PRIMAVERA: Hoo boy. OK, so the course of an Italian menu between antipasto and secondo is supposed to be “primo.” This is often a pasta course, but can also be a risotto, a soup, or some similar hot course. One such dish certainly could be pasta primavera, which is a pasta and vegetable dish that takes its name from the Italian word for spring, which is “primavera.” This dish, however, is not actually Italian – it’s an American dish dating to the 1970s and likely first prepared in Nova Scotia. And more to the point, “primavera” on its own is not actually a food word at all. In fact this episode belongs more to the titling scheme of the second half of the season, as we’ll see in a bit.

HANNIBAL: I let you know me. See me. A rare gift I’ve given you. But you didn’t want it. 

WILL GRAHAM: Didn’t I? 

HANNIBAL: You would deny me my life. 

WILL GRAHAM: Not your life. 

HANNIBAL My freedom, then. You’d take that from me. Confine me to a prison cell. Do you believe you could change me the way I’ve changed you?

WILL GRAHAM: I already have.

HANNIBAL: Fate and circumstance has returned us to the moment when the teacup shatters. I forgive you, Will. Will you forgive me?

The lengthy reprise of “Mizumono” (the episode does not actually get to new material until around six minutes into it) serves two purposes. First, it addresses the very large “we have no money” problem that Hannibal had acquired by effectively cutting 10% of the episode and replacing it with already filmed material. Second, it reframes the end of “Mizumono” from a cliffhanger to the commencement of an action with an inevitable conclusion, a sense tacitly echoed by the quasi-palindrome of Hannibal’s final line. 

“The third season is the best one” is one of those straightforward critical opinions that doesn’t seem to need extra justification. Part of this is the doomed yet noble way that Fuller responded to the increasing pressure of the show’s declining ratings. Sure, Season Three offers the nominally saleable hook of directly adapting two Harris novels, but it also does shit like an archly symbolic shot of a shattering teacup that then reforms into Will Graham’s face, casually expecting that viewers will take this in stride. The ones that remained did. 

WILL GRAHAM: It’s hard to grasp what would’ve happened, could’ve happened. In some other world… did happen. 

ABIGAIL HOBBS: Having a hard enough time dealing with this world. Hope some of the other worlds are easier on me. 

WILL GRAHAM: Everything that can happen happens. Has to end well, and it has to end badly. Has to end every way it can. This is the way it ended for us. 

ABIGAIL HOBBS: We don’t have an ending. He didn’t give us one yet.

Compare Will’s version of the many worlds hypothesis to Blake’s Eternity – a simultaneity existing outside of time in which all things happen at once.…

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ANTIPASTO: And so we move to Italian cuisine for seven episodes. Antipasto is the starter course, distinct from the amuse bouche or sakizuki in that it is a heavier dish, often with cold meats, as befits this unusually dense premiere.

BEDELIA DU MAURIER: You no longer have ethical concerns, Hannibal. You have aesthetical ones.
HANNIBAL: Ethics become aesthetics.

I have suggested in the past that my interest in Hannibal is that Hannibal presents a vision of the perfected man. This exchange is central to that contention. I had made an assertion along the same lines as Bedelia’s assessment many times prior to “Antipasto” airing (although its relevance was improved in shooting, where the line changed from “ethical problems”), routinely making the claim that I had abandoned ethics in favor of aesthetics. That said, Hannibal’s retort here is, to my mind, flatly incorrect, suggesting that aesthetics are a degraded (or ascended) version of ethics.

My contention, on the other hand, is that aesthetics are in fact the base form of philosophy from which all other forms follow. Our sense of aesthetic pleasure is fundamental knowledge from which our wider understanding of the world is structured. Even epistemology extends from aesthetics – what we recognize as true is rarely based on logical analysis (though even if it were, rationality is little more than a sense of harmony and balance) but on a notion of truth that is clearly akin to beauty or sublimity.

What is crucial about aesthetic judgment is what Kant describes as the “subjective universal” quality of them. They are, in empirical fact, individual and private judgments. But they are made with a sense of normativity – a belief that others ought to agree with them. (Kant believed that this only applied to beauty and sublimity, as opposed to the agreeable [judgments of visceral pleasure – “this human leg tastes good”] and the good [ethics], but this is wrong in both directions. Our notions of agreeableness are clearly made with at least some normative force, whereas ethics are not nearly as objectively determined as he’d like to think.) It is from this sense of normativity that the faculty of taste – the idea that aesthetics can be cultivated and refined. Which is where the notion of the perfected man comes in. Hannibal’s ontological force comes mostly from the fact that he has better taste than anyone else, both in literally sensory terms and in the sense of refined desires. It is this, for instance, that his ability to manipulate so effectively comes from: he understands what the most exquisite temptations are. Similarly, it is what his astonishing capacity for improvisation is based on. It’s not merely a hyper-intelligence and cleverness, but an immediate instinct for what the most interesting course of action would be.

All of which raises the question of what Hannibal’s aesthetics actually are. Which, helpfully, is much of what this episode is about. We can set aside the myriad of accurate but glib answers. Yes, Hannibal detests rudeness and values the confirmation of his own superiority (his line about being “happy to sing for his supper” is particularly funny), but these are obvious details that don’t do much to reveal the whole.…

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