‘Hannibal’ Is the Worst Ex-Boyfriend Ever in ‘...And the Beast From the Sea’

I’ve stayed quiet about Hannibal since the Red Dragon arc began — this half of the season has been slowly simmering and less surreally theatric than the first half. It’s not that it hasn’t been interesting, but there’s been less meat on its bones to chew over. Not so with “…And the Beast From the Sea,” in which Hannibal Lecter essentially proves why you should never break up with him.

The romantic relationship metaphor has extended into the Red Dragon arc, with Will Graham treating Hannibal like discarded refuse, and the latter acting the part of the jilted and angry ex-lover. Will acts like the selfish ex who only sees Hannibal when he needs something from him, refusing to acknowledge their intimate past and dancing around the giant elephant in Hannibal’s exquisite cell. Hannibal appeals to Will with morbidly poetic overtures, goading him into a reaction — any reaction, to prove he still cares.

Three years later, and Hannibal still isn’t taking this break-up very well. When the Red Dragon calls under the guise of Hannibal’s attorney, the good doctor is all too happy to offer his own twisted form of therapy, but this week he crosses the line from vague sympathy and mischievous manipulation into blatant direction. No longer is Hannibal merely pulling Francis Dolarhyde’s strings from the shadows and subtly influencing his thought — gone is the Dr. Lecter who knows the right things to say without saying them at all. Here is the gleefully vengeful Dr. Lecter who no longer gives a damn.

Will has made it clear that they are no longer going back to anything resembling the way they were, and he’s put up a mental wall between himself and Hannibal, echoed in the institutional glass that separates them. As Francis agonizes over his inner beast and what it might do to Reba, Hannibal dismisses his protege’s affections entirely, directing him to re-focus his energies on feeding the beast — perhaps he can pass it on to someone else, perhaps that someone else is a similarly tortured soul whose ability to empathize with serial killers has had him straddling a moral line. Perhaps that someone is Will Graham.

After poisoning Will and Molly’s dogs and eliminating them from the house, Francis slips into the Graham home to kill Molly and her son — to the exceedingly irrational Francis, it is another transformational act, one that might allow him to transfer the Red Dragon to Will Graham by devastating him to the point of madness. But to Hannibal, it is a scorned ex-lover’s act of revenge, the act of taking away everything Will loves not only as emotional retribution, but to leave Will so completely alone that he might come crawling back to the only twisted comfort he knows.

The home invasion sequence is the most riveting of the Red Dragon episodes so far, as Molly shows us yet another reason why Will is so enamored with her — she’s quick-witted and sensitive, and intuits a presence in the house as Francis barely makes a sound.