Warning: This review contains spoilers!
This is the finale that any show should aim to produce but many are unable to. After only two seasons of the hit show we are given a season send off filled with betrayal, sadness and death as well as no idea which direction a third season will take the show.
The episode begins with focus, as usual, piled onto Will Graham (played once again superbly by Hugh Dancy) as he is simultaneously counselled by both Hannibal Lector and Jack Crawford. Each want his loyalty and each need to trust him when they attempt the murder of the other, yet Graham gives nothing away, keeping the same straight face through both interrogations.
It is at this point where you become uncertain which side Graham is on. Although we realise that The Graham / Lector relationship rekindle has only been a rouse, we have still seen Will's connection with the chesapeake ripper. Although the final outcome is far from certain, one thing that is all but inevitable is that somebody will be dead by the end of the season.
The remainder of the first half hour of the thirteenth episode in this season plays out by showing what both Lector and Crawford have done for Will, Lector planning to start a new life with him by burning his patient records while Crawford tries to justify why he let Graham do what he did. After being forced to take a work absence Jack then goes to Hannibal's alone...
It is now, in the final fifteen minutes of the episode that the events which have been set up throughout the season begin to fall into place. Crawford confronts Lector and the fight which was teased in the first episode of the season plays out again in context, leaving Crawford wounded by a shard of glass to his neck. It is at this point that Alanah Bloom arrives, hoping that she can convince Hannibal to stop. After refusing to leave and attempting to shoot her former lover she is forced to flee to an upstairs room.
It is at this moment when we are reunited with Abigail Hobbs. Swiftly she pushed Bloom through the upstairs window and a beautifully haunting slow motion scene plays out her fall and probably demise. Graham is next to arrive on scene but following the same steps as Bloom he too comes face to face with the presumed dead girl from his past. The distraction allows Hannibal to sneak behind Will and mortally wound him with a stab to the stomach. Bleeding out the last thing Will is forced to watch is Hannibal pulling Abigail close to him before slitting her throat, finishing what was not achieved by the girls father in the very first episode in the show.
