‘Hannibal’ Recap: Will Forgives Hannibal In ‘Primavera’

Hannibal “Primavera” opened at the night that Hannibal wielded a knife on both Abigail and Will, leaving them to bleed out on his kitchen floor.

‘Hannibal’ Recap

Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) walks cautiously through the halls of Hannibal’s home with gun raised. There’s shattered glass on the floor. Abigail appears behind him. She tells that she did what he had told her. Turning around, there’s Hannibal (Mads Mikkelsen). “We couldn’t leave without you,” he says before caressing Will’s face with one hand and stabbing him the gut with a knife with the other. “Now that you know me, see me. I gave you a rare gift, but you didn’t want it. You would deny me my life,” Hannibal tells Will. He then asks for Will’s forgiveness and then slices Abigail’s throat. Together, Will and Abigail lie on the floor, bleeding out.

Miraculously Will survives, and awakes in a hospital bed to see Abigail, with her throat bandaged, walking towards him. Abigail tells Will that Hannibal, for some reason, had wanted them both to live. She’s mad at Will for having lied to Hannibal, and tells him that she wants them to find him, but Will doesn’t understand why she’d still go to Hannibal after everything that he’s done.

Graham recalls conversations with Hannibal inside his office in which he talked about going to Florence once it became time for him to flee. Eight months later, Graham and Abigail have arrived in Italy looking for Hannibal. In a chapel, Will muses that Hannibal would love to see the place blown up, and would convince himself that God would love it too. As he finishes the thought, he has a vision of the plaster cracking from the ceiling.

After a body turns up in the chapel, Will is questioned by police officer Rinaldo Pazzi (Fortunato Cerlino), who wants to talk to him about Hannibal. Lecter has already made a name for himself in Florence – the Monster of Florence. Twenty years ago, mutilated bodies displayed as tableaus showed up around the Italian city, positioned like Boticelli paintings. The body in the Palermo chapel is more than likely the Monster of Florence’s work as well. Rinaldo wants to know why the killer has acted again, right when Will arrived.

Recalling his first encounter with Lecter, Rinaldo said that he would visit Boticelli’s “Primavera,” the painting that inspired the tableau. There, he caught a young man, Lecter, recreating “the Primavero in pencil just as he did in flesh.” They tried to find evidence in Lecter’s home, but they couldn’t find any, and another man ended up taking the fall for the murder. When Rinaldo gives Will the file on Lecter’s latest murder, Will taps into the killer’s mind, imagining how he turned a body into a “topiary” that resembles a beating heart. Will sees the body reconfiguring itself – but instead of becoming human, it mutates into part human, part moose.

When Abigail arrives, Will explains Hannibal’s latest piece is meant to show his broken heart at losing them, knowing that they’re there. But, Will qualifies that Hannibal is merely playing with them, rather than showing any true emotion. She still wants to go to them. As he stares at her, he sees the knife wound across her throat, which starts to spurt blood.

While sitting alone on the chapel steps, Will senses that Hannibal isn’t too far off. And he’s right. In an apse, Hannibal listens and watches intently. Will then has another flashback to the night that Hannibal turned his knife on him and Abigail. Abigail did not live. She’d been carried off in a body bag. Her eyes had been sewn shut. Her organs removed. It was only Will who had survived after all. But, as he says aloud in the chapel, all is forgiven. “Hannibal, I forgive you.”