How To Get Away With Murder Season 1 Episode 11 recap.
Who here likes Annalise way better now that she is hiding the murder of her husband than before she was an avowed criminal?
Like, talk about a long game. Everything they set up with Annalise in the beginning – her inner turmoil and pain, her separation from her students, from her associates – is beginning to come to roost, but man, what a gamble. Because now, I’m in whole-hog, but the show was counting on the interns being the draw for the first nine episodes and I don’t know if they were.
But this? This I could get used to. First of all, we’re with Annalise all the way. I don’t know if it was just that bleakest of bleak Christmas montages, where eventually, so similarly and so different from everyone at Christmas, she sees herself as unworthy of food and can only have a KitKat. Or the fact that this week’s case (“we need some fun around here”) was designed to make her look good by comparison. Remember what she told us. “This is how the cycle of abuse works.” She knows because…well, we all know why she knows. She finds a way to defend her client, looking the other way at everything ugly.
That’s a show. It just took a while to get there.
And then, to fill it out (because we don’t get a fantastic, underplayed scene between two highly decorated award-winning actresses until late in the game, as though anyone would dare to say this was not the golden age of television), we check in with the kids over Christmas.
Now, can I say how much fun this was (even if it might have been a wee bit more effective last week)? May we never have another repeating flash-forward again. I loved everything I saw, from the Grand Rapids family house that’s just so happy Connor’s growing up, to Laurel’s decorated excess of a Florida Christmas (they’re always making up for something, those warm weather people) to the epic meltdown at Gracie mansion. I have not loved all the ways we’ve checked in on these kids and their neuroses, but I love that they’re coming apart most when they’re separated, because that makes perfect sense. Did that really happen? Who am I?
Related: I am supposed to continue to find Rebecca sketchy as f*ck, right? She doesn’t DO anything, she spends every second with Wes being like, “Yes, I agree with you, I am your Stepford girlfriend, let’s have sex to forget”, she has nothing to go back to and no life to resume and it creeps the HELL out of me. I assume this is intentional.
But she is as worried as anyone about the fact that (spoiler, if you got this far) Sam’s body has been found, so the mayhem will continue. I know the pace of the show has to be go go go, but I could have lived for one minute longer in that world where Annalise and Hannah look at each other in that sad understanding that the man they both loved wasn’t a perfect person.
Also, as someone who is a little too obsessed with those women-locked-in-the-basement style stories (I reread “Room” once a year and Lainey is currently considering never associating with me again), I thought this was a pretty novel new twist.
Furthermore, Frank as fixer is fairly boring, but Frank as fixer via having to hang out with Asher as distraction is pretty great. Extra points for saying that Bonnie’s family is ‘crazy’, as though we didn’t just see all the crazy families all episode long. How related is she to Sam? Somewhat, right?
So now. Now I’m on board and our show begins. It just took a hell of a minute to get here.
Attached - Viola Davis at Sundance last week.
