Welcome to this week’s How to Get Away With Murder recap! HTGAWM, also known as the show where one no-nonsense lawyer teaches a bunch of up and comers the ways of the justice system, with her students trying to awake and alive despite having diets that consist almost entirely of instant ramen!
This week on the show, more crimes were committed and the overarching mystery from the show’s premiere got even more delicious.
As always, our recaps are sectioned in The Plot, The Gay and The Ugly so keep reading to find out what went down.
The Plot
There are two murder cases on Annalise’s mind this week, as the talented and intimidating lawyer has to ponder whether or not she’s going defend the school’s star quarterback in the murder case of fellow student Lila Stanguard.
But, before Annalise can make a decision she has to go and bust out a client’s friend out of jail in the name of good business practices, she explains to her grumbling gaggle of recruits.
Things aren’t easy, breezy and beautiful though as on their way out of the precinct they’re surrounded by SUVs and several government officials jump out and inform them that the freed woman is not who she says she is. No, she’s not just a highly strung suburban mother who got caught being ‘intimate’ with a stranger on a park bench, she’s actually a wanted fugitive whose fingerprints were found on a fragment of a bomb that killed a janitor during a protest demonstration several decades ago.
Annalise takes the case only to discover that plot twist! It was the ringleader (who is already in prison) who was behind it all. They go to visit the man, who, despite having been locked up for years, seems pleased as punch to see his ex-activist teammate. She also happens to be his ex-activist…lover? Wild. They hold hands across the table and stare longingly into each other’s eyes and the man agrees to take the fall for her if they put him on the stand in court. Ah, middle-aged heterosexual love is a beautiful thing.
As promised, he goes on the stand but because nothing can ever go right for these people, he dumps the defendant right in it. ‘She was the one who suggested the bombs’ the dirty, no-good criminal explains, incriminating her and potentially seeing her go to prison for 10 years. His betrayal is soon explained though as Annalise accuses the man of having spoken to the government to set up a deal. She’s right, because this is Annalise Flippin’ Keating we’re talking about, and he soon buckles under her questions to reveal that he’d be given early release for testifying against her client.
They break for a few hours and Michaela uncovers some pretty big evidence. But before she can even finish her sentence, Annalise gets a phone call from Frank saying that their client has gone missing. We skip across town to see the client and the man who “betrayed” her sitting next to each other on a bus, kissing and all loved up. Love’s young dream.
With that case flushed down the toilet, Annalise still has to figure out whether or not she’s going to take the quarterback’s case, which involves enlisting her cop friend/ex-lover to find out how her husband is involved in the case. She needs to find out if her husband’s alibi checks out so that if he didn’t kill Lila then maybe the quarterback did.
‘It checks out’ the cop tells her after a bit of investigating, but in his actual sleuthing scenes we find out that not only is her husband’s alibi a lump of old baloney, there was actually a six hour window during which he could have killed the girl. It’s all very, very messy.
The quarterback meanwhile, makes his case to Annalise and her students. He tells a cock and bull story about cheating on Lila with Rebecca. Wrong move buddy boy, Rebecca is actually Wes (one of Annalise’s students)’ next door neighbour and in an effort to bust her out of jail, where she’s being held as a suspect in the murder already, Wes goes to see her. Rebecca doesn’t want to hear any of it though, unfortunately, and she calls the guards to have Wes taken away. He manages to shout ‘the quarterback is pinning it on you!’ as he leaves she pays any attention to that, but it might have cause more trouble than it’s worth.
Luckily for Rebecca, Wes pleads with Annalise to help her out because she’s poor and needs the best team she can get. The law is meant to work for everybody, not just the rich kids and those who are incredibly privileged. Aw, he’s got a good heart in him that lad. Annalise agrees and takes on the case. It might be a short one though as by the time they get to the jail to see Rebecca, she’s already confessed to Lila’s murder.
But did Rebecca actually do it? And how does she fit into everything? It’s not clear but we do see Rebecca again when the show has one of its flash-forward scenes. Wes, Laurel and Connor are trying to move the body of Annalise’s freshly dead husband, Michaela is crying in the corner and Rebecca looks shaken up. Laurel manages to talk Michaela round though and the team pushes on to ditch the corpse.
Their plan hits a bit of a snag though as whilst they’re putting the body in the car, Michaela makes the shocking revelation that her engagement ring is missing, presumably lost somewhere in that body bag, at the crime scene or somewhere just as incriminating in between. She freaks out, having wanted no part in this in the first place whilst the others manage to convince her to go with them to a bonfire which will serve as their alibi.
The Gay
There was plenty of queer activity in this week’s episode, but I can’t say that it was particularly good. We meet Michaela’s fiancé Aiden at which Connor makes various ‘nudge nudge, wink wink’ suggestive jokes given that he and Aiden knew each other in boarding school.
For reasons I can’t adequately describe other than ‘Connor wanting to be an asshole’, he tells Michaela that he and Aiden hooked up back when they were teenagers. It’s heartbreaking really, to watch one man effectively get outed and to see his fiancé realise that she didn’t know him as well as she thought she did.
Aiden promises that he is Totally 100% Heterosexual and things between them seem to be fine, but Michaela threatens that she’d destroy his career in politics if he ever cheats on her.
The Ugly
Rather than having issue with the way that Michaela handled the Aiden/Connor bombshell – her reaction was valid and she never says she’d have an issue with him being bisexual, just an issue with him being gay since she wouldn’t want her future husband to be a gay man which is understandable – I actually have more of an issue with the missed opportunity.
Bisexual Aiden would have been brilliant! The writers could have written him as bisexual and left him and Michaela happy together, without doing the typical ‘cheating bisexual’ trope.
So it’s not a huge deal, just a minor sadface of an event. I’ll be back next week with a new recap nonetheless.
