How to Get Away With Murder: Kill Me, Kill Me, Kill Me

Posted on November 21, 2014

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Bunch of morons on ABC TV’s “How to Get Away With Murder”

 

Okay, you got us on the final reveal, How To Get Away With Murder. For all our bitching about how silly things have gotten lately, we can’t deny the loudness of our gay gasps at the end.

And if we were being perfectly honest, we’d have to admit that we enjoyed the whole hour, even though it rehashed a lot of what we’ve seen already; in some cases, many times. It seems that when you take what used to be a bunch of rapidly edited, out-of-order clips and edit them together in order, you can wind up with a really tense, compelling story that makes … well, some sort of sense, anyway.

But let’s be clear: the minute you start thinking about anything you saw last night is the minute it really starts falling apart. In retrospect, it makes perfect sense that Wes is Sam’s killer and that Annalise mentored him through the process of disposing of the body and the evidence, because that’s been the nature of their relationship from the beginning and Sam’s murder is the culmination of Wes’s whole “down a dark path” arc. Thematically and from a character perspective, that works really well. But every single other character behaved in the most ridiculous and nonsensical manner. Forget why Sam would try to strangle Rebecca right in front of four other people, as if they’d all just wait for him to finish. That’s the least of the silliness. It’s the very idea upon which this entire show hangs that doesn’t make a lick of sense; namely, why anyone in that room who didn’t kill Sam would jump right into becoming an accessory to his murder.  “Oh my God, we all have to cooperate or we’re all going to go to jail for MURDER!” Not… really?

Why would all of these supposedly brilliant law students taking a class the professor actually calls “How to Get Away with Murder” come to that conclusion? Rebecca’s the one who broke into the house and accessed Sam’s computer. Laurel, Conor and Michaela had no motive or reason to kill Sam and there’s absolutely no physical evidence to pin the murder on them. This is all quite clearly on Wes and Rebecca, and the other people in the room can all reasonably claim to have stumbled into the scene. Why wouldn’t any of them – especially Michaela, who was freaking out the most – just say “I’m sorry, I have nothing to do with any of this. I have to call the cops?” How would Michaela, Connor or Laurel possibly be on the hook for Sam’s killing? It’s arguable that even Wes could easily get off if it can be proven that Sam tried to kill Rebecca – which it should, unless she has an amazingly unbruisable neck.

See what we mean? The entire story hangs on a premise that makes absolutely no sense at all. We honestly though this story was heading toward a “Murder on the Orient Express”-style reveal, where several people were involved in Sam’s murder for various reasons of their own. Maybe that would have been a cliche, but it would have allowed the story to make a hell of a lot more sense (not to mention give it more emotional resonance) than to just have everybody sort of stumble into the scene and do a lot of running around screaming until one of them kills Sam on the spur of the moment.

And then Annalise comes home, finds her husband’s dead body and … what? Sits there and waits for the murderer to return so she can tell him exactly what to do? She would have absolutely no way of knowing who killed Sam because his murder turned out to be a fairly random event. She certainly wouldn’t have had any reason to suspect his killer would come back. So why would she just sit there with her husband’s dead body, every second that ticks by making it more likely she’ll be accused of his murder?

Except…

The final reveal was a game changer, paying off the creepy dom/sub thing that Annalise and Wes have been engaging in all season. To get rid of Sam’s body, she convinced Wes to railroad the other students into becoming accessories after the fact. Maybe the show didn’t do a good enough job of explaining why they’d agree to it, but it’s a hell of a thing to reveal about Wes and Annalise, and how far they’re willing to go. But wait. Why exactly would Annalise do all this? Why didn’t she call the cops on Wes? Why complicate things even further? Because she’s been grooming Wes to murder her husband right from the very beginning. She sat in the dark with that dead body because it was the culmination of all her plans and she was just waiting for her puppet to come back to the scene, like she knew he would. It’s the only thing that explains all her actions, from her weird obsession with Wes to her reasons for staying with Sam for as long as she did. There was something a little stagey about their final argument, as if she was deliberately pushing and poking him to get him as riled up as possible, knowing she could get Wes and Rebecca into the house later that night to face a drunken, angry possible murderer. With the kind of devotion she inspires from Wes and the obsession he has with Rebecca, it was practically a given that things would end the way they did. Of course, they also could have ended with anyone else in that room dead as well, but that’s the kind of person Annalise is. In a show full of horrible people, she turned out to be the most horrible of all. And she roped almost all of the carefully chosen personalities of her team into becoming murderers or accessories to murder.  And we still don’t know who killed Lila. For all we know, Annalise’s scheme goes THAT far back. How do you get away with murder? You hand select a group of students who worship and fear you and then you manipulate them into committing and covering up a murder for you, based on the very things you taught them. Annalise found out about Sam and Lila, murdered her, and then set up his murder. It would explain every single one of her actions so far, including her wildly unethical work on Rebecca’s case. It’s THE TITLE OF THE FREAKING SHOW.

So one again, this entire show comes down to Viola, which is great for her, but it does tend to make the rest of the cast of characters  – and the story itself, at times – come off incredibly weak. We suppose we’ll be back to see if our theory about Annalise is true, but despite the fun of last night’s episode, all the show’s problems remain.

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