A florilegium of Primavera thoughts
Season 3 Will Graham is in many senses a post-Act V Hamlet, an active passivity born to a large degree of having seen (although in Hamlet the what is less clear ). Will even has a If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not now, yet it will come talk with the ghost of Abigail.
Of course, while Hamlet is the paradigmatic Self-as-point-of-view, Will is defined by his empathy; he's a Hamlet who knows, understands, and loves Claudius. He cannot let him be any more than he cannot have him not be, and the providential (and elegant in William Shakespeare and God's eyes) mutual killing at the end of the Hamlet's play is something that Will, with Hannibal's acquiescence, chooses and enacts as the only possible solution. Neither blindness nor cruelty: that's his design.
And speaking of the haunted, except when partnering with Hannibal, we never see Will as comfortable with another person as when he's in Palermo with the ghost of Abigail profiling the shit out of both God and Hannibal. He's always sassy, but with her he's warm (again, we know he can be, there's all the dogs for example, but rarely with humans, and rarely in a way that's so much about *himself* enjoying the interaction). In another world, one where the butterfly impossibly evaded the falling boot, the ghost of Abigail and him let Hannibal fuck off to Italy to be somebody else's nightmare, and stayed on the other side of the Atlantic as the spookiest, sassiest, most effective pair of crime-fighters in the continent.
There's a very sad degree to which ghost Abigail differs from Abigail alive - she's more open to him, more the way he wanted her to be than what she could or wanted to be - but, at least a bit, Will's many-edged gift makes his imagos of people closer to the real ones than most people's memories (e.g, Jacob Hobbs), so ghost Abigail is at least somewhat herself, if not purely so (and isn't that a commentary on the problematic limits allowed to female agency, even post-freaking-mortem - limits that Abigail fought against her entire life, against the various monsters in her life, against would-be saviors, and, one suspects, against the narrative of Hannibal, the show, itself).
PS: While Hamlet’s theology is basically a mixture of Gordon Ramsay and Simon Cowell, Will talks about God the same way he talks about [the other] insane murderers it has been his lot in life to have to get close to in one way or another. Elsewhen, Will Graham, Theological Profiler and Bona Fide Saint, would’ve have had an spectacular, if short, career.
Of course, while Hamlet is the paradigmatic Self-as-point-of-view, Will is defined by his empathy; he's a Hamlet who knows, understands, and loves Claudius. He cannot let him be any more than he cannot have him not be, and the providential (and elegant in William Shakespeare and God's eyes) mutual killing at the end of the Hamlet's play is something that Will, with Hannibal's acquiescence, chooses and enacts as the only possible solution. Neither blindness nor cruelty: that's his design.
And speaking of the haunted, except when partnering with Hannibal, we never see Will as comfortable with another person as when he's in Palermo with the ghost of Abigail profiling the shit out of both God and Hannibal. He's always sassy, but with her he's warm (again, we know he can be, there's all the dogs for example, but rarely with humans, and rarely in a way that's so much about *himself* enjoying the interaction). In another world, one where the butterfly impossibly evaded the falling boot, the ghost of Abigail and him let Hannibal fuck off to Italy to be somebody else's nightmare, and stayed on the other side of the Atlantic as the spookiest, sassiest, most effective pair of crime-fighters in the continent.
There's a very sad degree to which ghost Abigail differs from Abigail alive - she's more open to him, more the way he wanted her to be than what she could or wanted to be - but, at least a bit, Will's many-edged gift makes his imagos of people closer to the real ones than most people's memories (e.g, Jacob Hobbs), so ghost Abigail is at least somewhat herself, if not purely so (and isn't that a commentary on the problematic limits allowed to female agency, even post-freaking-mortem - limits that Abigail fought against her entire life, against the various monsters in her life, against would-be saviors, and, one suspects, against the narrative of Hannibal, the show, itself).
PS: While Hamlet’s theology is basically a mixture of Gordon Ramsay and Simon Cowell, Will talks about God the same way he talks about [the other] insane murderers it has been his lot in life to have to get close to in one way or another. Elsewhen, Will Graham, Theological Profiler and Bona Fide Saint, would’ve have had an spectacular, if short, career.