The identity of Sam’s murderer isn’t the biggest surprise in the mid-season finale.
by Andrea Braxton
The highly anticipated mid-season finale begins with one of the ugliest fights I’ve ever seen on TV. Annalise starts packing her bags as Sam tells her not to leave. “Your words mean nothing to me!” Annalise yells. She is fed up with his lies. After that, the couple competes to see who can say the most hurtful thing. Annalise tells the sordid details of her affair with Nate, but I think Sam won the hurting contest by saying, “You’re nothing but a piece of ass.” After years of marriage, that had to sting.
Annalise storms out of the house just as Rebecca arrives to get Sam’s backup phone files off of his computer and as Michaela arrives to use the trophy to get out of the class exam.
It’s the perfect storm. A drunk and furious Sam chases Rebecca through the house, but instead of calling the police, Michaela calls Wesley. Wesley, Connor, and Laurel speed over, and now everyone we know is present at the time of the murder is in the house.
I enjoyed how the show messed with my perception when Sam topples over the staircase and hits the ground. The students and I think he’s dead, which made no sense based on what we know from the previous episodes. How did blood get on the trophy and on Rebecca? I tried to process the plot holes as the students try to figure out what to do next.
Then Sam wakes up and starts choking Rebecca, leading Wesley to grab the trophy and kill him with a blow to the head. After all of the hype (and the hashtag #WhoKilledSam), I wasn’t too surprised. Wesley is the innocent underdog, but we see him compromise his morals for Annalise, Rebecca, and his fellow students. Plus, Rebecca was in danger, and he has already proven that he will do anything to protect her.
That was only 15 minutes into the show. The rest of the episode deals with the aftermath and recycles the future scenes from past episodes to show how they fit together. We learn how Bonnie and Asher end up sleeping together. We see how Sam’s body is disposed of in chronological order, and we see that Rebecca is willing to take the fall for the murder to protect Wesley.
Every character has different reactions to Sam’s death. Wesley, while remorseful, takes charge of the situation quickly. Connor goes into hysterics and then runs to Oliver for comfort. Laurel keeps a level head and uses her relationship with Frank to get the murder weapon away from the crime scene.
Michaela, desperate for some stability in her life, decides to sign the pre-nup that her future mother-in-law gives her. Priorities, girlfriend.
Meanwhile, Annalise, who doesn’t know that Sam is dead, runs to Nate. After having sex with him, Annalise sneaks out to go back home and leaves a long message on Sam’s phone about how she wants them to stay together, which confused me because, well, she just slept with another man and, on top of everything else he’s done, he just called her a piece of ass. But Annalise’s phone call to Sam was fitting with her character. She always comes back to Sam every single time she discovers a new lie he’s told her. She’s told him several times that she needs him, and although I think a part of her wants to leave him, another part of her feels lost and scared without him. Because her message to Sam is so lengthy, part of the recording is played as we see the students moving Sam’s body. Annalise is pouring her heart out to Sam, not knowing that he is dead.
When Sam won’t return her calls, Annalise fears that he has disappeared to do something foolish to avoid being a suspect in Lila’s murder. She calls Bonnie, who assembles the Keating Five, and Annalise tells them everything about Sam and Lila. “I need you to be as honest with the police as possible,” she says. Everyone agrees, even though every student but Asher knows that Sam is actually dead, not just missing.
At this point, I was disappointed. I wanted an “Oh my God!” moment, and I felt like revealing Wesley as the murderer so early in the episode wasn’t enough. Then, Wesley and Annalise share a strange look. Earlier in the episode, Wesley returns to the Keating household to get the bloodied trophy. We see him say, “I’m sorry” to Sam’s body. What we don’t see until the very end is Annalise sitting at the table, looking at the corpse. In response to Wesley’s “I’m sorry,” she simply says, “Don’t be.”
Now we know that Annalise is working with the students on covering up the murder. When the show returns on January 29, we’ll see how they are going to keep all of these lies straight.
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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.
