start in the dream stream. Will is narrating his technique for preparing a fly. At first I assumed he was just talking into the air, but his student is actually Abigail Hobbs. It's nice that people get to show up even after they're dead. He's going to teach her to fish, since she already knows how to hunt. She claims that stalking and luring are the same thing. He's trying to catch "the one that caught you." They seem to be having a good time. Will explains that the final step before casting is to name your bait after someone you cherish. That's weird. He named his bait "Abigail."
Will glowers by himself in his cell. The naked-corpse mural appears in the center of his eye. Dr. Katz is here to see him, and she says The killer was named James Gray, and his cool killer name is "The Muralist." Even the killer had a name that was a color? That's dumb. I also object to it being called a "mural," because a mural is supposed to be on the wall, not the floor. But I will go along with convention. Will thinks Gray worked alone until he was convinced to be part of it. Katz realizes where he's going with this and asks him not to say that the person who killed him was Hannibal Lecter. Will answers, "I'm saying Hannibal Lecter." He doesn't want Katz to just believe him; he wants Katz to prove it for him. He thinks there will be a very clever, hidden clue on James Gray, because that's the sort of thing an egomaniac like Hannibal would do. Katz is willing to go look for details, but she's skeptical. Will tells her, "Just as long as you're looking. You look out there. I'll look in here." I feel like most of the clues are probably not going to be in Will's cell.
Look out! A bee! He has a knife for a bottom! The bee flies around for a bit (like a very small air shark), then returns to its hive, which is full of computer-generated bees. And then it flies out of a person's mouth, because the hive appears to be partially inside a dead body. That's unusual!
Now Will is in his cage, meeting with Dr. Chilton. This is Chilton's hospital; why does Will have to go get in the cage to have him as a visitor? Will tells Chilton he'll give him the same deal he gave Katz. Chilton won't quite admit to recording all of Will's conversations, and he's also skeptical about what Will could offer him. Will says he's sure he's "quite the topic of conversation in psychiatric circles." Chilton goes on about how Will is pretending to be a confused, wounded bird when he talks to anyone else, but Will acts like a classic psychopath around Chilton. Will suggests that there are three possibilities: he's either delusional, psychopathic, or right about Hannibal Lecter. Will offers to let Chilton become" the first and last word on the mind of Will Graham." Chilton is strolling around pompously (it's really the only way to stroll when you're carrying a silver-topped cane), so when Will leans forward, Chilton steps backward hastily. What Will wants in return for allowing Chilton to psychoanalyze him is for Chilton not to discuss him or his therapy with Hannibal. Will says, "I am now under your exclusive care."
Bella (Jack's wife, dying of cancer) tells Hannibal she should have embraced Facebook when she had a chance. More specifically, she says she should not have let Jack talk her into chemotherapy. Hannibal says he's trying to extend her life, so she tells him about how she's been vomiting up her stomach lining and sleeping either eighteen hours a day or not at all. Hannibal tells her Jack loves her. She gets a brief monologue in support of choosing to die: "My silence is inevitable. The war is over. The cancer is an occupying force. I want to surrender while I still have my dignity." Hannibal claims to find the idea of death comforting. He says that when Socrates drank hemlock, he offered a rooster to Asclepius, the god of medicine, to pay his debt. He explains, "To Socrates, his death was not a defeat but a cure." This is a legitimate story, if you're curious.
The team from the lab is gathered around the tree that has the bee-guy on it. It seems that Jimmy wouldn't let them kill the bees, so they're in beekeeper suits. Jimmy goes on about how great it is that drones commit suicide, and I think they should maybe have spaced out the suicide conversations a little bit more. Brian says the body's been here about two weeks, based on the decomposition and amount of honey. And this couldn't have happened by accident. Somebody took out the eyes and part of the brain to make room for the bees.
Meanwhile, Katz is asking Hannibal to help her with examining James Gray's body because Brian's in the field. This is really their procedure? If the main surgeon is out of the office, they just ask a passing psychiatrist who used to be a surgeon? Can't the FBI afford more than one person to do autopsies? Katz admits that Will is consulting with her on this case, in return for her investigating the murders Will's accused of. Hannibal says he thinks there's a possibility Will's innocent. Hannibal asks who Will thinks killed the muralist, and Katz does not say that he suspects Hannibal. Hannibal tells Katz, "Only by going deep beneath the skin will you understand the nature of this killer's pathology." I like the idea that Hannibal's undoing will be his compulsion to constantly say things with double meanings. There's only so often you can say you're "having a friend for dinner" until people start to notice.
Chilton has a consent form for Will to agree to sodium amytal, which is a truth serum. Although Wikipedia says it's more often called "amytal sodium." I mention that so you'll know that I do some research. Will asks if there's an equivalent drug that could remove memories, and Chilton says that sort of thing would require tools, skills, and the willingness to embrace unorthodoxy. He admits that Hannibal might well have all three of those things. Will signs. The drug gets injected, which takes longer than I'm describing it since we're indulging in some slow motion and CGI blood. The fluorescent lights flash and the music becomes atonal. Will looks up at the lights with a stoned expression. We see him elsewhere, sweating and panting and generally looking like he did in the second half of season one.
In what is either a flashback or a recovered memory (or both), Hannibal is injecting Will in the neck and telling him to draw a clock. In the present, Chilton is questioning Will, but we can't hear him. Hannibal has a metronome on the table to Will, but it's not the kind with the swinging arm like we saw before. This one is the kind with the flashing light. You know, like the flashing fluorescent light. We see the two clocks Will drew (the normal one and the one that's all skewed). Hannibal talks, and his mouth moves around his face. So does his nose. It's all Picasso now. Will spasms around. Some of these shots are very reminiscent of Requiem for a Dream.
Will tells Chilton that he's realized that Hannibal was inducing seizures and encouraging him to lose time. Chilton says that doing that sort of thing normally requires a subject with photosensitive epilepsy, although Will asks about, say, viral encephalitis, maybe? Chilton looks like he's willing to consider this. He says, "That would suggest a radically unorthodox form of therapy." Will agrees.
Hannibal is at the hospital to see Will, but Chilton explains that he cancelled his appointment with Will because he's at a delicate point in his therapy. His opinion on Will is evolving. After his narco-analytic interview (that's the fancy medical term for using truth serum), he thinks Will may have a continuum of illnesses with different effects. He asks if Hannibal's light stimulation overloaded Will's visual cortex, and Hannibal doesn't deny it. Chilton has noticed that Hannibal shared very little information about what he did with Will, so now he's willing to consider the possibility that Hannibal may have made Will into a murderer. But he doesn't seem that mad about it: "You're not the only psychiatrist accused of making a patient ill. We have to stick together."
At the Crawford home, Bella is preparing to smoke some "purple kush" out of a pipe that looks like medical equipment. Which I guess it is, so who am I to complain about a weird-looking pipe? Jack would like a hit. She asks if he still gets drug tested, which he brushes off. Isn't he in the middle of his psych eval? This seems like it would be a bad time for him to get a positive drug test, although there's no chance that Brian and Jimmy are completely clean, right? She changes the subject to the news that she's done the paperwork to not be resuscitates, and Jack's buzz is harshed. He recommends a new treatment called magnetic hypothermia, which sounds dangerous. She says when she watched her mother go through this, she woke up in so much pain that she could only scream Bella's name. Jack promises to remember her walking in Italy and coming in from the garden and "as beautiful as you are right now." That didn't seem to resolve anything, although I guess that's to be expected from a conversation that started with both participants getting high.
At the lab, the beehive man has been identified as Duncan Holloway. He was 52, divorced, bankrupt, and went missing six months ago. He had a very high white blood cell count, so they think he might have had a fever. Jimmy suggests some sort of religious significance, because honey is one of the five elixirs of immortality in Hinduism, and bees are a symbol of Christ. Brian says something long and sharp was pushed in his brain. In fact, he was lobotomized.
A man. Somewhere. When shows do this kind of in medias res scene and drop us somewhere where we don't know anyone, they rarely concern themselves with how difficult it is to recap. He complains about his arthritis to his acupuncturist, who's played by Amanda Plummer. She recommends bee venom therapy. But he can barely afford what he's already getting. She pokes him with acupuncture needles in the forehead and neck. He says he can't feel anything at all, so she brings out the lobotomy equipment. See, you take a long poky thing (a lot like an ice pick) and slide it into the eye socket, right to the eye. Then you bang it with a hammer to get it into the brain, and then you wiggle it around. It's unsettling to watch.
Now the acupuncture guy is out in a field, looking, well, lobotomized. A young girl tells him not to stare at the sun. When he turns to look at her, he has no eyes. She screams. That seems reasonable.
He's been brought into the lab, where the boys tell Katz that their new patient is covered in holes. There are bee stings all over him, so he should be full of apitoxin. And he's blind and lobotomized, which is creeping everyone out. Some of the stings caused an allergic reaction on his skin, but others didn't. They realize that the stings that didn't cause a reaction are in the pattern of acupuncture needles, so the bee holes must be hiding the needle holes. Katz gets excited and rushes back to the body of the muralist. The spot where he was sewn to the other bodies is now of interest to her, because the big stitches are hiding smaller stitches. She remembers Hannibal saying "Only by going deep beneath the skin will you understand the nature of this killer's pathology." And underneath the stitching, it turns out that the killer removed James Gray's kidney.
Will lies on his cot, writhing and re-experiencing that scene where he brought Dr. Gideon (Eddie Izzard) to Hannibal's place. The Will in his cell remembers the will at the dinner table spasming. Hannibal announces that he's had a mild seizure. Gideon says, "That doesn't seem to bother you." Hannibal answers, "I said it was mild." So far, it's just like what happened last season, except now one of the walls of the room is replaced by the door to Will's cell. The door opens and Will walks into the room, so we have cell-Will observing as past-Will stands there in a stupor. And now, when Hannibal tells Gideon, "Terrible thing, to have your identity taken from you," he's staring at cell-Will. Then Will wakes up on his cot, presumably having remembered that scene where Hannibal revealed himself as the Chesapeake Ripper.
Katz tells Will that sutures under the stitching were hidden. But she's not ready for him to tell her that Hannibal is the Chesapeake Ripper. The kidneys were surgically removed, which is consistent with an ex-surgeon like Hannibal. Will warns her that if Hannibal is working with her in any way, it's just to toy with her, but she says can't bring this to Jack until she can back it up. She asks, "If Hannibal's the Ripper, what's he doing with his trophies?" Will has a little tour through his memories. He remembers eating sausages and Hannibal almost making a facial expression. He finally, finally says, "He's eating them."
Amanda Plummer makes some honey. Jack's at the door, and we learn that her name sounds like "Catherine Pimms." But that's not going to matter for very long, so I'm not going to worry about whether I spelled it wrong. Brian and Jimmy are here to talk to her about two of her former patients while Jack looks at the plants. She vaguely expresses sadness for Bee Guy's death. She explains that it's nice to die in a meadow with a head full of bees. I am not sure I agree with that philosophy. She asks if they've tried the honey, which she found too morbid. Yeah, it can't be healthy to eat corpse honey. She's very upfront about admitting, "I brought him to the field to die." But first, she quieted his mind. And after the arthritis guy was "quieted," he walked without pain for the first time. She smiles in a very creepy, Amanda Plummer, way, and says, "I can't make pain go away, but I can make it so it doesn't matter." In her opinion, she protected them from hopelessness, and that's beautiful. Jack is in no mood to hear someone gloating about how great it is to end someone's life to save them from pain. Laurence Fishburne is very good at adopting a posture that makes it clear he's barely keeping himself from attacking her. In fact, Jack does not move at all, but the threat of violence is definitely in the air.
Hannibal's office. Hannibal helps Jack's wife walk to the chair. She says Jack had to carry her after chemotherapy. And she brought him a coin of some sort, "For helping me understand that death is not a defeat but a cure." She's taken all of her morphine because she didn't want to die at home, where Jack would find her and have to make the call and wait with her body. She says to tell Jack she loves him very much and says goodbye to Dr. Lecter. Her POV shot goes into tunnel vision. We see her feet and hands as she lets go. Hannibal says, "Goodbye, Bella."
But the scene's not over! Hannibal sits back and considers this corpse in his office. He picks up his coin and flips it. We get the inevitable slow-motion shot from above as the coin revolves in the air, which is unfortunately reminiscent of every appearance of the Batman villain Two-Face. He catches the coin, goes to his cabinet and fills a hypodermic needle. He injects her in the neck, reviving her. What a jerk! She rasps, "No." I think it's great that possibly the cruelest thing that Hannibal Lecter has done on the show is when he saved someone from death.
Jack's office is empty. Katz walks past and asks Brian if he's seen him. No, because there was an emergency with his wife. She muses, "So Hannibal's at the hospital too."
Bella wakes up with Jack at her bedside. She puts her hand on his arm and he kisses her hand. Hannibal is watching from the corner, and she asks why. He apologizes and says, "I couldn't honor what you asked of me." He returns the coin. She slaps him, and it clearly costs all her strength. She tells him to get out, and he does.
Hannibal's house. Katz is nosing around in his refrigerator. That's probably fun. I bet he has a lot of fresh, local ingredients. She picks a lock and goes into a room that I guess is the pantry. It's got a meat-slicer and another refrigerator. And this one holds a kidney. She says, "Gotcha." Then she almost knocks a glass over, and the water trickles into a crack in the floor. Just like in The Great Escape, she realizes there's something below this room. She goes down the stairs with flashlight and a gun, rather than leaving the house immediately. She looks around, but we don't really get to see what she's looking at. She eventually turns on a light switch. And when she does, Hannibal's standing behind her. When she finishes being shocked at whatever's in front of her, she turns and sees him. He dives to the side, and she shoots.
The camera is in the dining room. We hear the shots, and dust flies up from the floor as one of the shots presumably hits the ceiling of the basement.
So. Cliffhanger! Is Katz dead? And if she is, will Chilton take the situation seriously? Tune in week, same Hannibal-channel, to find out!
Follow Monty on Twitter at @monty_ashley and read his blog, Mysterious Exhortations.