Hannibal EP Bryan Fuller Previews “Secondo” and Weighs in on Who Might Die This Season 

Warning: Spoilers Ahead

Where does Will’s search for Hannibal take him next? To Lecter’s childhood home in Lithuania, where he mets Chiyoh, the former attendant to Hannibal’s aunt. And if you’ve been missing Jack Crawford and wondering what became of him after the Season 2 finale, you’ll start to get some answers.

Now that the series has moved away from a “case of the week” format, we’re getting to know our main characters even better. But has the show completely moved away from the FBI? What does that mean for Laurence Fishburne‘s Jack Crawford?

TV Goodness participated in a press call with Bryan Fuller last month. He weighed in on Jack’s journey in the next few episodes and how the FBI will come into play later this season:

“The challenges were to keep our FBI personnel integrated into the story. The first half of the season it was really about finding ways for this story to be personal to Jack Crawford and how he is functioning outside of the FBI. We tether that to a personal agenda with his connection to Will Graham and his connection to Hannibal Lecter and understand that he is operating outside of the law. His appearance in Italy – I’m speaking ahead — all that will become clear in the fourth episode, so spoilers.

But it was really about doing what we were doing with all of the other characters, which was finding the personal connection for them to the story that exists outside of their occupation. For Jack, since he had gone down this journey and recruited Will Graham and lost Will Graham and found Will Graham again, [He was] worried [he’d] lost him forever. That gave him a very intimate connection to the storyline that we could unpack as opposed to having him in the FBI looking at evidence.

And, of course, in the second half of this season, which is a six-hour Red Dragon miniseries, the FBI has woven in more naturally because that is an active investigation and a return to the crime procedural, but in a way that you don’t often get on network television. We are looking at one case over six episodes as opposed to one case per episode and having a killer of the week, which was a bit of our format in the first two seasons which was a lot of fun and we got to do some really wild, dysmorphic things with the human body and are storytelling.

But what a great relief it is to focus solely on characters as somebody who loves to write character, first and foremost, and has always resisted the crime procedural aspects of the story, which is why [we] dress them up in stories that allowed us to do something visually dynamic that provided a thematic umbrella under which we told a deeper part of Will Graham’s story.

Yet now with the first chapter in Italy it’s all about the characters and them resolving their issues from the first two seasons, moving on into new issues and new complicated relationships.”

Because of the nature of this show and knowing Hannibal like we do, it’s always a possibility that someone we know and like will die. But are any of the main characters in danger of becoming Lecter’s next meal? Fuller explains:

“I think it’s always wise to be concerned about the main characters in the show. If not for the immortality, for their psychological well-being.

One of the fun things in developing this season is that everyone who survived the Red Dinner of the finale of Season 2 has been broken and reborn in a way that has shifted their perspective. So there’s certain things with key characters where we get to see them transformed into new versions of themselves. But yes, you should absolutely be worried for Will Graham always and the steps that he takes to resolve his relationship with Hannibal.

If the first season was the bromance and the second season was the nasty breakup, the third season is really that point in the relationship where you’re looking back at what you’ve lost and still needing a point of closure for that relationship and how drastic that point of closure is will be major part of Will Graham’s arc in this season.”

Edited for space and content.

Want more from Bryan Fuller? Click here for part 1 and here for part 2 of our Q&A.

Hannibal airs Thursdays at 10/9c on NBC.