Warning: This article contains spoilers for NBC’s television series Hannibal, as well as graphic discussions of violence.
Abigail Hobbs is dead. Her story was always going to end this way. She was doomed by her father and her father and her father. But more sad than the realization that the only way she could be free from the men who abused and used her for her entire life, is the fact that death was the last thing that she wanted.
NBC’s Hannibal, written and directed by Bryan Fuller, is an adaptation of Thomas Harris’ The Red Dragon, and follows FBI profiler Will Graham and psychiatrist/cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter. In the premiere, “Apértif”, these men meet for the first time when they are both brought on as consultants to catch a serial killer the FBI has been chasing: The Minnesota Shrike. The Shrike has kidnapped seven young women, each with a similar build and with brown hair and blue eyes, from college campuses around the state, and they all have disappeared without a trace. An eighth girl goes missing, and Will and Hannibal are brought onto the case. Will and Hannibal identify Garret Jacob Hobbs (GJH) as a possible suspect and go to his house. Before they depart, Hannibal anonymously calls the Hobbs household to warn GJH, who goes on a killing spree. Mrs. Hobbs is dead when Will and Hannibal arrive, but Will is able to break into the house, and as GJH slits his daughter’s throat, Will fatally shoots him. His daughter, now bleeding out on the kitchen floor, is Abigail Hobbs. She’s been dead since the beginning. Hannibal puts pressure on Abigail’s wound, saving her life, and travels with her to the hospital. The episode ends with a shot of Hannibal and Will at opposite ends of Abigail’s bedside as she lies in a coma.
This is the beginning of what fans of the show like to call our Murder Family. The FBI believes that GJH had an accomplice for his murders, and Jack Crawford, head of the behavioral science unit, is confident that it was Abigail Hobbs. However, Will insists that she didn’t, and Abigail maintains her innocence. The girls that GJH was abducting, kidnapping, and cannibalizing looked like Abigail, and they were all abducted from universities that she applied to. He was killing them as a proxy for killing her, out of a twisted, love-driven desire to keep her close to home. Will recognizes this during his investigation process, and after killing GJH, deals with complicated feelings concerning his role in not only saving Abigail’s life, but also orphaning her. He develops a parasocial paternal relationship with Abigail, treating her as if she were his daughter, assuming responsibility for her. This is encouraged by Hannibal Lecter, who, realizing that this relationship is a convenient way to manipulate Will, tells him “We are her fathers now.” And an unhealthy dynamic it is.
Once she is medically cleared, Abigail stays in the Port Haven Psychiatric Facility, as she recovers mentally, and is the patient of Alana Bloom, another psychiatrist working for the FBI, and a friend of Will, Hannibal, and Jack. Will and Hannibal are also given guardianship over her, and are allowed to take her on excursions, and while Will attempts to be an emotional surrogate for Abigail’s father, she rejects him. Hannibal, however, takes on a mentorship role with Abigail, earning her trust, manipulating her to rely on him, and convincing her to keep his secret that he was the one who called the Hobbs house. He has her take mushrooms while she stays at his house for dinner, as well as helps her hide the body of a young man that she killed (in an act of self-defense).
At the end of season 1, the FBI is closing in on Abigail Hobbs and on Will Graham (who is being framed for Hannibal’s murders). Rather than let herself be arrested, Hannibal helps Abigail fake her own death. For around a year, she lives in Hannibal’s house in secret, part-captive, part-willing participant, though this is not revealed until the end of season 2.
“Mizumono”, the season 2 finale, is a bloodbath. Multiple characters are bleeding out or on the verge of death in Hannibal’s house, where Hannibal and Abigail wait for Will to show up for the final fight. Will has been living a double life for months, convincing Hannibal that he has begun killing and cannibalizing others in the same way Hannibal does, and agreeing to run away to Europe with him. At the same time, he has been working with Jack Crawford to try to collect enough evidence to arrest Hannibal and keep him in prison for life. After discovering Will’s treachery, Hannibal is heartbroken, and when Will shows up, Hannibal stabs him in the stomach in a deeply intimate scene. He then slices Abigail’s neck in front of Will, drops her to the floor, and leaves.
As Hannibal says to Will, watching him bleed out on the floor, “Fate and circumstance have returned us to this moment.” Abigail’s death mirrors her first scene in many ways. Alana Bloom lies dying in the doorway, the same place that Abigail’s mother died in season 1. Abigail is also wearing a low-collared shirt, which she only wears before the events of “Apértif”: afterward, she always wears something with a high collar, and a scarf around her neck in order to hide her scar from her wound. Hannibal cuts her in the same place her father did, a poetic repetition that also destroys her ability to speak, a form of agency taken from her, and symbolism that shows that Abigail is again being destroyed by her violent father figure. Abigail also always wears her hair down, except in a flashback when she hunts with her father. However, her hair in this episode is also in a ponytail, perhaps a nod to the fact that she and Hannibal were doing their own kind of hunting. And again, it shows off her scar, her past trauma that will soon be repeated. In “Apértif,” Will, shaking from adrenaline, is unable to keep pressure on Abigail’s wound, and it is Hannibal’s intervention that stabilizes her until EMS arrives. In “Mizumono,” it is the same, though this time Will is fighting shock and succumbing to his own wound. But there is no Hannibal to save Abigail this time; it is his decision to leave that dooms her.
Ultimately, the only person who understood Abigail Hobbs is also the one who killed her. GJH coerced his daughter into helping him act out his violent fantasies. Will first saw Abigail as an innocent child, and once realizing that she was an accomplice to her father, he lashes out, seeing her as a cold-blooded predator. The FBI would fail to recognize that Abigail’s guilt was an act of self-preservation, and she would likely be tried and found equally as guilty as her father. Hannibal, the master manipulator and dangerous man that he is, acknowledges Abigail’s capacity for violence, even encourages it, but also sees her need for love and support as a young woman who has survived a massive amount of trauma. She carries guilt from her role in the murders of her father’s victims, which Hannibal comforts her through (“I know what monsters are, you’re a victim”), and offers her protection from the FBI and the media. When Abigail is afraid and needs comfort, she goes to Hannibal, regularly sneaking out of the Psychiatric Facility to meet with him at night, and literally running into his arms at a point near the end of season 1. Even in “Mizumono”, the season 2 finale, when Hannibal, bloody knife in hand, beckons her, she goes to him. This isn’t to say that Abigail was naive. She knew how dangerous Hannibal was, and was afraid of him. However, they also had a relationship built on trust, and they genuinely cared about each other, even if she is used as a pawn for Hannibal’s manipulation of Will.
Alana and Freddy Lounds (a journalist who works closely with Abigail in season 1) and two of the show’s primary female leads are the only others who come close to seeing Abigail as the complex woman she was. They both recognize that Abigail is working hard to keep something hidden (and likely something violent), that she is driven not only by fear but also by remarkable intelligence, and that they approach her with empathy (though not without their own motivations). Ultimately, due to Abigail’s own fear of discovery, as well as Hannibal’s interference, she does not confess her secrets to them. I believe that it’s intentional that it was two female figures that connected with Abigail in this way, though she spent the majority of her life isolated and controlled by men, and Abigail as a character has resonated especially with female fans who connected with her complex victimhood, as well as the agency that she attempts to exert throughout the series.
As horrifying as some of Abigail’s decisions may seem, there is well-thought-out reasoning behind all of them. Abigail became complicit in her father’s crimes to save her own life. “It was them or me,” she tells Hannibal at one point, and Abigail wanted to live. From the moment she woke up in her hospital bed, Abigail chose to hide her involvement, recognizing that the FBI would not acknowledge the extenuating circumstances. Legally and in the public eye, she would be used as a surrogate for her father. Since GJH is dead and cannot be adequately punished, Abigail will be burned at the stake in his place. So she lies, and she hides. She plans to sell her family’s house for money for school, or an apartment, but discovers that she wouldn’t get any of the money, that it would be divided amongst the victim’s family due to wrongful death claims. In a second grab for financial independence, Abigail agrees to give Freddy Lounds the rights to her story, and Freddy promises to help Abigail write a book about her experience, making money off of her notoriety. Abigail exposes herself to public scrutiny to this, as well as Freddy’s insightful investigation, and risks discovery, but does it anyway. She rejects Will’s attempts to connect with her emotionally, refusing to let him turn her into a surrogate, innocent daughter. She allows Hannibal to help her hide Nick Boyle’s body (whom she again killed in self-defense), because she knows that the legal system would not be on her side. However, she later uncovers the body herself because, as she says to Hannibal, she was afraid of them finding him. Now, she’s not afraid anymore, because he is found. At the end of season 1, when the FBI is closing in on her, Abigail allows Hannibal to help her fake her own death in order to avoid arrest. She lives for over a year in hiding in his house, and at the end of season 2, is meant to run away to Europe with him and Will. To achieve this, she pushes Alana out of a window. Again, these were choices she made under duress, but they were her choices. She always picked the one that not only ended up with her alive, but free, even as they hurt her. Because we see Abigail through the performances she puts on for others, we don’t know her hopes and dreams, especially because we only meet her after her life has fallen apart. But we know that she had them. She fights so hard for them.
Despite her debilitating nightmares and the guilt and trauma she represses every day, Abigail never shows any signs of suicidality. Instead, it’s the opposite. She consistently is focused on self-preservation. When she is killed, it isn’t even for anything that she’s done. She dies because Hannibal wants to punish Will for betraying him. She is viewed as an object by Will, who, in season 3, speaking to Abigail in his mind, says, “[Hannibal] gave you back to me… Then he took you away.” And despite all of Hannibal’s insights into her psyche, she is also ultimately used as a tool by him. Her death represents her lack of personhood, the final loss of agency. She dies lying next to Will on the kitchen floor, who is the one person that she’s actively rejected intimacy from. He never saw her. So really, she dies alone.