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From interviews, it sounds like Fuller and company left Chilton's fate somewhat unspecified because they don't know for sure if they can get Raul Esparza back in the future. But if he's alive, it's not even like they've written it so any main character had to be fooled into thinking he's dead.Freddie, though, I'm pretty sure has to be alive, because I think Will straight-up deep-diving into murder/cannibalism would wreck the show. But the writers are playing it that at least Hannibal thinks Freddie is dead. I'm guessing Hannibal's heightened sense of smell (and taste?) mean he wouldn't be fooled by fake "long pig". But even to catch a serial killer, I don't think that gets Will off the hook for desecrating Tiers' corpse legally nor morally.

Shoot, even with Burt being far less central to the show than The Mother to HIMYM, MAY spent precious minutes of the finale acknowledging that his death was real and meant something. I remember that shot in the elevator, post-funeral -- with three couples each together and Sylvia standing alone -- was genuinely moving.

Weren't the other four members of Leslie's new office being transfered from some other Midwest state anyways? I don't think they were already stationed in Chicago.

OK, under normal circumstances, but Will Graham is a freaking genius profiler who can tell two different cannibals apart because one eats with reverence and one eats with contempt, and he can discern this just from the evidence they leave behind. Don't you have to give his words some consideration? Shoot, Ned the Pie Maker didn't get as many details as Will somehow does and Ned literally got the dead to talk to him.

The EW season preview, months ago, started off with Fuller explaining the grossest twists of this ep, and thank goodness I was spoiled because I'd hate to have gotten this episode full force. (Not sarcastic.) In the AV Club walkthrough, Fuller also says in his mind that Bernardone put a dead bird in the victim's chest, but that much magic would have been a bit of a misstep for the show, so I'm glad he held back there. Even so, how did Bernardone get it in there? The lab guys examined her entire body and only came up with strangulation. Certainly he didn't crack her ribs open to do it.

There was a really good comment over at the AV Club, though, that the A-plot was not that plausible. A Dem nominee for the Presidency has to be pro-choice, and a Rep nominee has to be pro-life. Candidates like Jimmy Carter, Rudy Giuliani, and Mitt Romney have all had to adjust their previous positions to align with party orthodoxy. I felt like the show was trying to have it both ways - was Selina trying to straddle the pro and anti sides, or just straddle nuances of the pro side? Chung and Maddox end up just a few weeks apart on when the cutoff for an abortion is, allowing Selina to take the middle spot (they shoulda taken positions one week apart and forced her to either say "20.5 weeks" or pick one or the other to copycat.) All the fine texture of the show was brilliant though: Jonah's absolute douchiness, the general semi-competence of the main cast, that whole "as a woman" thing… all great stuff.

About Hannibal framing Chilton to Miriam... I guess he might have had recordings of Chilton's hypnosis techniques, but he also told her he would take her arm. I think he would have had to say that himself, at best with a disguised voice.

Plus, he runs the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. The place that employed at least one psychopath in hiding, and he's used unorthodox quasi-brainwashing techniques. Sure, we the audience know he didn't employ a gang of murder disciples to create those Ripper tableaus, but it's at least slightly plausible, right?

I don't know the original source, but someone on another forum quoted some Tumblr pictures showing the entry wound (left cheek), exit wound (back right of the neck) and a diagram connecting the two that suggests the bullet didn't necessarily hit any part of Chilton's brain. I suppose any bullet to the head is potentially lethal, but given how cagey Fuller's been playing it this week on Twitter and in interviews, I could accept either than Chilton died or he didn't. (that said, this does remind me of the Bionic Woman reboot, where the terrible character of Jamie's boyfriend got shot in the shoulder at the end of the pilot, then the second episode opened (?) on his funeral.)

Oh yeah. Fair enough. I guess that puts that in fair play to (posthumously?) exonerate Chilton.

Murder Wizards indeed. So not only did Hannibal lug several hundred pounds of delicate Tree Man (the tree by itself isn't so delicate, but the grafting and esp the flower arrangement were) to a parking lot and bust at least 10 sq feet of asphalt there, but this ep revealed he also had it soaking in an underground basement cistern and hauled it both in and out of there. Also, while Gideon might be lighter now with all those limbs removed*, the hospital equipment that kept him alive would have been unimaginably awkward to haul through those underground steam tunnels that Fuller mentioned. Hannibal also set up all the butchering equipment in that guest room too... * We know Hannibal cut off one leg first, so how would the rest of him not have been tainted with painkilling drugs? As for Chilton not being a cannibal... Are they 100% sure the Ripper is a cannibal? We know it, but as far as the characters in the show go, Will is sure only because he's a near psychic with his profiling abilities. I don't think they have much real evidence that the Ripper's trophies are necessarily being eaten.

I think butter spoils in the air, not because of being out at room temperature. There are "butter keepers" to keep butter at room temp (and thus soft) but submerged under water to prevent contact with air. Not that you would do that with a giant slab of Iowa-shaped butter though. Jonah's a complete douche and richly deserved to go for his terrible blog, but even so I felt a little bad about how Dan had completely played him to achieve great ends there. Well, Dan was on his phone as he was talking to Jonah about pulling the post, so he very well might have forwarded it. Now, Jonah took that picture and posted it of his own stupid volition, but Dan capitalized on it. He probably leaked it to reporters and got Jonah to pull it to make it even more of a scandal. He might have leaked Jonah's identity to get him fired too; not clear about that. Either way, I think there was definitely a bunch (of very evil moves) that Dan could legitimately take credit for.

It was enjoyable. I was a little skeptical about the plausibility of the core innovation Richard developed, but this Wired story says Judge & co put a lot of work into thinking up something that would be plausible, so... Middleditch was great, Nanjiani was great, ... the brogrammers and TJ Miller were good... I wonder, given how long ago the ball started rolling on this show, if they'll work in any of the San Francisco vs Silicon Valley tension going on now (Silicon Valley workers are settling in SF and gentrifying/driving up rents like crazy) this season. Andy Daly was definitely great, but in a role that probably won't recur. The thing that sticks with me though is the toy that they were tossing around in the incubator party at the end, the "always blue" one. So I did a few searches on Twitter to see if anyone else had already identified it, and they had. It's a "Hoberman Switch Pitch".

Doesn't the S3 Christmas episode also count as Very Special? It was the musical ep!

As a big fan early on and then less of a devoted fan later (I actually never watched enough of the later episodes to hate Jamie, or maybe I just had a huge crush on Helen Hunt due mostly to the early seasons), I gotta say the finale episode still sticks with me as a really satisfying sitcom finale. And I've been thinking about it a bunch this week esp because of the HIMYM finale, which also featured a lot of future time jumps and an unexpected death and a surprise divorce and an undone marriage and a final reconciliation of the main couple of the show. But for me, MAY's finale worked. It was funnier than the HIMYM finale, and the sad parts were more deeply felt for being truly earned. But what really strikes me as a major difference is how much the writers trusted Janeane Garofolo - a complete newcomer to the show - to carry a big part of the finale. And she does! When she addresses Jamie directly (via the camera), it's sweet and funny and sentimental in the best way. That said, this is the internet and I'm a born complainer, so... after future Jamie and future Paul get back together, it always struck me as slightly overkill/anvilly that present-day Jamie said something like "if you ever left me, I would make you come back, because you'd be wrong." (wow, I am really wrecking the sentiment of that with my awkward paraphrase.) Hey, here's an interview with Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt that I'd never seen before: -- this is part 7, which is just about them discussing the finale.

Yeah, Sepinwall posted an alternate link to Ricardo J Dylan's "alternative ending" (on Vimeo this time) in his followup blog post and that was taken down a day later too. But as uneasy as I was through the finale - because it rushed the next 15 years, because they killed off Tracy, maybe, because they trashed Barney and Robin's marriage a few minutes after the wedding they'd been building up the entire final season, because they really trashed Barney right back to OG sleazy Barney -- that alternative ending cut really underscored for me how much it was the tonal/pacing missteps of the final minutes that really ruined the finale. Hell, he coulda left in that Tracy died; people do die even in sitcoms. Just close on meeting the mother, which was written and acted so sweetly, and we're good. Maybe the official ending works for Ted telling the story to his kids who've spent six real years since their mom died, but to the TV audience, she'd been dead for a minute or so. Fire up the funny music, because it's time to laugh again! W.T.F. And the real ending didn't even subvert the cliche of ending right at the hopeful start of a relationship, because the real ending did exactly that. Just with Ted and Robin.

That alternative ending was great! And also already taken down by a copyright claim from the studio. Boo.

Yeah, they definitely should have ditched the old ending they shot. Sure, Henrie and Fonseca weren't going to look like teenagers forever and sure, maybe they never wrote out a version of the story that would have supported a new ending -- how could they have thought of every eventuality? -- but ideally they would have seen how the show had evolved since they'd first thought of the ending and came up with one that fit what had transpired since. I don't think keeping the mother offscreen would have been viable once they got that surprise ninth season either though. They'd paced out the clues and near-misses and left themselves with little else to give the fans besides actually showing her. Hey, unrelated, I just figured out that "T.M." could also stand for "The Mother"... I know "Tracy" was fixed in stone since long ago, but (I'm a new fan) was "McConnell"? Or any "M" name?

Even a tiny thing like Ted not "going big" by not holding the blue french horn might have helped... As for the fan-edited alternate ending: I liked it a lot.