Hannibal Lecter Transcripts: Hannibal S2E4

Bella: Lazarus had it good. My social circle doesn't include a friend with power over death. I suppose I should've embraced Facebook while I had the chance. I never should have let Jack talk me into taking chemo.

Hannibal: He's trying to extend your life.

Bella: He's trying to extend a quality of life that's not worth the effort.

Hannibal: Jack's efforts or yours?

Bella: I'm vomiting my stomach lining. On a good day, I sleep fifteen to eighteen hours. On a bad day, I don't sleep. My best-case scenario is prolonged pain management.

Hannibal: Jack will help you manage. He loves you, Bella. When you are gone, he will feel your silence like a draft.

Bella: My silence is inevitable. The war is over. The cancer is an occupying force. I want to surrender. While I still have my dignity.

Hannibal: You are considering ending your life?

Bella: Suicide seems like a valid solution to my problem.

Hannibal: How does that make you feel?

Bella: Alive. How does it make you feel?

Hannibal: I've always found the idea of death comforting. The thought that my life could end at any moment frees me to fully appreciate the beauty, and art, and horror of everything this world has to offer.

Bella: A death benefit?

Hannibal: Upon taking his own life, Socrates offered a rooster to the god of healing, Asclepius, to pay his debt.

Bella: What debt might that be?

Hannibal: To Socrates, death was not a defeat... but a cure.

Beverly: Zeller's out in the field, otherwise I'd ask him to help me with this. You were a surgeon, right?

Hannibal: I was a surgeon and a doctor, yes. Have you found any evidence on the Muralist's friend?

Beverly: That's what I need your help with. Might not have been a friend. Might not have even been an acquaintance. Whoever killed him, understood him.

Hannibal: So often you open your mouth and I hear Will Graham's words come out.

Beverly: I have an arrangement with Will. He's agreed to consult with me on cases, if I keep investigating the murders he's accused of.

Hannibal: I'm happy to hear that. Will needs a champion now more than ever.

Beverly: He has you, doesn't he? You think there's a chance he could be innocent. I know you do.

Hannibal: I believe there is a possibility.

Beverly: I'm just relieved he's not saying the killer is you anymore.

Hannibal: At least not to me. Who does Will believe killed the Muralist?

Beverly: Doesn't know. He thinks if James Gray's killer hid him in the mural, he may have hid something else.

Hannibal: A signature? What kind of killer seeks to depict the unconscious, instinctual striving of his victim by sewing him into a human mural?

Beverly: It wasn't just for appearances.

Hannibal: You have to get to the truth beneath the appearances. Only by going deep beneath the skin will you understand the nature of this killer's pathology.

Frederick: Did Dr. Lecter administer any drug therapies during your sessions together? Sedatives...

"Hannibal: The strobe causes neurons to fire en masse, like striking many piano keys at once. The strobe causes neurons to fire en masse, like striking many... The dissonance might foster a change in your mind. Is something wrong?"

Frederick: Will...?

Will: He was inducing seizures. He was encouraging them. The blackouts. The lost time. It was strategic. It was planned.

Frederick: You would only see a seizure response in a brain afflicted with photosensitive epilepsy.

Will: Or afflicted by something just as damaging. Like encephalitis.

Frederick: That would suggest a radically unorthodox form of therapy.

Will: Yes, it would.

Frederick: Doctor Lecter. I am so embarrassed. You didn't get my message? I canceled your appointment with Will Graham.

Hannibal: Is everything all right?

Frederick: I can explain. Shall we? Will is at a delicate point in his therapy. I don't want to confuse him any more than he already is.

Hannibal: Confuse him? Isn't it your opinion he's an intelligent psychopath?

Frederick: It was, but my opinion is evolving. After administering a narcoanalytic interview, therapeutically vital information has come to light.

Hannibal: What sort of information?

Frederick: What Will Graham suffers from may not be a single condition, but a continuum of illnesses, all with different neurological mechanisms. Some naturally occurring, others appear to have been induced.

Hannibal: Induced? Induced by whom?

Frederick: Did you ever use any kind of light stimulation in your treatment?

Hannibal: Light stimulation is a standard tool for neurotherapy.

Frederick: Evidently, it was overloading his visual cortex. Creating seizures, time loss, gaps in his memory. Almost strategically, it seems.

Hannibal: You're suggesting it was intentional?

Frederick: All our conversations about psychic driving. You were so curious and eager to hear what I had to say while saying very little yourself.

Hannibal: I had very little to say.

Frederick: I have been thinking about the possibility that you may have been psychic driving Will Graham all along.

Hannibal: A bold accusation, Frederick.

Frederick: You are not the only psychiatrist accused of making a patient kill. We have to stick together.

Hannibal: Please come in.

Bella: It's a little unnerving, not being able to walk across the floor.

Hannibal: Nothing can be so unnerving for someone strong as being weak.

Bella: I was so weak after chemotherapy, Jack had to physically pick me up. It was the second time he carried me across the threshold. I brought you something.

Hannibal: A gift?

Bella: Paying my debt.

Hannibal: Coq Gaulois.

Bella: For helping me understand that death is not a defeat, but a cure.

Hannibal: What have you taken, Bella?

Bella: My morphine. Every bit of it. I didn't want to die at home. I didn't want Jack to find me. I didn't want him to make that call... to be in the room with my body, waiting for it to become some ceremonial object apart from him, separate from who I was, someone he can only hold in his mind.

Hannibal: You denied him his goodbye.

Bella: I denied him... a painful goodbye. And allowed myself a peaceful one. Tell Jack... I love him very much.

Hannibal: Yes.

Bella: Goodbye, Dr. Lecter.

Hannibal: Goodbye, Bella.

Bella: What are you doing here?

Hannibal: I want to apologize. I couldn't honor what you asked of me. I'm sorry.

Bella: Get out.