'Hannibal' Finale Review: Hannibal's Mic Drop

It’s all over except the mopping up and doing the dishes: Hannibal went out on Saturday night locked in a bloody embrace with its fans, offering one final gourmet meal of well-done nuttiness.

Warning: Spoilers for the series finale of Hannibal ahead.

Series creator Bryan Fuller fashioned what I assume the show’s most ardent fans found a highly-satisfying conclusion to the canceled series: a three-way battle between Will Graham, Hannibal Lecter, and Francis Dolarhyde, with a final shot of Bedelia Du Maurier to send Hannibalites off to bed with sweet dreams.

My colleague Dave Nemetz gives you all the plot particulars here, vividly. I did think it was delightfully out of character to have Lecter make reference to “a mic drop — you dropped the mic, Will.” Evidently, Hannibal’s prison reading has included moldy issues of The Source.

Related: ‘Hannibal’ Ends With Lots of Blood — and the Ultimate Cliffhanger

The culminating Graham-Lecter-Dolarhyde bloodletting was beautifully choreographed and shot, and the series was true to its mission from the very start: to be a serial-killer saga that was more interested in the poetics of violence than in giving viewers sadistic kicks.

To be sure, gallons of spouting blood was spilled before Dolarhyde was put out of his misery (for he was indeed a miserable cur) and before Will and Hannibal did a last-embrace swan dive into rocky waters, serenaded by Siouxsie Sioux at her most Shirley Bassey-ish on the soundtrack.

All credit to Fuller for getting away with putting on, for three seasons, the most decadent hour of network television since the final Charlie Sheen episodes of Two and a Half Men. In general, Hannibal was not my kind of meringue. As I’ve written before, I found the show generally overwrought, verging on camp whenever it wasn’t downright campy. Fuller’s work here was accomplished but not to my taste: a rich confection that Hannibal shares with the ornate horror fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, the pulp of Sax Rohmer’s Dr. Fu Manchu books, and the fine moral rot described in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s great 1884 novel of opulent dissolution, Against Nature.

Yet, there are things about watching Hannibal I will miss. Certainly Hugh Dancy gave a wonderfully neurasthenic performance as Will Graham, Mads Mikkelsen seemed to be having a great time swiveling his hips and his lips as Hannibal, and Gillian Anderson was a remarkable hoot as Bedelia. I’ll also miss the quietness of Hannibal, the way it could lull a viewer into a comfy doze — indeed, the most shocking thing about watching any hour of Hannibal wasn’t the violence in the show itself, but rather the startling increase in volume when the show broke for a commercial.

The finale was one of the best episodes of Hannibal ever, because it had more action and fewer maundering speeches about the nature of death, art, and how to cook a nice chunk of meat. Yes, I suppose it’s some sort of cultural crime that Hannibal should die while Criminal Minds continues to live. (If you call that livin’.) On the other hand, Hannibal went out true to itself: self-serious to the point of knowing silliness, serenely sure of itself.