Amazing finale to an amazing series. If this is all the HANNIBAL we get, I'd say it already ranks at least among my all-time top 10 TV dramas.
In regards some of the convo threads that have been going on in the chat... I love the Thomas Harris novels, adore them. I have heard it's become in vogue to sneer at Harris as a writer, but I have a real connection to those books. RED DRAGON is still one of my favourite books, one of the few novels I've read and reread repeatedly... it had a big impact on my teenage years. THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS I know best from the film, which first horrified and delighted me as a kid, and which has held up over he years and remains one of my favourite movies to this day, a perfect film IMO. And it's pretty much a spot-on adaptation of the book, which was my companion during the most serious hospital visit I've ever had. Even HANNIBAL I have a fondness for, as I remember thinking it was my first proper "grown up" book when I read it at age 11, sneaking the big original edition hardback into school in my backpack to read in between lessons. Those books created a rich, Gothic mythology, and much of the TV show's success has come from how it channels that mythology.
As for Will Graham VS Clarice Starling, they're both great characters. The TV series may have absorbed many of the qualities attributed to Clarice in the books onto Will to deepen his relationship with Hannibal, but that doesn't mean Clarice is without value. She's still one of the great protagonists of crime fiction, and I do fear that any adaptation of the Hannibalverse is incomplete without her in it, so I do hope we get a SILENCE OF THE LAMBS adaptation somehow. And far from fearing Will being usurped by Clarice, I'm excited to see these two interact for the first time.
As far as how the Clarice/Hannibal relationship can differ from the Will/Hannibal relationship, I think it can be done. In the TV show, Hannibal is drawn to Will because he sees him as being much like himself, someone who with a little tweaking he can turn into a fellow serial killer. In contrast, Hannibal could be drawn to Clarice because she's utterly pure and incorruptible. She has someone who has been through pain and darkness and emerged from it herself, untainted by the dark and true to her principles. She is someone who can not be manipulated and pushed into wickedness by Hannibal, and that could make him fascinated by her. I'd rather leave out the HANNIBAL book ending, though.
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