Starting season 2 again, and it's so interesting to really analyze Hannibal once you realize how deeply and thoroughly he plans everything, you can see the exact moments when he decides to alter his plans or switch into different stages of them. He had plans to frame Will in the 1st season but wavered as they grew closer. In episode 12, once Will started to connect the Copycat with the deaths of Dr. Sutcliffe, Georgia Madchen and 'Abigail', Jack wrote him off. Hannibal tried to persuade Will that he was grasping at straws for his own interests, but even with his brain on fire, Will still couldn’t shut it off; he could sense the truth unfolding before him. It impressed Hannibal, but you can also see the exact second it also made him realize Will was way too close to getting to the truth and needed to be pulled off his scent and, more importantly, he needed to make Will disreputable. Still, in the finale, when Will confronts him, Hannibal continues to try and pull a confession out of him about his 'true nature', certain of that dark connection between them.

Unrelated, but honestly, Freddie Lounds is low key the worst. She pulls a Hannibal season 2 in the first season with Nicholas Boyle by telling him that Abigail is home. She stirs the pot, creates dozens of unnecessary problems, tampers with crime scenes, prints a lot of libel amongst her semi-correct theories, witnesses horrible acts of violence and continues to trek further into the shit and make everything worse. I don't condone murder necessarily, but she kind of has it coming; in the way that Hannibal is partially guilty for what Mason does to Margot, Freddie is partially guilty for a lot of what happens to Abigail. She says she cares what happens to her, but she's constantly manipulating her and orchestrating bad situations for her. If Abigail hadn't killed Nicholas Boyle, Hannibal would never been able to manipulate her; she needed to be at his mercy, and Freddie Lounds was the one who encouraged him to go see her before Marissa Schuur was killed. She didn't care that Abigail was lost and traumatized.

Like Hannibal said, regardless of being her father's lure, Abigail was an innocent. She was a survivor who was afraid of what her father might do to her. She insists that she didn’t help her father kill or disassemble the bodies, so in her mind, she could always maintain some plausible deniability. She couldn't know for sure that her father killed him if she never actually witnessed it. She was raised in a traumatic situation and coped by prioritizing her survival. If she hadn't killed Nicholas Boyle, she never would've had to actually fear prison time. She was still a child; her father put her in a position she never should’ve had to be in, and she just wanted to live. If she was an actual monster, psychopath or whatever, she wouldn't have experienced so much guilt for the deaths of all those girls and to some extent, Nicholas Boyle, once Freddie insisted he was an innocent man.

Time and time again, we see Freddie act as a malicious manipulator in her own right, but she just pretends she's some fly on the wall, when quite often, her actions have a direct effect of hindering cases and destroying lives.

Talk about psychopathic tendencies, yet unlike every other character to come into contact with Hannibal, she gets away practically unscathed, physically and psychologically. Hannibal loathes the discourteous and rude, but despite everything, he never makes any sincere attempt to kill her. Imo she deserves to get got just as much as Bedelia, if not more. That being said, she's a beautiful boss ass bitch, and her cuntishness is ridiculously attractive. Kind of annoying how Jack threatens her at the beginning of the series and then never actually does a single thing about it when she immediately continues to write even more shit about Will.

Season 1 feels like such a freshmen beginning. Don't get me wrong, I love the whole show, but you can see how they were almost trying to start with the crime show format, but season 2 is where the themes and visuals become a lot more abstract and artistic. The show catapults into the stunning structure that it's most recognized for. The relationships are also so much more complicated and expansive; such as Hannibal's methodical decision to engage in a relationship with Alana at the precise time to best alienate and distract her from Will, also working as a way to threaten Will, to push him further.

Also, Mads is shot in such perfect lighting with precise angles that realistically illustrate Hannibal's canonical 'maroon' eyes from the book series, playing with tricks of shadows to deepen the fiery/tawny shade of his eyes without it coming across as cartoonish. It's such an important and intricate detail because of how often his eyes are the focal point of a shot, essential to reading the slightest changes in his expression.

Also, really unrelated, but Hannibal's wardrobe is perfection. Like my real-life aesthetic is a sloppy season 1 Will Graham, but I definitely want the fashion sense of a power-dyke Hannibal Lecter.