We watched it last night. This is strange, very strange.
I presume the policeman is an analogue of the Italian policeman in the novel.
SPOILERS for the Series Finale:
Well, Fuller had to wrap it all up quickly. It’s ironic, in retrospect, that he chose to show so little of the plot in the first episodes of season 3–they were glacially-slow. “Tone-poems” rather than “story,” really. He could have spread the action of this one-hour season finale over three episodes, if only he had planned it a little better.
I do wonder: if he had had four or five seasons, would he have been working toward the same Ultimate Goal? That is, to end with something that was apparently a personal fantasy for Fuller–given that it appears nowhere in the source material–an emotional embrace between Hannibal and Will Graham. Was that the point of the entire series, all along, or was it just something he came up with hurriedly, so as to end the series with a water-cooler discussion topic?
All in all, I suspect this has been a major bump in the road for Fuller’s career. Every big name showrunner will have some embarrassing ratings-failure somewhere on the resume, but this was a pretty spectacular waste of resources. He will work, of course. If nothing else, he could make high-end porn. Or high-production-values commercials or industrial films. He will work. But this had to be a huge disappointment.