This week’s episode begins with Will Graham in the stream, imaging himself teaching Abigail Hobbs how to fly fish. She asks him what he’s trying to catch, he replies, “the one who caught you.”
Agent Katz visits him in prison, tells him that he was right about the palette killer being part of his own mural. Will tries to convince her that Hannibal is the killer that murdered the muralist killer. Annoyed, she promises to look at the evidence, but not at Hannibal specifically.
In the following scene we follow the path of a bee in flight to the corpse of a man covered in honeycomb, then the opening credits roll.
Back in the jail, Will is meeting with Dr. Chilton. He agrees to let Chilton test him, have complete autonomy over his psychological care. He makes Chilton agree that he is not to discuss anything they talk about with Lecter.
Bella (Jack Crawford’s wife) meets with Hannibal, she is having a session, telling him that she is thinking of taking her own life before she loses herself to cancer. She says the idea makes her feel alive.
Jack with the FBI team are at the bee crime scene. Jimmy tells Crawford that someone intentionally prepared the body for the purpose of making him a hive.
Lecter meets with Beverly Katz, they discuss the muralist’s murderer and Will Graham. She lies to him , saying that Will is no longer claiming he is the murderer.
Chilton prepares Will to be tested, he injects him with sodium anatol, aka truth serum, before conducting the test. Will asks what would be used to induce amnesia, and if Hannibal would have the means. Chilton says that Hannibal admits to using unorthodox tools, so it’s possible. The drug induces a trance like state, in which Will remembers his sessions with Lecter. Like a nightmare he sees the sessions of drawing a clock, himself seizuring, believing that Hannibal knew and took advantage of his encephalitis. Afterwards Chilton tells Lecter that he thinks he was driving Will to kill. That he wouldn’t be the first Psychiatrist to do so.
At the FBI crime lab they reveal the bee victim was missing for 6 months, had no family or money and was sick and likely to die if he was not killed. They also let Jack Crawford know that the man was lobotomized.
In the living room of a Naturopathic Healer, an elderly man receives acupuncture, the healer (played by Amanda Plummer) uses needles to make the man feel nothing. She then lobotomizes him while he is still awake. Following this, a young girl approaches the man from behind in a park, warning him that he shouldn’t look at the sun. The old man turns, his face is covered in welts from bee stings, and his eyes are gone. She screams.
Still alive, the man is examined by Jimmy Price and Brian Zeller. Agent Katz comes in, hearing them say that the bee stings were hiding needle marks. Katz gets an idea from this and goes back to check out the muralist’s body again. She opens up stitches and discovers that his kidney is missing.
Will Graham is delirious in his cell, seeing flashes of his missing memory. Like watching a play from on the stage he sees the night that Abel Gideon was at the table with Lecter, the night he saw Gideon as Garret Jacob Hobbs.
Katz tells Will about the missing kidney. Will tells her to look at the similarities in the muralists body and the Ripper’s victims. He implies that Hannibal is the Chesapeake Ripper, and that he is eating the trophies.
The FBI go to the house of Kathleen Pimms, the healer/bee killer and question her about her former patients, the murdered and the living victim. She, obviously unstable, tells them that her patient’s illnesses were not going their way, but they refused to die with dignity. She says it was much more pleasant and peaceful to die in a meadow with a head full of bees. She hides nothing, she says that she brought him to the field to die. She didn’t kill them, only quieted them and set them up to die. She protected them from hopelessness, and that’s (in her words) beautiful.
Bella is at Hannibal’s office again, stumbling, she needs his help to walk. She gives him a gift for helping her understand that death is not a defeat, but a cure. She has taken all of her morphine, enough to overdose. She went to his office so she would not die at home, to spare Jack a painful goodbye and give herself a peaceful one.
She says goodbye to Dr. Lecter as her life slips away, tears falling from her eyes. Hannibal sits with her body comfortably, examining the gift she gave him, a coin. He flips it, then grabs a vial from a cabinet and injects her with something, it brings her back to life. She cries no. She loses consciousness, and wakes in the hospital with Jack and Hannibal by her side. Hannibal gives her back the coin and says he wants to apologize for not being able to honor what he asked of him. She uses what strength she has to slap him across the face and yells for him to get out.
Beverly Katz is in Lecter’s house, with a flashlight in the dark, she searches his kitchen. Taking meat from the freezer, she thinks she has him, then knocking over a glass of wine and watching it seep through the floor, she decides to search the cellar below. She finds a dungeon that proves him the killer. Hannibal catches her in the act, they are face to face. As he flips the light switch she shoots her gun at him. You see him run, gun shots ring out and the scene fades to black. The end for this week.
This was a great episode overall I think, pulling in the theme of healing from all sides, the psychopath of the week and the personal lives of our characters. Bella’s struggle feeling death is her salvation, Will healing through regaining his memory, and the Naturopathic Healer looking to spare her patients an undignified death. No one plays crazy quite like Amanda Plummer, so she was excellent casting for just about any psycho on the show, save for Hannibal himself. As usual the visual elements were both disturbing and stunning. Can’t wait to see what the Creator’s have for us next week!
