Red Dragon Committed The Unsolved Killings In Hannibal’s Pilot Episode
The first killings Will investigated in Hannibal’s pilot go unsolved, but they were actually committed by Red Dragon, AKA Francis Dolarhyde.
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The unsolved killings seen in Hannibal’s pilot episode were really committed by Red Dragon, AKA Francis Dolarhyde. The Hannibal movie franchise was in poor shape by the time the NBC series arrived. Anthony Hopkins had exited the role following 2002’s Red Dragon, while the Hanning Rising prequel received a decidedly lukewarm response. While plenty of classic movies have been turned into TV shows, NBC’s Hannibal is widely considered one of the very best.
The series focuses on the relationship between the title psychiatrist/secret serial killer and Will Graham, a brilliant but troubled profiler with the FBI. The show was both a fascinating psychological thriller and one that featured any number of gory horror setpieces. Hannibal gathered a rabid cult following during its run though it was never a huge ratings winner, and it was cancelled following its third season in 2015.
The second half of Hannibal’s third season featured a new take on Red Dragon, the 1981 novel that introduced the Hannibal character. It was first filmed as thriller Manhunter in 1986, which featured Brian Cox as Hannibal and William Petersen as Will before a second film arrived in 2002. Hannibal season 3 introduced the “Great Red Dragon,” with Francis Dolarhyde (Richard Armitage) being a disturbed killer with a split personality who murders entire families on a lunar cycle. It turns out, he was secretly introduced during Hannibal’s first episode “Apéritif.”
The first scene of Hannibal’s “Apéritif” sees Will work a crime scene where an unknown killer murdered a husband and wife named the Marlows, with the sequence vividly depicting Graham’s mental process. He also visualized the murders themselves in graphic detail. These killings remain unsolved on the show, but a 2013 tweet by showrunner Bryan Fuller revealed the killings were actually the first murders committed by Dolarhyde.
The original intention was to reveal this fact whenever Hannibal finally got around to introducing the Dragon, but Fuller admitted during a Den Of Geek interview it became too convoluted to re-introduce that thread. “That was always the original intention and then we found in breaking the story that it became clumsy to try to go back and re-weave something in that started the season, and it became unwieldy so we ended up not weaving that through in the interest in telling a more complicated and richer Francis Dolarhyde story instead.”
The canon of Dolarhyde committing those murders in “Apéritif” can be called into question since Hannibal never tied off that loose end. That said, there’s one big indicator it really was the “Red Dragon” killer in an embryonic stage. The killer used – and Will visualized himself with – a Beretta 92FS Inox pistol, which is the main weapon Dolarhyde used throughout Hannibal’s third season, which feels like an intentional link made by the showrunners.
Link Source : https://screenrant.com/hannibal-show-red-dragon-pilot-first-killings/