Title: Will Graham and violence
Fandom: Hannibal (TV)
Length: 1770 words
Content notes: Discussion of murder and violence as seen on the show.
Author notes: Will isn't likely to appear on any 'villain' character lists, but he does have a villain/fake villain arc as part of season two. One scene in particular seems to bother a lot of fans.
Summary: Showing Will's attack on Freddie Lounds wasn't audience manipulation, but almost everything else we see of him might be.


I started a re-watch of Hannibal a little while ago for the specific purpose of counting how many murders/acts of violence we see Will commit compared to Hannibal. Given Will's imaginative reconstructions it's not hard to guess that Will comes out ahead, but just the act of counting brought it home to me how much violence we see from Will, even if most of it is not committed by him in the real world, or is part of his job. For example, in season one we see him on screen engaged in killing or other acts of violence eighteen times, arguably more as I'm leaving some out where we only see the aftermath or the non-violent parts of a death. We see Hannibal (with the second highest count) commit only five on screen during that season.

This is important because it means that from the very start of the show we are used to seeing Will's physical presence on screen committing violence. We quickly get accustomed to categorising it as either justice or reconstruction. In both cases we are also used to viewing it as something that has a terrible effect on him, though this is a questionable assumption since with hindsight we can see that he's already being affected by the encephalitis.

In season two the violence is more often genuinely in Will's hands (or more closely related to him) when we see it. This leads up to one incident in particular – Will chasing down Freddie Lounds before he and Jack fake her death - that I've noticed a lot of people find out of place, or needlessly manipulative of the audience.

I can see their point: in real life, a normal, sane person would simply have contacted Freddie Lounds and worked out a plan with her to fake her death. If anyone could fool Hannibal by faking the right kind of evidence, Will could. Instead, the show seems to be trying to mislead the audience into thinking Will has genuinely turned to the dark side by showing him luring her to his house and terrorising her to the point of breaking her car window and dragging her away, presumably to kill her.

I don't think this is why we're seeing it.

At the start of Su-zakana (2.08), we see Will and Jack having a conversation while fishing on the ice that clearly indicates they are plotting to trap Hannibal. Will is going to lure him in by giving him what he wants (Will's darker side) and Jack will put him away once they have the proof they need. If the audience is paying attention, they haven't forgotten this by the time they reach the end of Naka-choko (2.10) and Freddie's supposed death. If the show was just trying to pull a cheap manipulation here, we wouldn't have had that scene – a lesser show would have shown us a flashback later.

So why did we have to see it? Because it's what Will did.

A sane and sensible character would certainly have gone about this a different way. Will may or may not have counted as sane and sensible at the start of the series, but at this point he's nowhere near. Let's look at Will's actions in season two before the incident with Freddie as they relate to violence or killing:

- Will asks someone else to kill Hannibal for him.
- He points a gun at Hannibal, but doesn't kill him.
- He pulls the trigger on Ingram, Hannibal stops him.
- He kills Tier in self-defence, and performs horrifying mutilations on the body.

The mutilation of Randall Tier in particular must have been a huge step in this escalation. Think about what he had to do with Tier's body. Don't just look at the flesh he put on the creature's bones and wonder at how this show can make something look gruesome and scarily beautiful at the same time. Don't focus on the multi-layered conversation going on between Jack, Will and Hannibal here (though it's hard not to, it's masterfully done). Think about how he must have had to remove the bones from Randall's limbs, wrap the flesh around the new skeleton. How much blood and mess there must have been, how long it must have taken. Think about what it would do to you to spend a whole night up to your elbows in blood and guts and then go and look at it like nothing had happened, playing this dangerous game the whole time.

He might have killed Tier in self-defence, and he might be playing a part in his plan to trap Hannibal, but I don't think many people could or would go this far to do so. We are then distracted from thinking about this for too long by Freddie's supposed death. We know for sure a few episodes later that she isn't really dead, and Will didn't really take body parts to cook up with Hannibal for the meal we see them share. We can reasonably assume that it was some of Randall Tier they ate, so Will still took human flesh for them to eat, but at least his attack on Freddie was all a big act, right?

Well, he didn't kill her. We did see him menace her, chase her, break her car window and drag her out of it, of course. After he pulled the trigger on Ingram and killed Randall Tier in recent episodes, did we really need so much to fool us? It might even have been preferable to end on a similar reveal of Will to that of Hannibal when he found Beverly Katz in his house. We would have drawn the same conclusion (that killing her was implied, whether we believed it or not) that we did from seeing the chase, and it would have been a nice parallel.

I think the truth of it is that Will enjoyed it. He could have just talked to her, even when she'd been poking about in his freezer, but he didn't try too hard, and his demeanour was sinister and creepy. He opted to scare the living daylights out of her, chase her down and terrorise her. The whole scene is very reminiscent of Will's reconstructions of murders, which also helps us to downplay this, because as I mentioned at the start, we've seen him play this role many times before. The use (or not) of violence is something used throughout the show to manipulate our perceptions of Will and Hannibal.

But Will has just been through an experience that has changed him. If Hannibal is correct when he tells Will that other major experiences change how he thinks, then the mutilation of Randall Tier has to be a contender too. Tier is also an engineer, a reconstructor of the dead (skeletons of extinct animals), and a former patient of Hannibal. By the time we have all of this information, his role as a mirror for Will is established.

Tier built a monster that he wears over his body. He engineered a working trap with deadly teeth for his creature's mouth, and he controls this thing that is much more powerful than a human, much more dangerous. He believes this is his true self; it reflects what he believes he is inside. We know from his conversation with Hannibal that he feared people knowing this about him, crying when he first arrived at Hannibal's office. In the end, his flesh is placed on the outside of a skeleton of the same type of creature, so that his 'outside finally matches his inside'.

We know that Will is conspiring with Jack to set a trap for Hannibal. He's supposed to pretend to give in to the urges Hannibal says are inside him, get close to him, and get him to incriminate himself or commit one of his crimes with Will as a witness.

So Randall Tier built a fake monster - one that is the same as the creatures he reconstructs during his day job - to hide himself in. Rather than hiding in it, he's really revealing what he believes is his true self. He eventually ends up with his flesh covering the skeleton of one of his reconstructions: the monster has moved from an external man-made fake construct to being internalised and real.

By the end of Naka-choko, so has Will's.

He may or may not believe that the killer Hannibal sees in him is his 'true' self, but he's certainly aware of it and he's afraid it's true. Will always struggles to be one thing or another: when any question is asked of or about him he's usually an uneasy combination of both or all possible answers. This is never more true than in these episodes. The younger Randall Tier we can picture from his time as Hannibal's patient also brings Will's early sessions with Hannibal to mind, particularly his fear, how he trembled as he admitted how it felt to kill Hobbs.

In the episode following the attack on Freddie Lounds, we see Will's 'rebirth' from the stag (2.11, Kō-no-mono), signifying the changes in him. If it was purely the mutilation of Randall Tier that led to this, we would have seen it then, but although that was a huge event, it's still one that Will could justify to himself as necessary for the plan to trap Hannibal. The way he chased down Freddie, however, was purely for his own enjoyment. I don't think he planned it, although Freddie snooping around wouldn't be hard to predict, so a case could be made for it, but he went with his instincts when he caught her. He terrorised her instead of just asking her to co-operate, and then he voluntarily took human flesh to consume with Hannibal. Both of those things, as far as we know, are new to him. That's why we see the stag birth happen after the attack on Freddie, even though he didn't actually kill her.

So the attack on Freddie that we see isn't a manipulation of the audience. It might be the least manipulative the show ever is of how we perceive Will, because it's part of the real Will after his recent experiences, after the turning point with the mutilation of Randall Tier. Freddie sees the external monster (Randall's construction and Will's sinister approach and words to her) and the internal one (Randall's jawbone in the freezer, Will's behaviour in this scene) and so do we.

Far from trying to fool the audience by apparently leaving out the important part of the encounter with Freddie (whether at that point the audience thinks that is her actual death or not), the part we are shown – the aggressive and violent way Will goes about it – is really the most important part of all.