‘Hannibal’ Premiere Recap: The Cannibal Doctor Is A New Man In Florence

Hannibal‘s season three premiere “Antipasto” beings in Paris with the Eiffel Tower’s beacon shining down on the city while a man – clad head-to-toe in black – rides his motorcycle along the rain-slicked streets. The man is Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

Hannibal Premiere Recap

The surreal scene continues with Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen), still in his leather riding jacket, entering a party and grabbing a glass of champagne. His former student Anthony Dimmond (Tom Wisdom) walks over to Hannibal and starts to gossip about the host, a pseudo-intellectual who writes sub-par books. And then, Hannibal delivers one of the episode’s first double-entendre, talking about “dissecting” the author’s work. Before long, he has dissected the author’s person and has made a gourmet meal out of him.

Then, in a flashback, “Antipasto” shows Abel Gideon (Eddie Izzard) in his last days, as Hannibal continues to feed off him. He is down to one arm and has no legs left. He’s feeding snails on his arms, that he plans to eat and is preening Gideon with oysters and acorns. Gideon, getting under Hannibal’s skin, hopes for the day that it’s him who is eaten.

In the present, Hannibal and Dr. Bedelia Du Maurier (Gillian Anderson) are waltzing at a black tie affair in Florence, where they now call home. He is now going by the name of Dr. Fell, and is making moves to become the curator of a renowned library. When a bearded man on the board questions his command of Dante, he recites a passage from memory for the whole party to hear.  “I’m happy to sing for my supper,” Hannibal says when challenged to give a lecture on the Italian poet.

Alone with Bedelia, Hannibal admits that he’s hardly killed anybody since they’ve taken residence in Florence, save the real Dr. Fell, the former curator of the library. Bedelia wonders if Hannibal’s ethical code has been entirely supplanted by his need for aesthetics.

In another flashback, Bedelia and Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne) talk in an interrogation room before she heads back to her home. In the shower, she finds Hannibal. She waits or him on the bed, red wine in one hand and a loaded gun in the other. “What have you done Hannibal?” she asks him, to which he replies that he took of his person suit. She explains why she could no longer serve as his therapist, and apologizes for not finding him a new one. She’s optimistic that he won’t kill her.

Back in Florence, Hannibal encounters Dimmond. Since Dimmond knew him by a different name than the one he’s assumed in Florence, Hannibal invites him to dinner – but doesn’t kill him, surprising Bedelia. Dimmond realizes that Hannibal has assumed Fell’s identity when he attends his public dissertation on Dante. Instead of being alarmed, Dimmond is intensely curious about how Hannibal pulled it off; he wants to know more about the evil in him.

Hannibal, instead of being flattered into nixing his plan to kill and eat Dimmond, is all the more certain that he must. He brings him back to his Florence flat that he shares with Bedelia, who was just about to make her escape. Before she can go, Hannibal has bashed in Dimmond’s head with a bust, and then snaps his neck. Bedalia, who had killed one of her own patients back at home by jamming her arm down his throat in ‘self defense”, admits it was much as she’d imagined in her head. “What have you gotten yourself into, Bedelia?” asks Hannibal, who’d helped her get out of that first murder.