This week’s episode begins with the final scene from last week’s episode: that awkward moment when you visit your ex-murder husband in prison. Will Graham has come to the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane to pick Hannibal’s brain about the best way to catch The Tooth Fairy. After all, Hannibal tried to saw into his brain a few years ago. But I digress.

Before Hannibal turns to greet his visitor he takes a big whiff. “That’s the same atrocious aftershave you wore in court.” This scene is a great reimagining of Thomas Harris’s original Red Dragon text in as well as the movie versions. Hannibal takes another sniff and asks Will if there’s a child in his life now. Digging that knife in even deeper, Hannibal reminds him “I gave you a child, if you recall.” (BabyDaddy Hannibal = canon)

Will looks like the Cowardly Lion about to take off down the Wizard of Oz’s hallway. Finally, Hannibal agrees to take a look at the case files of The Tooth Fairy’s victims in Buffalo and Chicago. “You are family, Will.” Somehow Hannibal looks even more dangerous behind a thick pane of glass then he did when he was free.

Speaking of that child Hannibal tried to give Will, there’s a flashback to “Relevés” where Abigail asks Hannibal how many people he’s killed. This time, it’s extended to show the full extent of what happened: Hannibal took a pint of blood from Abigail in order to spray it across the Hobbs kitchen and convince everyone she was dead. Abigail asks Hannibal how he would have murdered her and matter-of-factly he tells her “I would’ve cut your throat like your father did.”

Every time Abigail reappears it makes my heart ache. “I’ll need to collect some flesh,” Hannibal remarks. “Not a pound. Only a piece.” She suggests that she could live without one of her fingers, but Hannibal laughs and it would be almost fatherly if it weren’t so disturbing. “I couldn’t bear to take even one. They’re so lovely.” After Abigail pushes the button on the blood spray tube, Hannibal declares. “Abigail Hobbs is dead” and she replies, “Long live Abigail Hobbs.”

Back at the BSHCI, Alana asks Will what it was like seeing Hannibal again and Will remarks that he had the absurd notion Hannibal had walked out with him when he left (Red Dragon, p. 86). Alana sympathizes: “I know that feeling.” He asks if she’s still with Margot and she smiles and says, “Yes, we have a baby. A Verger baby. A son.” “Good for Margot.” “Good for me,” she corrects him, “I carried him. He’s my son.” (So was Hannibal referencing Abigail when he said he gave Will a child, or was he referring to Will and Margot’s baby? Regardless, this is a decidedly uncomfortable moment.) Will assures Alana that he’s not letting Hannibal in, but she reminds him that “last time it didn’t end with you.”

Back in Hannibal’s prison cell, he’s shuffling through the file folder and tells Will “this is a very shy boy. I would love to meet him.” Suddenly the scene shifts to Hannibal’s office and the two are looking at crime scene photos. “The shards are set so that he can see himself in Mrs. Jacobi’s eyes,” Will notes. “Can you see yourself in their eyes, Will? Killing them all?” (Your murder husband misses you, Will.) Hannibal keeps trying to make connections between Will and The Tooth Fairy: “Like you, Will, he needs a family to escape what’s inside him.” Will wants to know how he’s choosing them, but Hannibal is not playing that game: “How did you choose yours? A ready-made wife and child to serve your needs… a stepson absolves you of any biological blame. You know better than to breed. Can’t pass on those terrible traits you fear the most.” Three years have not healed Hannibal’s wounded heart.

After visiting the Jacobi house and backyard in their shared empathy palace, Hannibal says the thing that Red Dragon fans have been waiting for: “Have you ever seen blood in the moonlight, Will? It looks quite black.” Sure enough, Will is in the yard, naked and covered in blood, gazing at the full moon.

At the BSHCI, Freddie Lounds is snapping photographs of Will in the parking lot. Inside, Hannibal has been handcuffed to the glass wall of his cell, while Alana saunters behind him. She warns him against planning anything regarding Will but he reminds her that Will came to him. “You’ve got Will dressed up in moral dignity pants,” states Hannibal. (They’re probably not leather assless chaps, then.) Alana isn’t finished: “I’ve been courteous to you and you’ve been receptive to courtesy,” she says, in a delightful inversion of Anthony Hopkins-as-Lecter to Clarice Starling from The Silence Of The Lambs. Then she pulls a Chilton and threatens to take away Hannibal’s books, drawings, and worst of all, toilet. “You’re afraid of indignity.” Hannibal’s bitchface is strong.

Another flashback to Hannibal and a blindfolded Abigail in his office as he hands her an antler-handled knife. “Your father cut your throat out of love,” he says, but is he talking about Garrett Jacob Hobbs or his future self? And yes, he has Clarice Starling’ed her by digging up her father’s corpse. He encourages her to “love him the way he loved you” by slitting his throat, which she does. “Never be ashamed of who you are.”

Then it’s a Francis Dolarhyde flashback as he’s eating at a table full of old people, one of whom casts disapproving looks his way. Now current Dolarhyde is watching his Jacobi Family Murder Home Movies. Then Will is watching Jacobi home movies on an iPad while he’s at their home. Then it’s become the real thing and Will is a silent, smiling observer. Francis is still watching his own movies, but he’s groaning and in obvious pain. Because he’s sprouted a giant, thrashing dragon’s tail, you see.

In the BSU lab, Zeller shows Will, Jack, and Price the Leeds’s strangled cat, found buried in a shoebox in their yard. “Son of a bitch,” snaps Price and Zeller is annoyed that he cares more about the cat than the Leeds children. “I’m not particularly fond of children,” Price assures him. “What do the families have in common?” Jack wonders. “They were happy,” Will says, forlornly.

In the Jacobi backyard, Will discovers a branch cut with a tool and a strange carving in a tree. This is where Dolarhyde watched the family. As he’s leaving he runs into Freddie. “I’m not talking to you,” he says but she argues that they’re “co-conspirators.” He reminds her that she snapped a photo of his temporary colostomy bag in the hospital and she reminds him that she put a large black bar over his junk. “You called us murder husbands,” Will snaps and Fannibals everywhere scream, applaud, and mentally smooch Bryan Fuller. She posits a conspiracy between Alana and Hannibal but Will is trying to get away from her. “‘It takes one to catch one,’ a Federal official told this reporter,” she calls out. “You’re referring to Hannibal Lecter or me?” he shouts. “I’ll let my readers decide.”

Dolarhyde is in his work cafeteria looking at the new Tattle Crime featuring those very same murder husbands. He then goes to the darkroom to ask about infrared movie film and meets Reba (the lovely Rutina Wesley), his coworker. He realizes she’s blind and can’t stop staring at her. He says he wants to film nocturnal animals at the zoo. (UH-HUH.) She cheerfully offers to help him process the film. Later, in his windowless van (of course), Dolarhyde sees Reba at the bus stop and offers her a ride home “for his pleasure.” She accepts and we can’t help but notice the dentistry poster on the bus shelter.

Reba invites Dolarhyde in and gives him a slice of pie, mentioning that she would like to go back to speech and hearing therapy after she leaves Gateway. She notices his self-consciousness then and asks him about it, ensuring him that he speaks very well and she is interested in what he has to say. She likes that she felt no sympathy from him when he realized she was blind and asks if she can touch his face to determine if he’s smiling or frowning. He flinches, then grabs her wrist, and assures her that “I’m smiling.”

Back in his sad hotel room, Will calls Molly and this time she answers. He says he’s lonesome and she says so is she. “I’m feeling randy,” she adds. “Me too.” “Randy’s our new dog,” she laughs and Will starts laughing, too. “Oh hell.” “Randy’s got huge balls,” Molly continues and by this point Will is cracking up and I’m crying because I love Molly so much and this scene is so cute and hilarious at the same time. In Will’s mind they are at home relaxing in bed together and not on the phone. She mentions Will’s criminal mind, but he denies that he has one. “We have a new dog,” he informs her, and we see the Leeds family’s Springer Spaniel across the room, chilling on the carpet. She tells him he’s a very sweet man.

This may be so, but Will still dreams of being covered in blood at the Jacobi crime scene. The old scent is back and so are the nightmares and excessive sweating. In a panic, Will runs to the bathroom and sees his reflection shattering in the mirror. Jack visits Hannibal and some meaty, pun-filled repartee ensues. Hannibal tells Jack he’s “chumming the waters” by using Will to catch The Tooth Fairy and Jack tries to act like he doesn’t give a shit: “You’ll either play along or you wont.” In the subtlest threat of all time, Hannibal tells Jack, “Bella used to say your face was all scars if you knew how to look. There’s always room for a few more. How much room does Will have?” Jack leaves.

Hannibal is still remembering the past, cooking dinner in that scene from “Mizumono.” The phone rings and Will says, “They know.” Hannibal looks over at Abigail who is helping chop vegetables. He tells her to wait upstairs while they wait for Will: “I want you two to be together… now you’re going to hunt with me.” Back in his cell, Hannibal receives a phone call from his attorney, but it’s not his attorney, its Francis Dolarhyde. “I’m delighted you have taken an interest in me,” Dolarhyde hisses, pleased that Hannibal will witness his becoming. “What are you becoming?” asks Hannibal. “The Great Red… Dragon.”

hannibal season 3 NBC poster