And then it suddenly hit me: what if Will only got married to see if Hannibal would react?
It can definitely sound too simplistic at first glance, like he cynically dragged a woman into his orbit just for the sake of an experiment. But Will’s choices rarely work on that clean, rational plane. His decisions tend to bloom out of a moment, a mixture of impulse, pressure, and a strange curiosity that refuses to be pinned down.
Marriage, for Will, was never something that made coherent sense. There’s no steady buildup toward it, no real narrative logic in his arc that suggests that was his natural endpoint. Instead, it feels as if he stumbled into it in the same way he stumbles into many of his actions…pressed by circumstance. He’s someone who, when confronted with the necessity of a choice, often just does the thing right in front of him rather than plotting out where it might lead. In that sense, marriage to Molly reads less as a grand plan and more as a whim that calcified into permanence.
But whims for Will are never innocent. His impulses are always laced with the undercurrent of Hannibal, that shadow presence shaping every move. Curiosity, perhaps his most Hannibal-like trait, often drives him to test boundaries, not just of morality, but of emotional entanglement. And so, one could read his marriage as a kind of experiment: not a conscious scheme to make Hannibal jealous, but an instinctual wondering. If he took the most binding human ritual, marriage, and gave himself to someone else, would it break through the bars and reach Hannibal? Would the reality of Will belonging to another force Hannibal to react?
And also, Hannibal had his own mock-marriage with Bedelia. Will may have been unconsciously responding in kind. Two men circling each other through the language of ritual and performance, using the marriage bond not as a sincere commitment, but as a gesture loaded with meaning: possession, exclusion, provocation.
So perhaps Will’s marriage really was about curiosity…what happens if I do this? It was about Hannibal, because even in his absence, Will’s actions are never free from him.