Season 3

Complete listed story — includes the ending

1. Antipasto

Several months after foiling Will and Jack's sting operation, Hannibal, in Paris, stalks and murders Roman Fell and his wife so he and Du Maurier can assume their identities. While Abel Gideon eats himself, he notes that Hannibal will be cannibalized someday. After being interviewed by the BAU, Du Maurier finds Hannibal showering in her home. Some years earlier, Hannibal finds her with the body of Neal Frank and helps her frame the scene as entirely self-defense. In the present, they travel to Florence, where Hannibal meets Sogliato, a professor who challenges his knowledge of Dante, and Antony Dimmond, an associate of Fell's he met in Paris. He invites Dimmond to a lecture he is giving on Dante to upstage Sogliato, which he attends, noting that Hannibal is using Fell's identity. When Dimmond confronts and tries to blackmail him, Hannibal kills him, mutilates his body to resemble a heart, and leaves it in the Cappella Palatina.

2. Primavera

Having survived his stabbing, Will wakes in the hospital and is visited by Abigail Hobbs, who explains that Hannibal wounded them precisely so they would survive. Will remembers Hannibal describing the chapel as a place of peace for him, and eight months later, he goes with Abigail after Dimmond's body is found. He is met by Florence chief inspector Rinaldo Pazzi, who investigated Hannibal twenty years prior for killings that he modeled after the painting Primavera, for which another man was convicted. As Will uses his ability, he sees the "heart" growing antlers and stalking towards him. Talking with Abigail, he realizes he has been hallucinating her and she died of her injuries. Pazzi realizes Hannibal is watching them and the two chase him into the nearby catacombs. Pazzi leaves after losing Hannibal, but Will stays and says "I forgive you," which Hannibal hears.

3. Secondo

Will travels to Aukštaitija to visits Hannibal's childhood home, which is occupied by Chiyoh, the loyal attendant to his aunt. Will finds a man caged in the cellar, and she explains that he killed and ate Mischa Lecter, though Will notes that she only knows this through Hannibal and could have been deceived. He frees the man, who attacks Chiyoh, forcing her to kill him. She accuses Will of Hannibal-like behavior, but with her only tie to the house dead, she agrees to help him find Hannibal. Before they leave, Will fashions the man's corpse to resemble a dragonfly. Jack, having also survived, comes to Italy to bring Will home and meets Pazzi. At a dinner with Sogliato, Hannibal stabs him in the head with an ice pick, forcing Du Maurier to remove it to end his suffering, killing him. They discuss Mischa, and Du Maurier concludes that Hannibal ate her to "forgive her" for causing him to "betray" himself, and that he will have to "forgive" Will in the same way.

4. Aperitivo

Frederick Chilton, having been exonerated after his framing as the Chesapeake Ripper, meets with Mason Verger, who has put a heavy bounty on Hannibal. He is planning to eat Hannibal alive, and Alana, having also survived, introduces herself as his new therapist and offers to help catch Hannibal. Chilton visits Will when he wakes, who sees Abigail in place of him. Jack visits Will to confirm the narrative that they were both wounded trying to stop Hannibal, and Will confirms that he alerted Hannibal of his impending arrest because he wanted to run away with him. Chilton asks Jack to help him catch Hannibal, but he is more concerned with caring for the increasingly ill Bella Crawford, who dies, though it is left ambiguous if Jack euthanized her. He is horrified to see Hannibal's card offering condolences at her funeral. Will leaves for Italy by boat.

5. Contorno

As Will and Chiyoh travel back to Florence by train, she begins to doubt their alliance and throws him off. Alana informs Mason that she has tracked Hannibal down through Du Maurier, who does his grocery shopping. After tossing his wedding ring and Bella's ashes into a river in Florence, the city where they met, Jack has dinner with Pazzi, who is withholding information from his superiors until he can confirm that Hannibal is behind the recent murders. Pazzi gets in contact with Mason, who offers him $3 million for Hannibal's capture but asks him to get his fingerprints first. Pazzi meets with Hannibal, who, aware of his intentions, subdues him. After confirming with Pazzi that Mason sent him, Hannibal kills him in a manner referencing his ancestor Francesco de' Pazzi by disembowling and hanging him. Jack arrives on the scene and throws Hannibal out the window after a fight, who survives by lowering himself to the ground with Pazzi's corpse.

6. Dolce

Will arrives at the scene and admits to Jack that part of him wants Hannibal to get away. They go to interrogate Du Maurier, who drugs herself to convince herself of her cover as Fell's wife, not slipping up during questioning despite them knowing her true identity. Alana suggests to Mason that he buy out the Florence police force, and he expresses to Margot his desire to conceive a child with her. She has sex with Alana and asks if she knows how to harvest sperm. Will meets Hannibal at a gallery while he looks at Primavera, and is shot by a watching Chiyoh when he tries to stab Hannibal. Hannibal takes Will to a hideout and removes the bullet, while the police press Du Maurier for his location. Jack arrives first and Hannibal restrains him, forcing him to watch as he starts to cut open Will's head. Will and Hannibal are then suddenly shown back in America, held captive at Mason's farm.

7. Digestivo

The Polizia di Stato, hired by Mason, kidnap Hannibal and Will, while Chiyoh saves Jack from a pair of officers and he gives her Mason's location. Mason informs Hannibal of his intent to eat him while wearing Will's severed face, so Hannibal convinces Margot and Alana to free him. He kills Mason's surgeon before he can mutilate Will, while Margot finds that the surrogate mother Mason promised would deliver her a Verger child is a pig carrying a stillborn human baby. While Mason is under anesthesia for the face transplant, Hannibal helps her retrieve his semen through prostate stimulation before taking Will back to his house, being saved from Mason's men by Chiyoh along the way. When Mason wakes, Margot informs him of her plan to impregnate Alana with his sperm before the women drown him in his aquarium, where his Kidako moray swims down his throat. At Will's, Hannibal admits to Chiyoh that he ate but did not kill Mischa. She leaves, and Will tells Hannibal he will let him escape but wants nothing more to do with him. He calls the FBI, only for Hannibal to return and surrender when they arrive.

8. The Great Red Dragon

After seeing the painting The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun, Francis Dolarhyde develops an obsession with it and begins remaking himself via physical transformation. Three years after Hannibal's arrest, Dolarhyde has begun killing happy families each full moon, putting mirror fragments over their eyes and mouths. Chilton, now a true crime novelist, visits Hannibal, incarcerated at the Baltimore State Hospital, for insight. Hannibal writes an American Journal of Psychiatry article correcting many of the errors in Chilton's book about him, while Dolarhyde becomes interested in him after reading the book. With three weeks before the next full moon, Jack visits a retired Will, who agrees to help with the blessing of his wife Molly, though he receives a letter from Hannibal warning him not to get involved. He goes to Dolarhyde's most recent crime scene and uses his ability, while Price and Zeller find a partial fingerprint on a mirror piece and create a mold of Dolarhyde's fanged dentures. Needing assistance, Will reluctantly visits Hannibal.

9. And the Woman Clothed with the Sun

After faking Abigail's death, Hannibal has a session with her where he convinces her to slit the throat of Garret Jacob Hobbs's stolen corpse. While she and Hannibal wait for Jack to arrive at his house, she worries about being caught, but he insists that they have to wait for Will. In the present, Hannibal agrees to help catch Dolarhyde, while Bloom, now the hospital's administrator and married with a son to Margot, warns him to stay in line. Studying the murders, Will deduces that Dolarhyde kills naked so he can "clean" himself in the full moon as he begins having nightmares about killing the families himself. He finds the Han for "red dragon" carved into a tree on a victim's property and runs into Freddie Lounds as he leaves, who photographed him leaving his meeting with Hannibal and wrote an article about their relationship. Dolarhyde reads it and watches film he took of his murder scenes. While developing film, he meets blind Reba McClane, who he drives home as she takes an interest in him. He calls Hannibal from his old office posing as his attorney and informs him that he is becoming "the Great Red Dragon."

10....And the Woman Clothed in Sun

Dolarhyde admits he is obsessed with Hannibal and would like him to "meld with the strength of the Dragon." He takes Reba on a date to a zoo, where she is given the chance to touch a sedated tiger. They later have sex, during which he sees her as the woman from the painting. The next morning, he is horrified to realize that the Dragon wants Reba as its next victim. After observing Du Maurier giving a lecture on her time as Hannibal's victim, Will confronts her on her culpability. They discuss Neal, and Du Maurier recalls that, aggravated by Hannibal's manipulation of him, he swallowed his own tongue during a nervous breakdown and died when she reached down his throat trying to resuscitate him. She tells Will that he still has time to save himself from Hannibal. Having tricked Chilton's secretary into giving him Will's address, Hannibal brings up the Great Red Dragon paintings to him while they analyze Dolarhyde's motives. Dolarhyde sneaks into the Brooklyn Museum to gain access to the original copy of The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun, where he eats it in an attempt to break its hold over him. Will arrives, and Dolarhyde incapacitates him and flees.

11....And the Beast from the Sea

Will informs Jack and Alana that Hannibal is likely talking to Dolarhyde, as he mentioned the paintings. Dolarhyde admits his fear of killing Reba to Hannibal, who gives him the Grahams's address to satiate the Dragon. He takes film of Molly and her son Walter and later watches it with Reba, who is unable to see the contents. He attacks them at night, but they escape despite Molly being shot, and when Will arrives at the hospital, Walter asks him to kill Dolarhyde. Dolarhyde breaks up with Reba to stop himself from hurting her. Having called Hannibal's real attorney, Alana informs Hannibal that she knows he is talking to Dolarhyde. She and Jack monitor their next call, and when Dolarhyde again mentions his fears about Reba, Hannibal informs him that the call is unsafe. Alana strips his cell of ameneties as punishment. Will confronts him and he admits that he sent Dolarhyde after his family, and Will realizes that he is pushing Dolarhyde further into his Dragon personality, who "changes" his victims.

12. The Number of the Beast is 666

Now in therapy with Du Maurier, Will admits he has been seeing himself murdering Molly as the Dragon, while she confirms that Hannibal is in love with him and asks if he feels the same. Will plans to stage an interview with Lounds where he disparages Dolarhyde in hopes of drawing him out, and Chilton is roped in when he meets with Hannibal about his article. In response, Dolarhyde abducts Chilton, but is briefly interrupted by Reba stopping by in an attempt to make amends. After she leaves, he forces Chilton to observe photos of his murders and the paintings, before making him record a video where he promises Dolarhyde's retribution against Will will be harsher. Dolarhyde then bites Chilton's lips off and mails them to Hannibal, one of which he eats, before burning Chilton alive. Will is unnerved by the video, wondering to Du Maurier if he marked Chilton for death by placing his hand on his shoulder in a photo taken for the interview. He visits a severely disfigured Chilton, who mentions seeing Reba. Dolarhyde abducts her and informs her of his crimes as the Dragon.

13. The Wrath of the Lamb

When Reba tries to run, Dolarhyde sets his house on fire and commits suicide to avoid seeing her die, though she manages to escape. After learning Dolarhyde's identity, Will visits Hannibal one last time, stating that he rejected Hannibal at his house knowing that he would turn himself in. Dolarhyde, having faked his death by killing another man, attacks Will, who suggests that he "change" Hannibal for manipulating them both. Will presents a plan to Jack and Alana to stage Hannibal's escape to lure out Dolarhyde, though he tells a disgusted Du Maurier that he would allow Hannibal to escape if necessary. Hannibal agrees to the plan after Will asks him personally, only for Dolarhyde to kill his guards during the fake escape, allowing Hannibal to take Will to the cliffside house he kept Abigail and Miriam Lass in. As Will accepts that he may die helping Hannibal, Dolarhyde attacks and wounds them both, and they kill him together in a brutal struggle. Hannibal tells Will that "this is all I ever wanted for you" and Will admits that "it's beautiful" before embracing him and pulling them off a cliff, leaving their fates unknown. A post-credits scene shows Du Maurier, her leg amputated and cooked, waiting apprehensively at a table set for three.