The head of the FBI Behavioral Science unit, Jack Crawford, calls on profiler Will Graham to assist them catch a serial killer. The killer has now kidnapped eight women, all similar in appearance and always on a Friday.

Will and Jack hunt a killer who is burying his victims alive, so they will become fertilizer for his garden of fungus. While the tabloid journalist Freddie sets targets in on Will.

Determined to give Abigail closure, Will and Hannibal take Abigail back to the scene of her father's crimes. But things take a turn for the worse when the copycat killer strikes again.

A series of family murders takes place, and Will determines they were conducted by each of the families' missing children, who were abducted and brainwashed into killing their old families for their "new family."

A murdered couple is found in a motel room, posed in praying positions with the flesh of their backs opened and strung to the ceiling to give them the appearance of wings.

A nurse at a state hospital for the criminally insane is murdered by a patient, Dr. Abel Gideon, in a manner reminiscent of the "Chesapeake Ripper", who hasn't committed a murder in two years, the same number of years Gideon has been incarcerated.

The BAU is called in when a man is found in a hotel room bathtub with his kidney removed and Graham must determine whether this is the act of an organ harvester or if the Chesapeake Ripper has claimed his first victim in two years.

Lecter's patient Franklin Froideveaux worries that his friend Tobias may be a psychopath, but Franklin's growing obsession with Lecter is what concerns the latter more.

A totem pole of human bodies ranging from freshly killed to decades old are found on a beach and while Graham is investigating the crime scene, he suddenly finds himself in Lecter's office.

Beth LeBeau is found murdered, having drowned in her own blood as a result of her face being cut into a Glasgow smile. Graham's mental state continues to sharply decline.

Dr. Abel Gideon escapes from custody and begins targeting the psychiatrists who attempted to treat him, displaying their bodies with a Colombian necktie. Graham's undiagnosed Encephalitis drives his temperature up, causing severe hallucinations.

Graham deduces that several recent murders were all the work of a copycat patterning after recent serial murders, and that Georgia was killed because she may have remembered the face of whoever had killed Dr. Sutcliffe.

Following his strange trip to Minnesota, Graham is taken into custody by Crawford for the probable murder of Abigail Hobbs. They find her severed ear in his kitchen sink and her blood under his fingernails.