How To Get Away With Injecting Iron Into Your Torso
That is... such a chest. This show needs to release a 12 Months Of Billy Brown calendar.
How To Get Away With Asher
And then Asher makes this face. It doesn't matter why. But it's also maybe the face I'm making at Nate's 84-pack.
How To Get Away With Flashbacks
The flashbacks now are all about how Annalise came to know Wes, and that his real name is Christophe. The answer lies years ago in a court case she took, which lets us look at how happy Annalise used to be. She's also 8 months pregnant in the flashbacks, and the show took these four episodes to show us what happened to that baby. The point here is: Annalise used to smile.
Wes's mother, it turns out, is the alibi of Annalise's client. Annalise befriended her casually and then used that to convince her to testify for the defense. It was typical underhanded Annalise, but you get the impression that this is where the current win-at-all-costs Annalise was born.
How To Get Away With BABIES
Annalise also recovers from being shot by Wes via some brief hallucinations that someone has given her a baby, which she freaks out about, then cares for and loves and cries over in tandem with the revelation that she had been having one of her own. Mostly I wanted you to see this adorable, adorable, perfect moppet.
How To Get Away With Dessert
In the process, Annalise also houses a bowl of ice cream. One of the things I love about this show is that Annalise stress-eats, just like a normal person. She also, if I remember correctly, spills some ice cream on the documents and then just scoops it up and licks it off her finger. Or was that an earlier episode? It's all running together. The point is: I recognize this behavior.
How To Get Away With Therapy
Wes has trouble sleeping, so he goes to get some pills and makes a dumb offhand joke about killing himself. This doctor therefore has to keep him there until she deems him not a threat, and this turns into a) Laurel fighting to get him out of there when nobody else really cares that much and Annalise thinks maybe he should stay in there and cope with his anger issues; and b) Wes eventually getting out, but returning to her to make her the receiving end of some exposition about his Feelings. Most of them with regard to Annalise calling him "Christophe" and leaving a boatload of legal files at his front door that are supposed to reveal all to him. Because she can't just tell him. She has to make him sort through her recycling as well.
How To Get Away With No Sleeves
Frank's obsession with tank tops is really where he loses me. That, and his hands squeezing the life out of a pregnant girl. Those two things together are powerfully unsexy.
How To Get Away With Confessions
Laurel then decides to goad Frank into telling her all about his past misdeeds. She goes on a rant, too, about how she is annoyed with herself for finding his dangerous side attractive and implies she's ended up with her father even though she hates her father, and blah blah blah disappointment. Frank finally blurts out that he killed Lila. MOVEMENT!
But, of course, she asks him for details and he says nothing. And nothing. And later, nothing. He calls her to see why she's ignoring him, and MAYBE IT'S BECAUSE YOU SAID NOTHING, DUDE. Then she asks him if Annalise made him do it, and nothing. So basically, he confesses to this heinous crime, over which they killed someone ELSE, and then won't open his mouth and explain himself -- or, he'll say they need to talk, and THEN explain nothing. Needless to say, Frank's strategy here is full of stupid. If you can't tell her why you killed the girl, DON'T TELL HER. Not that I'm advocating... sigh. I guess if we are stuck with Frank, I don't want him to be a strangely dumb Frank.
How To Get Away With Asher
And then Asher makes this face. It doesn't matter why.
How To Get Away With Surveillance
You also need to know that someone -- and they either KNOW it's Philip, the Half-Blood Hapstall, or simply assume it -- is e-mailing them videos of what happened On That Fateful Night from around the mansion. And is trying to extort them for the big bucks. They are SO certain it's Philip, and that he's into it with Catherine, that I suspect it will turn out Caleb is behind the entire thing.
In the meantime, everyone is super scared they're going to get killed, and Annalise turns over the videos to the DA in exchange for immunity. It doesn't work initially, because the DA is not stupid and knows that if Annalise is giving him blackmail footage of her cronies running scared around a mansion the night someone died there, it probably means something bad. She has to pull LOTS of insane strings and eventually resort to underhanded tactics to get their immunity. There's also some malarkey where they pretend there is no way to tell when these videos were taken, and they MIGHT be saying they stripped all the files of their identifying data, or something, before they turned over the laptop? Except what happens when someone finds the originals? GUYS.
How To Get Away With More Flashbacks
So, back to the past: This is the trial in which Wes's mother was to be a witness. This man's fiancee was murdered, at which point it was revealed she was an FBI informant. And if you think young Charles Mahoney looks familiar...
How To Get Away With Wade
... it's because we once knew him as Hot Neighbor Wade. It is really, really criminal that this prison did not let him swan around shirtless. Did they not know the jewel that they had in there?!?!? #FREEWADE'SABS
Wes's mother worked on the cleaning crew of the building, and supposedly saw Wade in his office around the time he was supposedly killing his fiancée. They haven't revealed yet if Wade actually DID IT, but we do know Wes's mother was fed this lie and asked to repeat it in court, and that this made her nervous because of perjury and things. I don't know why she wasn't TOTALLY on board with releasing these abs back into the world.
How To Get Away With Guest Casting
These are Wade's parents. And my suspicion at first was that Adam Arkin did it, because you don't hire him for a role like this and then give him one or two racist lines per week and then let him leave. We still don't know whether Wade or Adam did it -- I admit it doesn't make sense for Adam to do the crime, then try and STOP his son from doing the time -- but OTHER THINGS ARE REVEALED that I will tell you later. He's not a nice cat. (Also, my Arkin Did It theory was borne of a time in which I thought maybe he also killed the mother so that there would be no eyewitness to exonerate his son, and he'd get off scot-free while his son rotted in jail. This part didn't pan out AS YOU WILL SEE.)
In the meantime, please know that a) I ALWAYS have to look up which Arkin is Adam and which Arkin is Alan; and b) the woman there, Roxanne Hart, played Arkin's wife on "Chicago Hope" eons ago. That can't be a coincidence.
How To Get Away With SMILING
Just in case the sense of foreboding wasn't strong enough, we get to see LOTS more about how chipper Annalise was back in the day.
How To Get Away With Wigs
Flashback Bonnie: The saddest clown.
How To Get Away With Asher
And then Asher makes this face. It doesn't matter why.
How To Get Away With B Plots
So. WHO CARES. But I'll try. I BELIEVE Annalise convinced Catherine to confess to shooting her while drugged up? Regardless, C is in jail. And Caleb goes to ask her if she and Philip killed their parents, and Catherine is HELLA MAD about it and won't speak to him. Caleb is depressed, but then he and Michaela have some more sex, which works out nicely for both of them until he disappears without a trace. So: She had sex with her gay fiancé, with Eggs 911, and now with Caleb, all of whom are gone. One is in the prison of his own life, one is in actual prison, and one is on the lam, getting killed, being held hostage, or maybe getting away with murder. Could Michaela's bits be the new Lady Mary's Vagina?
How To Get Away With Asher
And then Asher makes this face. It doesn't matter why.
How To Get Away With Cheating
And these two hook up. It makes sense; for whatever reason, Laurel has always been drawn to helping Wes, and him being on psych hold puts her squarely in his camp. She goes to him when she's upset about Frank, and the two of them take all Annalise's files and go to Ohio to find out the truth. It leads to tongue. Sometimes tongue IS truth.
How To Get Away With Dinner
Annalise wears this GREAT dress to cook Nate dinner, and looks as gorgeous as Viola ever has on this show.
How To Get Away With Beauty
LOOK AT HER. This is morning-after glow. She is resplendent. Sorry, Sam. No disrespect to the creepy and violent dead (okay, so some disrespect), but she never looked this good with you.
How To Get Away With Turquoise
That color is fab. She's also REALLY feeling it now that she's having sex with Nate again. Her clothes perk up almost immediately.
How To Get Away With Asher
And then Asher makes this face. It doesn't matter why.
How To Get Away With Stealing Paperwork
Laurel, in Ohio, found and tore out this page from the police files on Wes's mother's suicide. It alleges they thought he might've done it. She hides it from Wes and takes it to Annalise instead, blah blah blah, it's all filler while we wait around for Wes to find the page sitting on Annalise's desk and start to wonder if he's a psycho killer.
How To Get Away With Child Murder?
We then see lots of flashbacks of Wes standing over his dying mother's body, a knife in his hand. I feel like if he remembers this, he would be able to stop and think, "Oh, wait, moments before that, I was plunging the knife into her throat. THAT'S RIGHT." And so he could reasonably conclude that, lacking any memory of such, he is innocent. But Wes is suggestible, and I guess people black out from shock all the time. Or so TV teaches me. And TV would never, ever lie.
How To Get Away With Legs
Eve is in this up to her eyeballs, too. Most important is the microscopic length of the skirt she wears, which is also maybe only up to her eyeballs.
Here's the scoop: Wes's mother blew off testifying. Annalise calls her in and has her arrested by immigration, and then asks Eve to come help defend her, or something? Basically, Annalise uses her immigration status to convince her to testify. And it's when Eve shows up to play her part in all this that she learns Annalise is pregnant. She's not super thrilled about this. I think she figured Annalise would come back to her eventually? So, yeah, that skirt probably wasn't supposed to be professional. It was an Ulterior Motives skirt.
How To Get Away With Asher
And then Asher makes this face, and wears this face, and it doesn't matter why.
How To Get Away With Rubbing
Seriously, this is the best. Viola Davis squeezes his boob like three times in this scene, while also making a crack about his body being amazing. You know she was thinking, "Listen. These are the twin elephants in the room. Annalise would be all over them AND SO THEN SHALL I." Heroic character work, that.
How To Get Away With Asher
And then Asher makes this face. It doesn't matter why.
How To Get Away With Recovery
Annalise goes by Wes's apartment to... I don't know. Talk to him? Leave him more files without a word? And she gets attacked by Philip, who has broken in. Lucky for her, she's on the phone with Eve at the moment; Eve calls 911, Annalise gets away, whatever, all is well. But as this is happening, we get the truth about Wes's mother...
How To Get Away With Suicide
... which is, Annalise goes to talk to her, and it comes out that Wes's mother is basically just totally terrified of Adam Arkin. And somehow she sees no way out of any of this but to say, "Protect my boy," and then drive a knife into her own throat. It's really violent and awful, and we get SO MANY SHOTS of her lying on the floor with blood burbling out of her neck and yet not being dead. Annalise freaks out and begins to call 911, then stops and does nothing. I think she realizes that the woman... you know what, y'all can speculate. I think it's because Annalise realized Wes might be safer with her dead? And that she really wanted to die and was probably beyond help anyway, and that if she lived, it would connect Annalise to this and raise more questions than it answered. I think. I don't... Hmm.
Anyhoo, as she's leaving the mom there to bleed out, she realizes Wes is coming home and is going to watch this whole thing end, and it makes her feel shitty and guilty. This is why she took Wes under her wing and got invested in his law career. It IS pretty much the least she can do. Although, given how all this went, it might have been NICER if she'd gotten him into Yale.
How To Get Away With Not Kissing
No, Frank is not putting the moves on Bonnie (who still likes Asher, even though she told him to buzz off for what I assume she decided was his own good)(also he was being needy and kind of loopy about deciding his father was murdered). She has eavesdropped and figured out that he killed Lila, and so Frank is just doing a little tit-for-tat threatening here, reminding Bonnie not to get on her high horse about that in the very spot where she offed Rebecca. They are both HORRIBLE PEOPLE and this basement basically needs to go up in flames.
It's Bonnie who guesses that it was for Sam, and not Annalise, and Frank wordlessly confirms it but still doesn't explain it, because there are too many episodes left yet.
How To Get Away With Asher
And then Asher makes this face. It doesn't matter why.
How To Get Away With Oliver
This just proves that Oliver is the only good person on the entire show. All these jerks are holed up at Annalise's trying not to die, and he brings them pizza. Oliver, you are a saint. You are THE ONLY NECESSARY ONE HERE.
How To Get Away With Threats
Adam Arkin's character really is gross. He's CONSTANTLY referencing Annalise's race, and whether she's proving her people worthy. He must have had to bathe in lye after shooting these scenes. Here, she puts the pieces together and realizes Wes's mother feared him because he raped her and is actually Wes's father. Now, this is a HUGE leap of logic -- i would have just assumed she was afraid of him because she witnessed HIM committing murder -- but Annalise, it seems, is correct. Adam Arkin is angry. Adam Arkin fires her. Poor Hot Neighbor Wade is still languishing in prison, by the way, and we haven't seen him but for that one episode. Is he getting enough time to do his sit-ups? Did they put in a pull-up bar? WHAT OF HIS MUSCLE TONE?
How To Get Away With Crashing
And so Annalise gets hit by a car, really badly. I had a wild hair that maybe Eve did it because Eve resented the pregnancy, but Eve doesn't seem like this big of a douchenozzle so I'm back to wondering if Adam Arkin is behind all this. Anyhoo... guys, this is wrenching. Annalise loses the baby. And it's heartbreaking. The show also keeps SHOWING the dead baby. You know the death of the baby is nigh, but we sit through the C-section and the removal of the fetus and the CPR attempts and Annalise's face, and I actually couldn't watch. I had an emergency C-section, and although it was due to early labor and fetal distress rather than an accident like this, and my babies lived, it was also the scariest moment of my life and Dylan didn't cry right away and I will never, ever forget. ANYWAY. This isn't about me but somewhere I realized I wasn't breathing during these scenes.
Nor was the baby, which they laid on Annalise's chest so she could say her goodbyes, and we got LOTS of cutaways to the baby's face, which... it was a lot of dead infant. Maybe more than was necessary, although it did squeeze some moisture out of my eyes.
How To Get Away With Family Pics
A nurse who plays her part WAY too matter-of-factly comes in and asks if they want a family photo, because often that's the only memento they have of their child. This is actually a true thing that happens in NICUs and delivery wards, but it's not usually quite this... well, it was somewhat insensitively staged. Annalise is shown in present-day crying over this photo, and I must say, it's affecting.
Annalise also blames herself for not handing off the case and staying home, and we see the beginning of her pulling away from Sam. I don't know that we really needed to have the fracture in their relationship turn out to be HER doing? Couldn't he just have been a dink? I mean, clearly he IS a dink, but I liked him better as a full dink and not a provoked one.
In present-day, Annalise, as usual, tells Wes a partial truth. She doesn't mention the baby or her pregnancy or the TINY detail that she decided not to call an ambulance for his mother, but does tell him that a) she blames herself for his mother dying and faults her own ambition and refusal to let the case go; and b) tells him that Darth Arkin is his father.
How To Get Away With Quitting
Connor wants to transfer to Stanford, because he hates everyone. Oliver quit his job, because he's bored there and Annalise is more exciting or some shit. And Asher spent some time living with them in the aftermath of the Sinclair murder, because he was falling apart, and as a consequence he wants to be pals with them.
How To Get Away With Asher
And then Asher makes this face because he will never be as close to Connor and Oliver as they are to each other, unless he wants to get funky.
How To Get Away With Asher
And THEN Asher makes THIS face, and it doesn't matter why.
How To Get Away With Making Out
And THEN Asher EATS Michaela's face. I will tell you why: She's lonely for Caleb, and feeling guilty that she didn't tell him Philip was on the loose, and Asher is feeling lost and alone and left out of everyone's bonds. And they're both DRUNK OFF THEIR TREES.
How To Get Away With Word Vomit
Laurel is ALSO wicked blotto. So she turns up at Annalise's and starts blathering, and of COURSE, she tells her -- incorrectly -- that Frank told her he killed Lila on Annalise's orders (we know he never said that; he just never denied it when SHE said it). Oh, Laurel. Frank told Bonnie, "She can never know," meaning Annalise, and so cue up the boozehounds howling.
How To Get Away With Mama
So Annalise packs up and flees to Cicely Tyson's house. Because if you go anywhere when you find out your henchman rather than your husband killed his pregnant lover, and your henchman let you THINK the husband did it, it's to the house of the mother who once burned down your residence around your creepy, molesty uncle. Basically, everyone on this show needs, and has, a sounding board who is somebody that has had a hand in the death of another. It's a regular homicide support group.