'How To Get Away With Murder' Recap: Controlled Chaos
Is How To Get Away With Murder sponsored by Jenga? Because the entire thing is like a big tower of lies where people keep plucking old lies from the bottom and placing new lies on the top. Obviously one of the great pleasures of watching HTGAWM (and playing Jenga, for that matter) is the unbearable yet addictive tension as we brace for certain disaster. For nearly 20 episodes now we’ve watched these characters forge impossible alibis, lies, and double crosses and it’s only a matter of time before the whole thing comes crashing down around them.
“Meet Bonnie” may have been the first episode where things reallllly started teetering. Basically it was a big ol’ Scramble Fiesta, as stories began crumbling and everybody pivoted wildly to create new and more audacious fabrications just to keep themselves safe. Seriously, it was straight-up difficult to keep everything straight, but the episode left me with a sort of exhilaration… I may not be able to follow every single twist and turn, but at this point we probably should just embrace the chaos.
It’s saying something that an episode without too many shocking reveals was still this riveting. Obviously plausibility went out the window in the pilot, so at this point we’re just experiencing a heightened scenario where tons of brilliant, unscrupulous people double-, triple-, quadruple-cross each other every week. Until somebody can provide me with a proper flowchart of where everyone currently stands, let’s talk about what went down this week!
We began with that greenish flash-forward, which continued the weekly trend of simply adding more people into the mix (as opposed to, you know, explaining how Annalise gets shot). In this case, both Bonnie and Asher were seen leaving the scene of the crime as well! So, clearly whatever happens between now and then doesn’t prevent these two from being co-conspirators later on. Which is kind of nice to know? They do make a cute couple.
Then we flash-cut back to present times, when Asher was just about to testify against Annalise in some kind of hearing to allow the mean prosecutor lady to wiretap Annalise’s office. Except then Asher started having flashbacks to Bonnie tearfully “confessing” to murdering Sam in that parking structure last week…
And if we’re being real, Bonnie NAILED her performance. She was just open-face sobbing while describing how Sam had tried to sexually assault her, and how she had no choice but to fight him off, and how she had to cover it up because the system never believes rape victims, etc. And because Asher has a heart and soul he immediately took pity on her, which would end up paying off in her favor: Back in the present he stormed out of that hearing without saying anything against Annalise. Phew for now!
Still, the damage had been done. Now the entire group knew that Asher was prepared to be a witness against Annalise, and by extension THEM. Bonnie obviously thought that a false confession would prey upon Asher’s weakness for her but it didn’t matter to Annalise, she was just 100 percent pissed about the whole thing. There’s nothing worse than believing you’d gotten away with covering up a murder only to have some law student bro muck things up, you know? Anyway, the entire house was in disarray, the students were bickering, Connor was drinking beer on the job, just tons of meltdowns. A regular week, really.
To add insult to injury, Prosecutor Emily was still trying to get one over on Annalise in the Hapstall case by bringing that dead rich lady’s testimony back into the trial. So that was the gang’s task this week: Figure out how to undermine the dead witness’ credibility so that it could be thrown out again. So, out came the bankers boxes full of evidence.
Annalise got mad at Michaela for talking dirty on the phone to Levi, mostly because by this time Frank and Annalise had figured out just who Levi was (bad news, in their opinion) and he should not be allowed to talk dirty to anybody, let alone Michaela. House rules!
Then Laurel and Frank took a break from doing their usual unscrupulous tasks to have noisy, chaotic sex in the basement where they knocked everything over and squealed a lot. This house is truly unclean.
The main thing the gang discovered about that dead aunt was that she ranted to a policeman using racial slurs. She seemed like a very unchill lady in general, good riddance. But would this be enough to get her testimony thrown out?
Meanwhile Asher’s plea deal for immunity was in jeopardy and his mean dad wanted him to sign new papers or something, and it hurt Asher’s feelings that the mean dad seemed more interested in keeping HIMSELF safe than actually helping Asher. And forgive me for not totally understanding this part, but it seemed like the entire reason Asher had gotten embroiled in this was because of something in his past that he was trying to get out of. I think it has to do with the picture of that lady on his cell phone? Anyway, that’s a secret for another time, I guess.
Then Oliver showed up for his weekly hacking sesh, and he discovered that the racist lady video had an extended director’s cut in which she admitted that she hadn’t actually witnessed anything personally to do with the murder. (I loved when Oliver joked that he should be on Annalise’s payroll considering how many cases he’s helped solve. At the very least she should give him a nice gift card to Chili’s or something, that would seem fair.) Also Connor told Oliver that he loved him, which I think was supposed to be romantic but it loses points because Connor’s a total psycho a lot of the time.
Unfortunately, Annalise’s new extended director’s cut video was not allowed into evidence, mostly because it was clearly an illegal acquisition. There was a super weird moment when the female defendant shouted at the judge to rule in her favor because as women of color they had to fight a system that always works against them, and the judge agreed that the system was messed up but had to do her job anyway. This scene matched up with an earlier one in which Annalise explained to Asher that he would never be able to put himself in her shoes because he’s a white man, and the system is designed to always back up his side of the story. These were two very thought-provoking moments in an otherwise chaotic hurricane of drama!
So then Wes and Levi tracked down that gravedigger that Frank was friends with, and at gunpoint demanded to know where Rebecca’s body was. But the grave digger denied knowing anything and just mentioned that Frank had borrowed his storage unit key. So the next thing we knew, Wes was stealing a ring off of Frank’s key ring right in plain sight. Good thing Frank had conspicuously set his keys down on a desk in front of everybody!
As it turned out, he and Bonnie had both promised Annalise to fix this situation; Frank would handle Levi and Bonnie would handle Asher. To do this, Bonnie simply met Asher at a bar, got real weepy again, and then said she was in love with him. He returned the sentiment, but then used it against her: He loved her so much he was going to turn her in so that she wouldn’t have to feel guilt anymore. Whoops! That was not what she was going for at all.
As for Frank, he planted meth in Levi’s car and got him arrested! Classic Frank.
Meanwhile Annalise was still feeling bugged by the Nate situation, and confessed to him that his wife had actually asked her to kill her. But again, he still wasn’t super stoked with Annalise, and took this news pretty neutrally. Like, “Okay. Cool.”
And again she showed up at his apartment tearfully prostrating herself before him, pleading that she’ll never hurt him again. While he still seemed dubious, he at least admitted that he’d been working with Wes, so clearly he was starting to come around a bit.
Speaking of Wes, it was now time for he and the gang to uncover what Frank had been storing in his buddy’s storage locker! The whole thing was as exciting as Storage Wars except with corpses. But after much cringing and sad-hugging, the gang discovered that the suitcase in question was not full of a corpse, but rather a bunch of useless junk.
See, no body! Just several hundred thousand dollars, which Frank keeps in a suitcase in a grave digger’s storage locker. Nothing to see here. (I’m starting to think Frank is a weirdo.) But as we learned in a flashback, Frank knew they would come here, so he arranged for this whole thing to happen, just so that everyone would think Wes was crazy. And it worked. Suddenly everyone was mad at him for hanging out with meth dealers and dragging them to storage facilities to look at suitcases full of money. In other words, Wes was trash now. Another victory for Frank!
So then Annalise sat Asher down for one last Hail Mary pass in order to keep him from testifying against Bonnie. And what she did could be considered unusual: She showed him a videotape of the time Bonnie was forced to appear in child pornography with her father. Which, in my opinion that is not a great video to make. But another bad thing about this video in particular? The nightmare clown doll in the background! Truly horrible.
But anyway, assuming this video was real (on this show anything’s possible), we learned something major and very sad about Bonnie, and now Asher had extra incentive to protect her from the authorities. And he certainly seemed disturbed by what he saw. So, uh, yay?
We concluded with the green flash-forward, which involved Bonnie stopping off at a gas station to take a hobo shower (the fact that she had blood on her clothes was supposed to probably make us think she’d shot Annalise?). But when she got back outside, Asher was no longer in the car…
Because he was now at the police station! And he wanted to “make a statement”! That was obviously a vague way to end it, but still… Asher remained an x-factor, even in the future. After sitting out of Season 1′s main conspiracy, he was clearly making up for lost time.
“Meet Bonnie” was nothing less than a dizzying whirlwind of lies, truths, and manipulations. Though it can be frustrating to watch this show on a week-to-week basis (in that my short-term memory is not great and also I reaaaallly wanna know what happens next!), part of me is glad I can’t binge it, as that kind of stress can’t be good for my health. But this episode managed to keep the thrills coming while also getting us more invested in who these people are and what makes them tick. I just hope that when the Jenga tower finally falls, there’ll still be enough show left to care about. But with characters like this, it shouldn’t be a problem.
What did YOU think about “Meet Bonnie”?
How To Get Away With Murder airs Thursdays at 10 p.m. on ABC.
