How to Get Away with Murder: “It’s Called the Octopus”

This review contains some notes on last week’s episode, as we play catch-up on the new season.

Sometimes I am irritated by how the HTGAWM title hardly contributes to the premise of the episode (i.e. “Freakin Whack-a-Mole,”), but last week’s “She’s Dying” was spot on. Gripping her stomach trying to stop the bleeding, our anti-hero, Annalise lay seemingly dying on the floor. We are, once again, transported to the siblings’ (lovers?) mansion, where Connor is hovering over Annalise’s dead body while the others force him to leave the scene. Turns out, Wes wasn’t the only one running from the house, eliminating my proposed theory that Wes was on his own. Nope.

This week we have more dealings with the Hapstall case. I should explain the ‘lovers’ quip. Turns out, there is now a motive for this case. A photograph of the two siblings looking into each other’s eyes, going for the kiss, surfaces in the tabloids. SIBCEST! scream the headlines. Now Annalise is unsure of her clients’ innocence, as she should be. Previously, Caleb unluckily or conveniently went for a run during the murder of his aunt and his DNA was found at the crime scene. He lied about where he was and Katherine covered for him. Now, he has been exonerated from the murder charge of his aunt, but I am convinced he murdered their parents as some sort of act of love for Katherine. Perhaps they are star-crossed lovers, thwarted by their shared mother and father? I’m buying into the whole SIBCEST thing—might regret it later, but right now it seems accurate. Additionally, their housekeeper was the one who sent in the photograph of them. All very sketchy indeed. I would not put it past How to Get Away with Murder, which has turned all other ABC show plot lines upside down on their heads and shown that nothing is impossible, to throw incest into an already haphazard mix.

And the series continues to make interesting moves with the lead characters. Matt McGory is getting the part he deserves. It’s not that I’m rooting for Asher to be the bad guy, but I want him to have a little more screen time and a more developed character—both seem to be happening. I enjoyed Asher’s bon mots last season from time to time, but now, for me, they serve no real purpose. Him working with that unpleasant prosecutor, Ms. Sinclair, doesn’t seem to be a great idea, but I am excited to see where this goes. Although, in this episode, we saw Ms. Sinclair, dead on the downstairs mansion floor, eyes gouged out, so it may not go that far. The real question is: What is Trotter Lake? And who is Tiffany?

Meanwhile, Wes and Nate present one of the most unexpected duos of the show. Annalise dresses in her sexiest outfit and makes one final attempt to restore things with Nate, but is shot down. No surprise there. But what is surprising, is that as Nate shuts the door on Annalise, he turns around to Wes and says, “Im in.” In for what? Are Nate and Wes the perpetrators of Annalise’s shooting? Is the phone call he made asking about her safety a decoy?

And it wouldn’t be HTGAWM without sex, sex and more sex. Enter, Levi AKA Michaela’s new boyfriend, AKA Rebecca’s foster brother, AKA the recipient of the “EGGS 911” text. That’s all we know right now, but I have a feeling he is here to stay. Last week Laurel tried to get in Frank’s pants, unsuccessfully, as he revealed a more sensitive side (“Until you get to know me this [his body] is off limits”), while also revealing a dark side. We already knew about that since he killed Lila. When will that information be unearthed?

As far as the case of the week, Annalise’s latest client is a woman who is accused of killing a client during one of her sex parties, Utopian Circle. The case has everyone in a tizzy—the accused, the clients of Utopian Circle, the Keating Five, and Annalise. With some thorough investigating by Connor and Michaela, it turns out the sex was not random, and that she slipped him a nitro-tryglycerine so it would react with his Viagra and cause a heart attack. She loved him, didn’t want to kill him, and only wanted his wife to find out so he would leave her. Well, it backfired and the heart attacked killed him. Annalise gets the case thrown out by blaming his wife for the mixing of medications. Case closed.

The case itself was kind of a bore, but what it did show (once again) is the lengths to which Annalise is willing to go to win a case. She says to her client Tanya, almost threateningly, “I never lose a case.” We keep encountering a theme within the show, and especially this season, where people are starting to discover that Annalise is both self-centered and selfish. She does have feelings, but she is certainly not empathetic. And, oftentimes, she only looks out for herself, making her the perfect anti-hero of this show.

The question remains, did she go too far? or was she just in the wrong house at the wrong time?