Tome-wan

Tome-wan
Season 2, Episode 12
Air date	May 16, 2014
Written by	Chris Brancato Bryan Fuller Scott Nimerfro
Directed by	Michael Rymer
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"Tome-wan" is the twelfth episode of Season 2, and the twenty-fifth produced hour of Hannibal. It originally aired on May 16th, 2014.

Plot

During a therapy session, Will shares a vision of how he would kill Hannibal. Meanwhile, an increasingly impatient Jack brings in a surprise witness to help Will catch Hannibal.

Synopsis

Hannibal has Will try an exercise where the FBI profiler closes his eyes and imagines what he would like to see happen to Hannibal in his war with Mason. Will imagines Lecter, bound in a straitjacket and dangling from a wire over the pigpen in Mason's barn. Will raises a knife and cuts Hannibal's throat. As blood sprays all over both men, they stare into each other's eyes while Hannibal is slowly lowered into the pen to become the pigs' next meal.

Hannibal conducts a therapy session with Mason Verger, who is critiquing Hannibal's sketches as either good or garbage. Mason sits into Hannibal's chair and puts his feet on the desk, much to Hannibal's irritation.

Mason pulls out his father's pocketknife and provokingly hovers it beside Hannibal's neck. Withdrawing the knife, Mason proceeds to sit in an armchair and begins stabbing his knife into the upholstery as he asserts his dominion over Margot and taunts Hannibal for conspiring with her. In a rare moment where he nearly loses his temper, Hannibal closes his eyes to retain his composure.

Margot Verger is still recovering from the car accident and the hysterectomy Mason had performed on her. She is broken, defeated. Mason has taken everything from her and shown her the consequences of trying to break free of him.

Even Jack Crawford isn't sure. In his office, he and Will discuss their plan to bring down Hannibal. Jack is frustrated at how long it is taking, but Will insists the doctor has given him nothing actionable, just "vagaries," and you can't arrest a guy on vague evidence. Still, the FBI might have an ace in the hole. Jack leads Will to an interrogation room. There, pacing around a table, is Dr. Bedelia du Maurier, Hannibal's psychiatrist, who went into hiding because she was convinced the doctor was dangerous. Hannibal has not pursued her (he's been busy) but it's tough to hide from the FBI.

Bedelia makes clear to Will how terrified she is of Hannibal, how she feels she was under his influence when she was treating him. She confesses to having killed a patient, somewhat in self-defense, but mostly it was murder. Hannibal had persuaded her that killing the patient was her only choice. "He'll persuade you to kill someone, and it will be someone you love," she tells Will.

Bedelia also has harsh words for Jack, telling him only Hannibal is in control of what is happening, and if Jack thinks otherwise it is only because Hannibal allows it. But Hannibal doesn't know about Bedelia's return, and he doesn't know that Will is still working with the FBI to catch him. Or at least pretending to. Hannibal feels he has an inkling of how much Will hates him, since he has taken away everything Will bonds with or loves - Alana Bloom, Abigail Hobbs, Jack Crawford, Will's unborn child. Hannibal has gotten to anything that threatened to take Will away from him. "You're fostering co-dependency," Will tells him.

Hannibal is seated at his desk, sketching. His office door swings open. Carlo and a couple of henchmen enter. They tell Hannibal that Mason would like his company. After a brief struggle, Carlo renders Hannibal unconscious with a stun gun, but not before Hannibal stabs a henchman in the leg with a scalpel. It is revealed that the henchman was Carlo's brother, Mateo, was stabbed in the femoral artery, and bleeds to death on the floor.

When Hannibal wakes up, he is bound in a straitjacket, suspended over the pigpen in Mason Verger's barn. Mason brings Will to see him and reveals his plan to lower Hannibal feet-first into the pen and let his pigs eat Hannibal alive. "We'll need a little sauce," Mason says, and hands Will a knife to cut Hannibal, make him bleed a little so the pigs get the scent.

Will stands there. It is his dream come to life. He stares at Hannibal, who stares back. Then Will spins the doctor around and slices the straitjacket, freeing him. Carlo, Mason's lead henchman, hits Will on the head and he passes out to the sound of shouts and thuds.

When Will wakes up, he is all alone. Streaks of blood run along the platform, as if bodies were dragged this way and that. Will raises the rope leading down into the pen and finds Carlo. The bottom half of his body has been consumed by the pigs. He was eaten alive.

Somewhere, Mason wakes up on a couch as Hannibal places a mask over his face and doses him with a highly psychedelic compound that makes him hallucinate. Mason is delirious and euphoric. Hannibal hands him his father's knife and suggests Mason demonstrate on himself how his father used it to test the depth and thickness of a pig's skin.

Will returns home to find one of his dogs on the porch and the screen door open. As Will enters his house, Mason's voice calls out, "I just love your dogs." Will tracks the voice to a chair in a corner, where Mason sits in the darkness, gleefully sawing off pieces of his face and feeding them to the dogs. Will looks around. Hannibal is there.

"He fed his face to my dogs," Will says.

"He broadened their palates, as I broadened yours," Hannibal says.

He and Will debate what to do about Mason: Kill him or save him? Murder or mercy? "He's your patient, you do what's best for him," Will suggests. Hannibal breaks Mason's neck.

Despite the severity of his injuries, Mason has survived. Jack goes to see Mason, who lies in a hospital bed in his bedroom, wearing a halo and neck brace, his lower face hidden behind a mask of bandages. Mason says he had an accident and fell into his pigpen, where his pigs ate his face. They would have eaten more if his sister had not happened to find him.

Jack questions him about the care he received from Hannibal, and whether he's satisfied with it. Mason assures him that Hannibal is an excellent psychiatrist. He only hopes he can "repay" the doctor someday. Jack leaves and Margot appears, telling Mason she plans to take care of him, as he has taken care of her. Margot has the power now.

Elsewhere, Will tells Hannibal what they are doing is unsustainable; they are going to get caught. They need to do something. Jack still suspects Will of having killed Freddie Lounds. They must give Jack what he wants: the Chesapeake Ripper.

"Jack is my friend," Hannibal says. "I suppose he deserves the truth."

Extras

Book to Show

• This episode briefly features Carlo’s associates Matteo Deogracias and Tomasso Falcione from the novel Hannibal. In the novel, Matteo is Carlo’s brother, but this is not specified in the show. The fourth member of the team, Piero Falcione, is absent from the show.
• Hannibal echoes his line from “Apéritif,” again telling Will they are “just alike” (with Will reiterating the line again later). This line originated as a taunt in Red Dragon (“The reason you caught me is that we’re just alike”).
• Hannibal’s line about discourtesy being “unspeakably ugly” comes from The Silence of the Lambs; he says this to Clarice after Miggs flings semen on her.
• The references to eating the rude and “free-range rude” come from Barney recollecting conversations with Lecter in the novel Hannibal.
• The image of Hannibal in a straitjacket calls to mind his incarceration in a mental institution in Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs.
• Hannibal’s bare feet in the pig-feeding sequences are consistent with Mason’s plan in the novel Hannibal to feed the pigs Hannibal’s feet first, then keep him alive overnight with no feet.
• Hannibal and Mason’s dialogue about “God’s choices in inflicting suffering” comes from narration in the novel Hannibal, where it describes Mason’s mindset while plotting Hannibal’s torture and demise.
• Mason quoting the Bible about “one of the things that is hid” comes from the novel Hannibal, when he is discussing whether Clarice and Ardelia Mapp are sexually involved or just roommates.
• Will’s line about how having committed murders has purged Hannibal of lesser rudeness comes from an identical thought Clarice has in The Silence of the Lambs.
• Will’s dialogue when explaining Bedelia’s immunity is almost identical to Clarice when debriefing Mason in the novel Hannibal.
• Bedelia’s line about Hannibal being lost in self-congratulation comes from the novel Hannibal, where it describes Hannibal’s mood when the earrings he gave Clarice catch the firelight. Bedelia saying Hannibal’s whimsy will get him caught is a thought Clarice expresses in the same novel when hunting him.
• As in the novel, Hannibal kills Matteo during a kidnapping attempt, but in the book this occurs in Florence and much later in the timeline, seven years after Lecter’s escape from custody.
• Hannibal cutting an artery near Matteo’s groin is the same way he kills Gnocco in the novel Hannibal. Carlo’s later line that Hannibal “likes to cut low” is similar to a line Rinaldo Pazzi says to Carlo in the book: “He’s fast with his knife. Goes low with it.”
• In the book, Mason attempting to feed Hannibal to his pigs occurs nineteen years after Mason’s disfigurement and paralysis, as the culmination of a long-in-the-planning revenge plot.
• Hannibal’s dialogue about Sardinian kidnappers comes from narration in the novel Hannibal. His taunt about Matteo’s smell is paraphrased (and censored) from Hannibal’s dialogue in the book under similar circumstances. Mason’s response is likewise paraphrased from the novel (in the book, Carlo puts a cattle prod in Hannibal’s eye, and Mason screams via remote monitor while Tomasso and Piero say, “Blind him and there’s no money!”).
• Mason’s squealed line quoting “This Little Piggy” when Hannibal’s shoes are removed comes from the novel. His line about the pigs being shy starting on the toes comes from narration in that book describing Carlo’s experience feeding a Nazi to pigs twenty years earlier.
• The reference to sending Hannibal’s “cojones” to Matteo’s family comes from Mason’s dialogue in the novel Hannibal.
• Mason repeats his “good, funny times” line, which he previously used to describe going to swine fairs with his father in “Kō No Mono,” and which originated from narration in the novel Hannibal.
• As in the book Hannibal, Carlo is devoured by the pigs; however, this also occurs much earlier in the show’s timeline than in the books’. Tomasso is impliedly killed on the show; in the book, Tomasso is the sole (rich) surviving Sard, after Margot honors the Sards’ agreement with the late Mason.
• Hannibal drugging Mason into cutting his face off and feeding it to dogs, and breaking Mason’s neck, comes from backstory Mason tells Clarice in the novel Hannibal. However, the circumstances are changed. In the novel, Hannibal had less provocation: Mason invited Hannibal over to get him “involved in something” so Hannibal will “cut him some slack” on the court-mandated therapy. Mason wears leather and masturbates in front of Hannibal while engaging in autoerotic asphyxiation. Hannibal offers him “amyl nitrite” which is actually Angel Dust, methamphetamines and acid, and breaks Mason’s mirror, suggesting that he peel his face off with a shard. Hannibal lets Mason’s two dogs (whom Mason references in the episode in dialogue taken from the book) out of their cage, and Mason feeds them his face and eats his own nose (a fact Mason does not later remember). Hannibal then breaks Mason’s neck with the noose.
• Will and Hannibal’s dialogue about mercy and murder come from Will’s thoughts in the final paragraphs of Red Dragon, where a hospitalized Will recalls a visit to the Shiloh battle site shortly after he shot Garret Jacob Hobbs.
• In the book Hannibal, Hannibal writes a letter reminding Mason that he ate his own nose and said, “Tastes like chicken!” Hannibal says from the sound, he guesses it had the consistency of a chicken gizzard.
• Hannibal says his line about taste and pity to Clarice in the novel Hannibal, shortly before revealing that the main course is Paul Krendler’s brain.
• Mason and Jack’s dialogue about the eel is taken from dialogue between Mason and Clarice in the novel Hannibal. 
• Mason’s post-mutilation state roughly corresponds to the novel Hannibal, but in the novel Mason has only one eye and no eyelids (requiring a “monocle” device that regularly dampens his remaining eye). The show makes his disfiguration less pronounced, confining it to the lower portion of his face.
• Mason’s line about hoping to get his face back when they pumped the swines’ stomachs calls to mind Mason saying in the book that they got his nose back after pumping the dogs’ stomachs (which Hannibal later disputes).
• In the deleted scene from this episode, Will references an “embalmed beef” scandal which involved several Verger employees being rendered. This conflates two different events which are referenced in the novel Hannibal’s recounting of the Verger family history: the real-life 1898 “embalmed beef” scandal, which involved U.S. troops in Cuba being fed poorly-preserved low-grade meat, a scandal which is said to have “hardly touched” the Verger dynasty; and an incident similar to the one Will describes (which was investigated by author Upton Sinclair, presumably in the early twentieth century). In the book, there is no reference to the deceased employees being whistle-blowers and no hint of foul play, and the lard product is “Durham’s” rather than “Li’l Ivy’s” (the latter is a brand seen in Bryan Fuller’s previous shows Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies). Will and Mason’s subsequent dialogue also comes from this portion of the book, up to the reference to blame not sticking to the Vergers.

Cut Scenes

• The DVD and Blu Ray have a deleted scene of Will and Mason in the barn which picks up directly from the end of “Kō No Mono” and would have opened the episode. The scene makes Will’s manipulation of Mason even more overt, with him saying the same “snare” line he says to Hannibal in the next scene.