Do you know who anyone really is?

by Andrea Braxton

Professor Annalise Keating asks her class, “Do you know who anyone really is?” As far as How To Get Away With Murder is concerned, the answer is no.

After last week’s pilot episode, I had pegged Annalise’s husband, Sam, as a poor, devoted sop with an unfaithful wife. It turns out that he sleeps with his students and that Annalise suspects that he murdered his former student Lila Stangard. Annalise actually seems a little scared of him sometimes, which makes me wonder what sort of man he truly is.

Annalise’s character is conflicted but fascinating to watch. She is vulnerable with her boyfriend, Nate, but she won’t hesitate to blackmail him. She doesn’t care if her clients are guilty, but she panics about her husband’s suspected guilt. She is angered by Sam’s infidelity, but she is also unfaithful to him. I’m left wondering if I’ll ever figure out just who she is, and I like the mystery.

The court case was my favorite plot line in this episode. While it wasn’t the most dominant plot line in the episode, the writers used this case to bring out more details about the characters and to perpetuate the theme that it’s hard to know who someone truly is. An heiress is found stabbed to death in her bed, and from the moment her husband lounges comfortably on top of her blood, I just knew he was the murderer. I was wrong. Laurel figures out that the husband’s hunting background doesn’t fit the inexperienced stab wounds, and Annalise actually prove his innocence by having him confess to the murder of his first wife.

As in the first episode, the students go to extreme measures to impress Annalise. Wesley proves he has some worth after all, and I’m rooting for him to stay innocent. However, based on the scenes set in the future, he shows that he can and will be corrupted. Like the pilot, the episode starts in the future with the students arguing about disposing the body and then returns to the present. There are short moments where it jumps back into the future to shed some new light on the situation, such as how Wesley lies about the outcome of the coin toss to decide how they will deal with the body.

The episode touches briefly on Michaela, Asher, and Connor–long enough for Michaela to be annoying, for Asher to remain forgettable, and for Connor to show that it might be possible for him to care about someone other than himself. Laurel gets a surprising amount of screen time as she tries to get Annalise to actually learn her name and not think of her as the one her sleazy associate Frank wants to sleep with. I was pleased when she succeeded.

Wesley’s mysterious neighbor Rebecca is somehow connected to Lila Stangard’s boyfriend and gets arrested toward the end of the show for Lila’s murder. Although I thought that the students were acting on Annalise’s orders when they burned the body of a man who looks a lot like Sam, now I’m not so sure if Annalise is even involved. It seems like Rebecca might be the one responsible for the murder.

My one criticism about this episode is that, with the exception of Annalise, the show relies heavily on stereotypes. We have the doe-eyed underdog, the preppy overachiever, the cocky jerk, and the tough-but-damaged girl next door, just to name a few. Michaela and Frank, especially, are a little too predictable for my taste.

But this episode is a definite improvement on the pilot. It wrecked most of my inferences about the characters and about the various plots, which made me second guess any new assumption I made. The episode played with my perceptions, and I enjoyed being shocked every time.

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Andrea Braxton graduated from the University of Missouri in 2013 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and an English writing minor. She lives in Baltimore, MD and works as an editorial assistant for an educational publishing company. Andrea wrote recaps for TV shows for the VoxTalk blog, and if she could, she would watch TV all day. She’s addicted to Netflix and any show with a good cast and tons of drama. She has a publishing blog at http://abraxtonwriter.wordpress.com.

Photo courtesy of TV Fanatic.