It was the series that everyone was cautious about, originally pitched like Dexter meets Beverly Hill 90210, Hannibal was an uncertain commodity. Turns out it’s one of TV’s most unmissable shows.

Some of what follows could be considered SPOILERS guys, so only read if you have finished the second season, you have been warned

Now, with Season 3 just wrapped in the US, TV Guide has talked to series showrunner Bryan Fuller about where it’s going next season. On Bedia, Gillian Anderson’s character, Fuller says: “She’s a very busy lady. But if I had my druthers, she’d be a series regular in Season 3.”

On the season overall, Fuller said: “Season 3 is going to be a lot of fun because it’s going to be taking a lot of disparate elements from the novel Hannibal Rising and the novel Hannibal and mashing them up together as part of the thrust of the season. It’s going to be fun to bastardize two novels into one sort of Frankenstein season. I will brace everybody right now: We’re significantly changing the Hannibal origin story from Hannibal Rising.”

On fuller’s original plan with the series – to follow the stories laid out in Thomas Harris’ original books, he says: “The books won’t necessarily be in sequential order. We’ll be hitting elements of each of them except Silence of the Lambs in the next season. My hope is that not only do we have a completely different Hannibal Lecter story in Season 3, but we will meet some of those great characters like Francis Dolarhyde and Lady Murasaki and weave them into the world in a unique way.”

He says that because the next season is so different than what has gone before, he wants to make sure it’s properly mapped out before production begins: “I’m hoping we start production a little later this year because we had very few weeks in the writers’ room before cameras started rolling, and it was hard to keep up. I’m hoping we have a little bit more time in the writers’ room. Because this season is so different and it is such a departure structurally from what we’ve been doing in the first two seasons, I want to make sure we’ve thought it through very well.”

On the possibility that some of the lead characters may not return, Fuller plays it teasingly cool: “Laurence [Fishburne] is also a very busy man. One of the wonders of this season is: Will Alana survive and will Jack Crawford survive? Will Abigail Hobbs survive? Those are things that are going to be revealed very slowly at the beginning of Season 3… everybody in that house that was dying. And it doesn’t just mean that only one person could be dead.”

We’re on board for Season three… what about you guys?