As you’ve probably gathered if you read my recent treatise on the first half of Hannibal‘s third season, I have been champing at the bit for the show to get to the Red Dragon storyline. It’s the very first of Thomas Harris’ Hannibal novels and will represent Bryan Fuller‘s program’s first direct adaptation of a particular novel (as well as being the only one of the novels they have complete rights to). Naturally, the show has touched on or borrowed bits from all of the novels, but this will be the first time they’ve straight-up done a book on TV.

If you watched last week’s episode, “Digestivo”, you know it ended with *SPOILERS* Hannibal Lecter turning himself in to Jack Crawford after Will Graham, once and for all, said he wants nothing to do with his former friend/tormentor again. Elsewhere, Alana Bloom was helping her lover Margot Verger kill Mason Verger after retrieving the Verger Baby from a pig’s womb. Seriously, that episode was effed up.

And now we have images for the first two episodes of this second half of this season, episodes entitled “The Great Red Dragon,” and “…and The Woman Clothed with the Sun.” (Check out the complete gallery below!)

It looks like it does indeed take place long after the events of “Digestivo”, and it is much more in line than any of us expected with the events of the Red Dragon novel. We see Will’s wife Molly, played by Tony winner Nina Arianda; we see True Blood‘s Rutina Wesley playing the blind Reba McClane, the love interest to our new villain; and we see the Red Dragon himself, Francis Dolarhyde, played by Richard Armitage. Hell, we’ve even got Lara Jean Chorostecki back as Freddie Lounds, and if you’ve read the book or seen the films, you know Freddie doesn’t have the best time.

If it goes well, and provided such a thing can exist due to the cancellation, this half-season should give a good idea of how a Silence of the Lambs season could go, since Fuller has said he’s wanted to do that one and he’d keep Will in it along with bringing in Clarice Starling. Again, it’s all contingent on if the show gets picked up by another network. For now, though, we’ll just have to be content with the Hannibal Lecter in a big glass box we are getting.

What’re your thoughts on these photos and about where Hannibal looks to be heading? Talk about it below!