Dolce
Bedelia sends Hannibal packing after stitching up his wounds. While Hannibal fully intended to eventually eat Bedelia, she has cut her time with him short and prepares to be visited by Jack and Will. Bedelia drugs herself and pretends to be brainwashed into thinking that she is Lydia Fell and that Hannibal is indeed her husband Dr. Fell. Jack and Will don’t believe it for a second, but Bedelia doesn’t give up her game. While Jack is distracted with Bedelia, Will sneaks off to meet Hannibal, knowing exactly where he’ll be. Their reunion is sweet, but each knows what the other must do if they are ever to be free of each other. They leave together and Will is the first to attempt to kill Hannibal. However, Chiyo is watching from afar with a rifle and shoots Will before he can make his move. Hannibal takes him to a safe place, dresses his wounds, drugs him, and straps him to a chair at the dinner table. Jack also seems to know where to find Hannibal and arrives to see Will tied down. Hannibal disables Jack by slicing his achilles and restrains him at the dinner table as well. The three are finally having dinner together, but the main course is meant to be Will as Hannibal begins to slice open his skull with a bone saw. The next thing we know, Hannibal and Will are hanging upside down in Mason Verger’s slaughter house. How they got there and what happened in the interim is left a mystery for now.
Will and Hannibal
The title of this episode is especially fitting, because “dolce” is Italian for “sweet”, and that’s exactly the sense you get from Will and Hannibal’s reunion – a sense of delicious sweetness. As Will sits down next to Hannibal he breathes a sigh that seems to indicate happiness and comfort after a long journey. Both of them look more at ease and happier than either of them have looked since their parting, and as one watches one feels that neither should ever be without the other. But at the same time, that’s the problem. As Will says, he and Hannibal are starting to blur – as beautifully expressed by their mirror image wounds – and if either of them are to survive they need to separate themselves from each other. This scenario, of course, plays out as Hannibal starts to cut open Will’s skull with a bone saw – and if the film Hannibal is anything to go by, to subsequently feed Will’s brain to himself until there’s nothing left. Hannibal would obviously partake too, so that’s one way of both extracting Will from his life while still making him a part of him forever. This does not happen, however, as something happens to interrupt their little drama and bring them to Mason Verger’s Muskrat Farm. When we last see Will and Hannibal, they are hanging upside down together among the pigs, awaiting slaughter.
Alana and Margot
Apparently Alana and Margot have started a romance, as revealed through a strange and sexy kaleidoscopic sex scene. It is made clear that although Mason is ahead of the FBI in his hunt for Hannibal and has no intention of giving him up to the proper authorities, that Alana has every intention of informing the FBI once Mason has Hannibal in his custody. Margot seems unmoved by this, knowing that Mason’s unlawful capture of Hannibal would send him to prison. However, Margot confides to Alana that she needs to harvest Mason’s sperm before he goes to prison so that she will have a viable heir to the Verger fortune.
Mason Verger
Mason’s caretaker Cordell is busy preparing unusual pieces of pig to simulate to Mason what to expect when eating Hannibal piece by piece. If he is to eat all of Hannibal, he must be prepared to eat fingers and marrow. At the same time, Mason is concerned with securing the Verger lineage, telling Margot that they should find someone to have their baby. Margot, having previously had her uterus removed by the order of Mason in season two, is obviously in no position to have one of her own children – a testament to Mason’s impetuousness and lack of forward thinking. Knowing that Mason’s time might be short, Margot sets to scheming a way to produce an heir.
