It’s been a long, long time since a path to Hannibal Lecter’s capture was clear. The rules of narrative, to say nothing of Thomas Harris’s source material, dictate that Will Graham would be the man to take the Chesapeake Ripper down. But he and Hannibal had become so emotionally intertwined that it made the profiler’s triumph over the killer increasingly unlikely, at least in terms of it resembling a good old-fashioned arrest.

At the end of Season Two, as we learned for certain a few episodes ago, Will had a chance to stop Hannibal but instead hoped to join him on the run. More recently, he was on the verge of stabbing the doctor to death in the the streets of Florence before fate, in the form of one of Chiyoh’s deus-ex-sniper-rifle bullets, intervened. Either way, Graham was morally compromised in a way that would give any defeat of Lecter a bitter aftertaste (no pun intended). As Will himself puts it during their final conversation, “When it comes to you and me, there can be no decisive victory.”

Turns out he’s wrong about that. Brain Hannibal with the butt of your handgun, plumb the depths of his backfat with a knife, brand him with red-hot iron, truss him up in a pigpen while preparing to eat him alive, and he makes nary a peep. Hurt his feelings, though? Then he’ll voluntarily give up his entire criminal career, so long as it’s Will doing the hurting. “I miss my dogs,” Graham says to his nemesis as they sit together in his cozy country house for yet another heart-to-heart chat. But then he sticks the knife in: “I’m not gonna missyou. I’m not going to find you. I’m not going to look for you. I don’t want know where you are or what you do. I don’t want to think about you anymore.”

Smug until the last, Hannibal tries to tell Will what he’s really feeling: “You delight in wickedness, and then berate yourself for the delight.” That’s the final strike. “You delight,” Will replies. “I tolerate. I don’t have your appetite.” Then comes the kiss-off: “Goodbye, Hannibal.” No more cat and mouse, and no more folie à deux either — Will’s done with the devil for good.

Earlier in the episode, Hannibal told Alana that she never could have understood him. Now it’s his turn to experience that kind of ignorance. Will’s superhuman empathy, the quality that enables him to understand Hannibal through and through, is the exact quality that renders him ultimately impenetrable to Hannibal in turn. Simply knowing that the closest thing he’s ever had to a friend has thoroughly rejected him, even as an enemy, for reasons he will never be fully capable of understanding, is enough to make Lecter give up, if only to ensure their continued connection. Will Graham caught Hannibal Lecter by letting him go.

I reviewed last week’s Hannibal, perhaps the most insane thing ever to air on network television, for Decider. You really need to see the gifs.

Let’s state it for the record: If Hannibal really is over, it’s the most upsetting cancellation since Deadwood, hands down. Both series are, or were, ruthless and uncompromising in articulating the poetically violent visions of their creators through inimitable dialogue and sumptuous cinematography. They’re gifts we’ve been lucky to have, even if only for three seasons apiece. That said, only one involved human bodies prepared like Peking duck, attempted incestuous insemination, beautiful women having kaleidoscope sex, and bone saws slicing through living human skulls. C’mon, NBC, Netflix, and Amazon! Hannibal has it all! And “Dolce,” tonight’s episode, was a veritable garden of unearthly delights — funny, sexy, suspenseful, repulsive, and, as always, absolutely gorgeous.

Hannibal is goddamn great. I reviewed this week’s episode for Decider.

“Contorno,” last night’s action-packed, bowel-unpacked episode ofHannibal, took visceral (no pun intended) pleasure in kicking the living shit out of Hannibal Lecter. Physical opponents — that psychopathic mental-hospital orderly, Mason Verger and his goons, and of course Jack himself — have gotten the drop on the Doctor in the past, but in each case the action was elegant and elevating, whether Hannibal was being trussed up for the perfect death or engaging in an expertly choreographed hand-to-hand battle with a worthy opponent. None of that this time. This was just a decent guy who’s getting too old for this shit handing an asshole’s ass to him. And man, it felt good, even if he got away in the end. The split from the show’s usual operatic setpiece-violence in favor of this down-and-dirty fight was striking, and provided a surprising and welcome break from the claustrophobic, symbolism-laden slaughter.

And maybe it’s the latent class warrior in me — okay, not so latent, the expropriation of the wealthy really can’t begin fast enough — but it seems as if the show relied on a certain slobs-vs.-snobs schadenfreude to fuel the climactic town-vs.-gown beatdown. After all Hannibal’s posturing, his expensive clothes and fine wine and gourmet meals and high culture, he was for all intents and purposes beaten in a bar fight by a working stiff. Hannibal revels in the perversity of immersing us in this aristocratic killer’s mind and world, but a scene like this shows it’s still wisely attuned to popular desire to watch the effete elite taken down a peg. (The use of Rossini’s “The Thieving Magpie” as the soundtrack for this scene smartly recalls its accompaniment of Alex DeLarge’s anti-aristo rampages in A Clockwork Orange.)

He takes a beating and keeps on eating: I reviewed this week’s Hannibal for Decider.

It will be left to scholars to determine whether opening “Apertivo,” this week’s ep, with a slow-motion closeup of a bullet entering a man’s face and exiting through the back of his head in a geyser of viscera influenced NBC’s decision to cancel the series days before it aired. But the fact remains: Hannibal is, without exaggeration, one of the most visually and narratively audacious shows in the entire history of television. It’s to the Peacock Network’s credit that they let it get away with murder for as long as they did.

I reviewed this week’s astonishing Hannibal for Decider.

What ultimately keeps “Secondo” from sinking under the weight of its contradictions is the strength of the statements its central characters make about who, and how, they are. Even in a series as quotable as this one, last night was a real power hour. Hannibal on what happened to him as a kid that made him the way he is: “Nothing happened to me. I happened.” Will on why he wants to find Hannibal, a mission that obviously means more to him than just an attempt to catch a killer: “I’ve never known myself as well as I know myself when I’m with him.” Bedelia on the bond between these two mad geniuses: “Forgiveness is too great and difficult for one person. It requires two, the betrayer and the betrayed….Betrayal and forgiveness are best seen as something akin to falling in love.”

Indeed, Will and Hannibal speak about each other with a seriousness and intensity that, while neither romantic nor even sexual, is undoubtedly erotic, even to those of us not given for making lovey-dovey Tumblr gif sets of every pair of fictional characters we enjoy. Which gives his concluding declaration about what it will take for him to forgive Will for deceiving him — the same way he “forgave” his sister for awakening his urges — the thrill of the perverse as well as the horrific: “I have to eat him.” Well, you know what they say: You are what you eat.

I reviewed last night’s Hannibal — shakier than usual, sensuous as ever — for Decider.

Il Mostro’s crimes were crazy, albeit not quite as crazy as NBC censors blurring out nudity in Botticelli’s paintings while letting people be graphically mutilated onscreen. But they also show that even this criminal supergenius had a period where, like any artist, he learned by copying from the best before moving on to make his own masterpieces. Case in point: the gigantic heart Hannibal fashioned out of the twisted limbless corpse of stupid sexy Antony Dimmond, the smarmy scholar who saw through Lecter’s false identity last week. Though impressive enough on its own, like all great art its full potential is only unlocked when it’s put in front of its intended audience, Will Graham. He envisions its transformation into a repulsive antlered avatar of Hannibal, in a sequence that’s part Hellraiser’s rebirth scene, part Beetlejuice’s sculpture garden, and part Salvador Dalí’s Soft Construction with Boiled Beans.

I reviewed this week’s typically marvelous episode of Hannibal for Decider.

Hannibal captures the strange, very adult phenomenon inherent in relationships between you and your coworkers or you and your therapist: Within these fixed confines you become truly important to one another, yet you only ever see each other’s forward-facing parts. Hannibal’s psychosis, Will’s unclassifiable disorder, Dr. DuMaurier’s years-long manipulation by Dr. Lecter — these factors make them unknowable, but stand in for the mysteries we all choose to leave unexplored in the people we work with, because separation is safer than immersion.

This is the one-two punch that makes Hannibal haunting. At the same time its story pokes and prods at our most intimate and complex connections with one another — often through the work of its protagonists, profilers and psychiatrists for whom this is literally their vocation — its grand guignol imagery loosens your moorings and sets you adrift in the realm of pure nightmare. The human element forces you to lower your guard; when the wall is down, the horror is poured into your brain like a black liquid, pooling in the creases of your cerebellum till it’s impossible to get clean again. Once you let this devil in, he’s there to stay.

I’m covering Hannibal for Decider this season! Here’s my review of the season premiere.

This is a show that leaves you thinking that maybe the world is a little bit worse for its presence — a mark of all great horror. And whether you’re a fan of the genre or a practitioner, you’ve got to be like Will Graham voluntarily connecting with the worst humanity has to offer. You must be willing to turn to the work and say “just fuck me up.” In this series, that thrillingly self-destructive impulse is invited — and then rewarded a hundredfold with some of the most gorgeous visuals of murder and cooking you’ve ever seen. When you binge on Hannibal, Hannibal binges back. Bon appétit.

I wrote about the visual and narrative brilliance of Hannibal, the most soul-deep sinister show on TV, for Rolling Stone.