How To Get Away With A Girl In Your Car
The episode opens with Frank charging into the hospital in a panic about Annalise -- "SHE CAN'T DIE," etc. -- before being escorted back outside due to over-emoting and generally unsanitary slobbering over an open wound. As soon as he gets past the hospital cameras, Frank's mood shifts back to placid -- suggesting this is all some kind of elaborate play -- and then he gets into his car... where Catherine Hapstall is lying, asleep or knocked out or dead. With nothing covering her body. Discretion, Frank! Where is your corpse sheet? You know he has a whole section of his linen cupboard just for those.
How To Get Away With Morning Wood
Jumping back: Frank and Laurel are slamming it hard before work, so I guess this is going swimmingly. But when he gets up to shower, she snoops around his room, trying to find evidence of anything that suggests he killed Rebecca, disposed of Rebecca, and/or received a large amount of money for the sale of Rebecca's various organs or body parts. I'm SURE people in the latter business give thorough receipts, but alas, she does not find one.
How To Get Away With Discussing Private Business In Your Massive Classroom
The Idiots all convene in their lecture hall to run through super personal affairs in a place where it's likely anyone who hates them might overhear and take notes (doesn't EVERYONE hate them, also? Right?). Basically, everyone -- especially Michaela -- is WAY OVER Wes being so paranoid about Rebecca being dead, and I agree with them, even though I even know he's RIGHT. It's just tiresome. Wes blah blahs about Frank and the money, Laurel says she didn't find anything, and Michaela basically threatens to "serial kill" him if he keeps this up. I like that the show isn't forcing good friendships between these people who were thrown together by circumstances not of their choosing, but it's also exhausting when they're so nasty all the time.
How To Get Away With Green
Annalise wears this dress twice in this episode, and it works on her both times. I can't tell if that's a continuity mistake or just budgetary, but whatever. People in real life wear things over and over again, so why not Annalise Keating?
As part of her law lesson, Annalise quizzes Asher on the concept of "discretion," which ties into his choosing not to testify against Bonnie. We flash back to him asking Annalise how she got the revolting video from Bonnie's youth, and Annalise won't say, but notes that it explains why Bonnie would have reacted violently to Sam's hands on her without her consent. Asher agrees not to testify, but tells Annalise that DA Sinclair knows about this little thing called Trotter Lake. Annalise asks him to tell her everything so that she can fix it. She has a LOT of things in common with Olivia Pope. They both seem prone to fixing things for people who perhaps don't deserve the repair job.
How To Get Away With Asher
And then Asher makes this face. It doesn't matter why.
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So basically, the Asher storyline goes this way: Annalise needs about two seconds to convince DA Sinclair that it's a bad idea to go after her, because of how easily Annalise can make it look racially motivated (and any number of other sinister things). In addition, Annalise is recycling a coat she wore last season, where she then -- as she does here -- closes it with an actual belt that has nothing to do with the coat. I really can't deal with the impracticality of this approach. If you take off the coat, what do you do with the belt?!? You basically CAN'T take off the coat. AND, as an added insult, it looks terrible. GET IT TOGETHER Y'ALL.
How To Get Away With Asher
And then Asher makes this face. It doesn't matter why.
Annalise hasn't told Bonnie the truth about how she got Asher not to testify, but the conversation here is very awkward, as Asher is trying not to reveal what he knows but may have made it plain anyway in the manner in which he sympathizes with Bonnie offing Sam. I can't tell if Bonnie realizes that Annalise has filled him in, or not. Her line readings could be interpreted either way. He says something like, "I don't know what to say," and she replies with something like, "You just said it," and ... anyway, I can't tell. But if Bonnie sussed it out, I'd have expected a scene where she got crabby with Annalise about it, and that doesn't happen, so.
How To Get Away With Belts
Case of the Week: A transgender woman kills her husband, whom she claims came at her with a bottle and had been abusing her for years. She doesn't have proof. Annalise is willing to fight dirty to protect her, and when all else fails, she compiles a huge file on Asher's father's misdeeds and turns it over to the police in exchange for not pressing murder charges against her client. Bonnie wonders if this is unfair, but Annalise snorts that it's time for Asher to grow up, because everyone else in the house already has. Yes, because everyone else in the house KILLS PEOPLE, and/or covers up killing people. REAL MATURE.
Seriously, I hate that belt. Does the coat really not have buttons?
How To Get Away With Zzz
Laurel spends most of the episode taking action while looking dead-eyed in the extreme. I do like her necklace, though. Anyway, Catherine Hapstall decides to record The Idiots talking, because she doesn't trust them, which leads to her catching everyone discussing Caleb being hot and how Michaela should nail him now that Eggs 911 is in jail. They're also doing some bitching about whether the Hapstalls are innocent and how to find another suspect to pin it on, which pisses off the Hapstall siblings, because they think it means their lawyers don't believe in them.
This whole thing reinforces that it's STUPID to complain about your clients WHILE YOU ARE SITTING AT THEIR TABLE and they are only ten feet away and their devices are lying around -- something Annalise does point out later before growling, "YOU ARE ALL GARBAGE." I love her for that. They ARE all garbage. Oscar the Grouch wouldn't even touch them.
How To Get Away With Dresses
Meanwhile, Michaela is still wearing super cute sleeveless short day dresses while Annalise is running around in coats she would rather BELT than have them be open to the elements. What SEASON IS IT, y'all?
How To Get Away With Indignance
Laurel grabs Wes and tells him it's time to ask Frank once and for all whether he killed Rebecca. This is a brilliant strategy, because NO WAY would he ever LIE TO YOUR FACES, Laurel. Jeez. Granted, he didn't kill Rebecca, but he does know she's dead and who did it. Still, merely asking someone if they did something doesn't mean you're going to get the truth out of them. Something The Idiots would know, since they have been lying about Sam's murder for a long time. And lie about all kinds of other things. You are all lying liars. What makes you think any different, Idiots?
How To Get Away With Asher
And then Asher makes this face. It doesn't matter why.
How To Get Away With Asher
And THEN Asher makes THIS face, and I'm REAL CURIOUS why because he's staring straight into the camera lens and that's a curious choice given that no other part of this scene was shot that way.
How To Get Away With Snooping
The big debate this week is, can the PLLs suggest the Hapstalls' birth parents as suspects. Michaela is defensive of them because she too was adopted, so she doesn't like portraying birth parents as greedy jealous murderers. But Oliver does some snooping and finds that there is another Hapstall -- a half-sib who belonged to Dead Aunt, and might be trying to arrange himself an inheritance. I don't know if I'm into this enough to bring in a random new suspect at this stage in the game.
How To Get Away With Baking
Nate's wife has died, so Annalise starts making him Grief Cobbler. That is a sentence that is true.
How To Get Away With Tearing Annalise To Shreds
Nate finally answers the door and mock the cobblers -- although there is not a PILE of cobblers so he clearly saw fit to eat the Grief Cobbler even while looking a gift chef in the mouth. He then delivers a scathing rebuke of Annalise as a human, telling her that she cost him many of his wife's last days by getting him stuck in jail for a crime he didn't commit; he further tells her all about how he held his wife until the last breath went out of her body (I believe he admits that he did with the pills what Annalise would not), and that nobody will ever love Annalise that much, ever. It's a well-acted scene because there are no histrionics; Nate is very quietly devastated and devastating, with tears that seem to come almost in spite of himself. It's Billy Brown's best work here.
How To Get Away With More Belts
Annalise would love to take off her coat and stay awhile and talk, but she can't BECAUSE IT'S BELTED AGAIN and what if she accidentally leaves it at his house along with 1700 Grief Cobbler pans?
She does find Wes, though, who has come to see Nate. She chases him down and the two of them have a fight themselves, all about how Wes doesn't trust her. Annalise psychoanalyzes that it's because of his mother and how she killed herself and gave him abandonment issues, and basically somehow blames Wes AND Wes's mother for the fact that Wes doesn't trust her -- even though Wes is CORRECT NOT TO TRUST HER. And then for the umpteenth time, we have a chat wherein Annalise and Wes decide there will be no more secrets between them, and then Annalise lies baldly that she only knows that Rebecca ran away. Wes accepts this, seemingly, because this show is full of inconsistent people who can't read a room.
How To Get Away With Your Big Family
Frank tells Laurel that he's deeply, mortally offended that SHE, of all people, thinks he is capable of hurting a woman. This is presented to us without ANY sense of how full of crap he is, given that WE know he killed Lila. Anyway, he takes Laurel to his family dinner, and she's totally charmed by his mother's wig and his crazy boisterous crew. But the thing is, none of this serves to make me conflicted about him. He killed Lila. Unless this show has a WHOPPER on tap about how Lila was secretly a terrorist who was going to blow up Middleton University, I really don't think Frank can ever have a good enough reason for doing that to a pregnant person and her baby. It's beyond redemption. I assume the show plans to test that theory, of course.
OH BUT: Someone in the comments who pays better attention than I do says that later, there's a piece that implies Frank may have rented the family to impress Laurel. If he did that... well, that's gonna be hard to maintain. Do you keep them all on retainer?
How To Get Away With Ruining People
Bonnie has No Fucks To Give with DA Sinclair, until DA Sinclair blurts out the truth about Trotter Lake and Tiffany. She never outright says Asher did anything, but she tells Bonnie that Tiffany was gang-raped, and with Asher hoping for immunity, the implication is that he was part of it. And if indeed it turns out he was... THIS SHOW. Y'all had BETTER NOT be taking the ONE HALFWAY DECENT HUMAN and retroactively making him a RAPIST, thereby undoing his rootability TOO. WHY DO YOU HAVE TO RUIN EVERYTHING.
How To Get Away With Hacking
Ollie, also, is doomed. I fear this deeply. Because a) he's nice, and b) he and Connor are too happy, and I think the show would rather have Connor having angry sex all over town. So Oliver hunts down the Halfstall -- his name is Philip -- and hacks into his computer to get pictures. As he and Connor sit there discussing what he's doing, and mentioning Annalise's name and all kinds of other information, we learn they're being watched...
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... by Philip himself. Oliver is too good a hacker to have fallen for some kind of weird trick like this, I think, but whatever. Contrivance. I am not concerned that Oliver is going to end up dead, and Connor is going to end up blowing into the Hapstalls' manse and putting into motion whatever gets Annalise shot. DON'T KILL OLIVER. If Asher is a rapist, then Oliver is ALL I HAVE, YOU GUYS.
How To Get Away With Dumping A Body
In the past, Frank gets Rebecca's body from his friend and disposes of it "properly," as in, by burying it. (Wouldn't you want to burn it first, or something? I know that didn't work with Sam, but it seems a lot easier than hiding an entire dismembered human.) Anyhoo, Frank buries her in a forest, and then in the present day, he dumps a bloodied Catherine Hapstall in what appears to be the same spot. I guess he has his hangouts. But when a cop and her sniffer dog find them in the woods together, she calls it in.. just as Catherine sits up, breathing hard, in a way that suggests she has just violently come-to after being drugged. Who the hell knows. Well, Frank knows. But Frank sucks, so I don't want to ask him about it.