Okay I don’t know how coherently I can express this but there’s a theme I keep noticing in Hannibal as really quite central but I never see anyone talk about it.
There’s something fascinating going on in regards to free will vs fate and nature. It’s a constantly repeating pattern-characters will desperately try to control the world around them and time and time again it is proved futile. Hannibal smashes his teacups to try and put them back together but they won’t. All his schemes and machinations are nothing in the face of the greater machinations of fate that never intended it to be put back together.
Bella, attempting to have control over whether she lives or dies, ultimately having the decision made for her in the flip of a coin. Jack, desperately trying to keep her alive, ultimately being the one to take life from her. The universe does not let her choose when to die or Jack choose to keep her alive.
Will, desperately trying to control his nature and choose who he is and what he wants ultimately being unable to repress or run from his real desires. No matter how many families he makes for himself, roles he tries to play, physical walls he puts between them, none of it is comparable to the pull of the universe, keeping them in each others orbit.
Abigail, saved from death, just to die the same way on a kitchen floor, because fate will not be cheated and she was always meant to die that way, just living on borrowed time.
Chiyoh, spending a lifetime trying to make a conscious choice not to kill her charge, only to be forced into it in self defence anyways.
Hannibal, desperately trying to sever himself from the vulnerability and love he feels, only after everything to accept that he is vulnerable and he is irrevocably changed and there isn’t anything he can do to control it. Hannibal’s comments on how we don’t control forgiveness or with whom we fall in love. “Love. Either he pays you a visit or he doesn’t”.
There’s something so fitting to all of that, that ultimately will doesn’t choose to run away with him in a conscious easy guaranteed way or try to kill him in a way that assures he dies. Instead, there is acceptance that there is to be no fighting the strings of fate. A leap of faith-if they live, so be it, there is no more fighting it, they are conjoined. If they die, so be it, then that is what is meant to be. The two most rigidly repressed control freak characters- will for his repression of nature and passion, hannibal for his repression of weakness and the vulnerability of his life and heart in someone else’s hands, accept the total loss of control and the futility of trying to have it. “If everything that can happens, happens, then you can never really do the wrong thing. You’re just doing what you’re supposed to do.”
