Only an actor as charismatic and cryptic as Mads Mikkelsen could give Anthony Hopkins a run for his money in the role of cannibal Hannibal Lecter. The Danish actor left his mark on the character a decade ago on NBC’s Hannibal. Developed by Bryan Fuller (Pushing Daisies), the psychological thriller gave new life to the Thomas Harris book series that inspired the big screen’s The Silence of the Lambs and its cinematic follow-ups.

With Hugh Dancy playing Dr. Will Graham, Hannibal’s foil and fixation — and supporting roles played by the likes of Caroline Dhavernas, Laurence Fishburne, and Gillian Anderson — Hannibal became not just a cult classic but one of our picks for the most gripping serial-killer TV shows, the best horror TV shows, and the TV shows with the best finales. Like many other cult classics, it ended too soon, canceled by NBC after three seasons. That it aired on network television at all, however, boggles explanation — this is a show, after all, that features nonlinear timelines, extreme gore, and a man-eating villain who beguiles viewers as much as he does Will.

“There are people who are attracted to someone like Hannibal Lecter and repelled at the same time,” Fuller told TV Insider in 2015. “It’s that careful balance of, ‘I’m close to the fire, but when do I actually get burned?’”

Ten years after the Season 3 finale — which aired on August 29, 2015, and stands, at least for now, as the series finale — let’s sharpen our knives and dig into Hannibal’s final moments and the prospects of another slice.

The third season ended 10 years ago with a literal cliffhanger.

After an escalation in the psychological game between Will and Hannibal — with Will becoming more suspicious of his psychiatrist and Hannibal becoming more infatuated with his patient — Season 2 ends with Hannibal narrowly avoiding capture. He escapes to Europe with his own psychiatrist, Bedelia Du Maurier (Anderson), where he slays his way into a new identity. Will and FBI boss Jack Crawford (Fishburne), recovered from their Season 2 finale injuries, pursue him there, but after Will dishes out rejection to Hannibal yet again stateside, the latter turns himself into the FBI.

In the second half of Season 3, a serial killer named Francis Dolarhyde (Richard Armitage) finds inspiration in the incarcerated Hannibal and fancies himself a mythological beast named the Great Red Dragon, and Jack once again recruits Will for help finding the killer. Will, reluctantly, turns to Hannibal, over the objections of Du Maurier, Will’s new therapist, who has somehow broken free of her former client’s spell. At Hannibal’s cliffside home, he and Will overpower and kill Dolarhyde. Covered in blood, the two men embrace each other and their intertwined fate.

“This is all I ever wanted for you, Will, for both of us,” Hannibal says.

“It’s beautiful,” Will says, before pulling Hannibal with him over the cliff.

“It felt like it was a natural conclusion to the story we’ve been telling on NBC: Will and Hannibal, who have talked about murder and murdering separately, now are doing it together,” Fuller told TV Insider after the finale. “That felt like it was the evolution of their relationship, that in this moment they would become the murder husbands of fanfic lore.”

(Speaking of fanfic lore, Fuller also mentioned alternate takes in which “Mads and Hugh went much further in certain takes, where lips lingered over lips and things like that.”)

The Season 3 finale marks a pivotal point for Will, one in which he’s willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for Hannibal’s would-be victims — or maybe for Hannibal himself. “If you look at the dialogue before the final act, he’s telling you everything that’s going to happen,” Fuller said. “He’s telling you he can’t save himself, and that’s fine. We’re telling the audience, ‘Will Graham is willing to die to finish this,’ And he does take that leap.”

There may be a sense of finality in that cliff dive… if it weren’t for a post-credit tag that shows Du Maurier at a dining table, staring at her own severed leg, which has been tressed, roasted, and presented on a platter before her. “Either Hannibal survived his fall, or Hannibal’s Uncle Robertus is taking up his nephew’s old habits,” Fuller said. “If I’d known we were doing a fourth season, it would’ve been great to reveal, like, David Bowie sitting on the other side of that table and have a ball with that. That was one of the things we were kicking around — if there was a fourth season — to reveal who was at that dinner table.”

The Hannibal team is determined to continue the story.

That mysterious ending came after NBC canceled Hannibal in June 2015, midway through the third season. In his statement about the news, Fuller alluded to the possibility of a continuation elsewhere: “Hannibal is finishing his last course at NBC’s table this summer, but a hungry cannibal can always dine again,” he said.

A week later, the producer confirmed to TV Insider that conversations were underway for finding Hannibal a new home. “The studio had asked me what the scope of Season 4 is, so they could prepare production proposals for potential distribution partners,” he said.

Fuller also gave a tease of what he had in store for future seasons, including the introduction of Clarice Starling, the FBI agent played in Silence of the Lambs by Jodie Foster. “She was the plan for Season 5,” he said. “The Season 4 idea was taking something from one of the novels and turning it on its ear, and then cutting that ear off and shoving it down Will Graham’s throat.”

Brooke Palmer/NBC

Weeks later, though, Hannibal’s chances of continuation were getting more remote, with Fuller tweeting that Prime Video and Netflix had passed on the chance to pick up the series. “Netflix couldn’t do it because of the Amazon streaming [of the three filmed seasons],” he told fans at Comic-Con that year, per Variety. “Amazon would have liked to have done it, but they wanted to do it very quickly, and I wanted to be able to get all the scripts in advance before we [started] shooting.”

Fuller did tease the possibility of continuing the story with a feature film at the time. “There may be an opportunity for a little break, and then hopefully, we’ll find a way to bring Mads and Hugh back to you,” he said.

A decade later, Fuller and the stars of Hannibal have kept hopes of a revival alive. At Emerald City Comic Con this February, Mikkelsen said (per Popverse) the Hannibal team “want[s] to see it continued.” He also assured fans that the Season 3-ending plunge wasn’t the end of Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham.

“Of course, [Hannibal] is going to survive that, and so is Will,” the actor said. “It’s just a question of how much we jump in time because if we do a jump of six or seven years, it can be very interesting [to discover] what these guys are doing now. So, I don’t want to see an ending; I want to see a fresh start.”