Hannibal: 10 Things We Won't Get To See

Hannibal is that rare thing: a television adaptation of a long familiar cinematic property that betters the original. It’s smarter, more stylish and sophisticated than the previous film adaptations of Thomas Harris’ novels, with a singular vision throughout – that of Bryan Fuller, the showrunning executive producer of the series.

For those not in the know, the show follows the introduction of Will Graham, the sensitive, unstable FBI profiler of the Red Dragon novel, to his new shrink Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a renowned forensic psychiatrist and also the Chesapeake Ripper, one of the serial killers that Graham is hunting.

Critically acclaimed from the beginning, Hannibal never reached a large fanbase. Intellectual, elliptical and arty at one and the same time as being the most brutal and gory programme ever broadcast on network television; perhaps it was only ever destined to attract a niche market. Whatever the reason, Hannibal was cancelled by NBC on 22nd of June 2015, three episodes into the third season. At the time of writing, efforts to find a new home for the show on platforms like Amazon or Netflix have met with failure.

Hannibal’s status as the third iteration of Lecter’s story means that much of the central narrative is familiar to viewers, just given a new spin by Fuller and company. If season three is really the swansong for this remarkable project, then what storylines and set pieces will we miss out on? Let’s see… and here be spoilers, so don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Although Hannibal follows the same narrative arc as Thomas Harris’ original novels, it plays fast and loose with some of the stories already familiar to fans of the franchise in order to tell the story the way Fuller wanted it told. One of the changes made was to cast Lara Jean Chorostecki to play the role of Freddy Lounds, the exploitative tabloid reporter of the novel Red Dragon. Every other interpretation had been male, scuzzy and sleazy, whereas Chorostecki, fashionable and elegant, brought a coldly manipulative kind of sleaze to the part far more in keeping with the show’s aesthetic.

When the second half of season three begins to follow the Red Dragon storyline, it’ll actually be the fourth time the story has been told, not the third: Red Dragon has previously been adapted for the big screen as both Michael Mann’s seminal Manhunter, and Brett Ratner’s rather less successful Red Dragon. In all three previous versions, the obnoxious Lounds falls foul of The Tooth Fairy, the serial killer antagonist, and is kidnapped, has his lips bitten off and is set on fire while strapped – or glued – to a wheelchair.

In Fuller’s adaptation, we’ve already seen the iconic image of the flaming chair: in season two, Will Graham fakes the death of ‘Fredricka’ Lounds in order to allay Lecter’s suspicions. It’s unlikely that Fuller is going to repeat the feat in season three when the Red Dragon storylines filter into the narrative. Does that mean a whole new fate for the most irritating hack in popular fiction today?

One theory is that Fuller was saving Freddie for Lecter’s larder. After all, she’s the very definition of the rudeness that Lecter despises the most… perhaps immolation is too good for her. If Lounds isn’t killed by the Tooth Fairy, would we have seen her become one of Hannibal’s inventive, artistic crime scene exhibitions in season four? We’ll never know.