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Skanks Get Shanked
Original Air Date: Oct 15, 2015
Caitlin- Senior Staff Writer
caitlin@thetwocentscorp.com
Dear showrunners of How to Get Away with Murder: if someone is tuning into your show after missing a couple episodes, or (God forbid) being completely new to it, your recaps are not going to help them at all. I swear this one just made things more chaotic, and we didn’t need any more of that tonight.
Regardless, we open on future Annalise being aided by EMTs. Who summoned them? Could be the students, as they’re listening in. When they hear that there’s a diseased person on the property, they think it could be her. Guess they don’t know about the other little surprise they ran by.
Just How Crazy Evil Can High School Girls Be?
The case of the week starts on a pretty standard level, at least for this show. A girl named Zoey comes to the firm with her parents, tearfully saying that she and her friend Rachael bonded with two popular girls, and that their hidden dark sides eventually turned against them and forced her to kill her BFF. The prosecution is arguing that the girls were the ones who were brainwashed, and Annalise tells her decidedly disgruntled students to find errors in all their past cases.
Annalise learns enough to tear down another expert witness. Such attacks are her bread and butter. Conner tries to support Zoey, but Laurel thinks she’s a lying sociopath. She steals Zoey’s phone to prove it and hits pay dirt: a video of Zoey and the girls openly mocking the crime they committed. The horrified parents demand Annalise get rid of the evidence and she agrees, angering Conner, who now thinks- probably correctly- that Zoey should be locked up for the public’s safety.
Unfortunately, the video emerges at trial despite more of Frank’s dirty work. Somehow, Annalise gets to the verge of making it look like Zoey was still a pawn in the popular girls’ game, but then Zoey stands up and starts screaming about how they’d be nothing without her. She’s dragged away as Annalise’s track record suffers a major blow. The main reason for this is Conner. He was the one who gave the defense the footage. He feels angry at and trapped by Annalise, and their confrontation later shows it.
Will the Siblings Case Ever End?
Short answer: probably not. Long answer: for reasons we’ll see hinted at later, we’re not getting rid of these two any time this season. Michaela goes to prep Caleb and Catherine to take the stand in their own defense, which mostly means trying to figure out if they’re having sex or not. Even I don’t know what they’re saying for a while, but it turns out that they’re not. Better yet, a doctor can prove it because Catherine is a virgin.
Can Annalise Be a Killer?
Well, okay, first off, Annalise Keating absolutely COULD kill if she really wanted to. But this question has a specific context: Annalise is summoned by Nate’s wife, who does not actually want to murder in her sleep. On the contrary, she is suffering from her long battle against cancer and wants Annalise to help her perform an assisted suicide. The request haunts Annalise for the whole episode, distracting her from some things that are pretty hard to turn your attention from.
Annalise says she’ll consider getting the fatal medication and agrees not to tell Nate why the two met. She goes as far as getting Frank to obtain the pills for her, but in the end, she leaves them behind. She says has contemplated suicide multiple times during her life and essentially adds that if she should get to keep living being the kind of person she is, nobody else should flee their better lives. This is not a good show for getting a warm fuzzy feeling.
What Does Wes Know- or Just Think He Knows?
When we last saw Wes, Levi was telling him that Rebecca was dead. This sends him to Nate for help and gets both of them suspecting Frank. He also finds out that Levi lied to him, and throws him up against walls a bit more. But Levi insists that he just wants to track down who on this show full of potential killers murdered Rebecca. And so they go search a cemetery. Nothing comes of it, and when an angry Wes goes back to Nate, Nate just as angrily tells him Levi isn’t Rebecca’s foster brother at all.
What the **** Are You Doing, Asher(/Bonnie)?
After being absent from most of the dubious extracurricular activities thus far, Asher now stays away from everyone else for basically the entire episode. That’s because he’s with his dad, talking to the doomed lawyer. Only when Bonnie shows up to confront him do we learn that he’s been spilling what he thinks he knows: that Annalise killed Sam and justice should be served. How does Bonnie respond to his well-intentioned betrayal? By confessing to the murder herself. Why am I surprised?
And What the ****ing **** is Even Going On?
All the snippets of the future we’ve seen have answered very little about almost anything we actually want to know. This is no exception. Nate is now trying to calm the frantic students, telling them there’s nothing they can do about the events in play now. Except, actually, there is, and it apparently involves sending Michaela to the door of…Caleb? I am not shocked by this twist so much as I’m just completely and utterly confused.
Next Week: Meet Bonnie