NBC's Hannibal is home to the creepiest stag on television, but the dark, antlered creature won't dominate the third season.

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The stag appeared to die during "Mizumono" as the life seeped out of Will Graham (Hugh Dancy), but the imagery may pop up again in the future.

"Not as much," cautioned series creator Bryan Fuller, according to Seat 42F. "We're going to see the Stag Man, the Windego; but the stag it feels like we're looking for what our next kind of psychological symbol is because if that was about their relationship in season 1 and season 2 and he watched it die, it feels like it should die and be born again as something else."

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Now that Hannibal (Mads Mikkelsen) and Will's relationship has suffered an irreversible breakdown, the symbol of their partnership must fall apart as well.

"The stag is really representative of Will's first exposure to Hannibal Lecter because he saw, in that field, Cassie Boyle impaled on a severed stag head," Fuller said to Seat 42F, explaining how the stag came around in the first place. "In his mind, the psychology of that is essentially he's seeing the stag with the ravens picking at the corpse [and] everything gets blended in his psychology and comes up with the self-conscious image of the stag."

Graham's mind will undoubtedly create something equally as interesting for the series' next "psychological symbol," but viewers will have to wait until Hannibal returns to NBC in 2015 to find out more.

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