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It’s a Trap
Original Air Date: Feb 25, 2016
Caitlin- Senior Staff Writer
caitlin@thetwocentscorp.com
Mark it: it took three episodes in, but How to Get Away with Murder is again making me yell obscenities at the screen. We have to wait until the very end for the reason (as usual), but there’s plenty to see before then- mostly graves seemingly being dug deeper and deeper.
Given where we left off last week, I wasn’t expecting us to open on Wes, but we do. He’s looking at the file Annalise secretly left him, wondering what it all means. We see, though he doesn’t, that his mother, Rose, was set to testify as an alibi witness for Charles Mahoney in the trial of his fiancée’s murder.
Even when we do get to that cliffhanger- AKA, the damning footage Phillip seems to have, Annalise is supremely unconcerned. She assures Connor that she’ll make everything go away, just as she’s done before. What she’s not expecting is for Phillip to demand a million-dollar ransom. She orders Connor to gather the others. Unfortunately, Laurel and Wes are already gone. She showed up at his door and offered to go with him to Ohio to investigate the Mahoney trial more.
Flashback to ten years ago. Annalise and a Frank who was apparently pretty new in his position were themselves headed to Ohio to defend Mahoney. When Laurel and Wes start looking for more information, they are presented with boxes and boxes of hard copy files. They have no idea that, back home, everyone is freaking out. Ashier is even offering to fall on his own sword and go to jail, but Bonnie talks him down, telling him Annalise can make this go away, too.
Realizing she needs to find Phillip, Annalise drags Michaela along as she apologizes to Caleb and persuades him to ask Catherine if there’s anything else she remembers about the night of the shooting. Catherine only turns on Caleb, suggesting, truthfully or not, that she may actually have killed their parents. In Ohio, Laurel and Wes don’t know that his mother panicked over her commitment to testify. They only know they can’t find a mention of her in stacks and stacks of files.
The Mahoney trial actually went like a lot of Annalise’s trials today seem to. She was her usual self right up until Rose didn’t show up on the camera feed where she was supposed to be testifying anonymously. Confronted by Charles’s father and with her case in shambles, she called Sam for comfort (as Bonnie hid near him at their home). In the present, she offers her students very little comfort whatsoever. But also in the present, Wes starts to wonder whether his mother’s death was really a suicide at all.
With Annalise telling them there’s nothing they can do until morning, the students depart. Michaela and Caleb seem about to rekindle their relationship. Asher and Bonnie, on the other hand, end theirs entirely. Why they do so, but Annalise and Nate continue to be a thing is beyond me. But even more beyond me is Connor’s attempt to transfer to Stanford and take Oliver with him- I can promise you that that isn’t going to fix any of this, buddy.
If that weren’t enough relationship drama, Laurel laments the end of her own relationship with Frank to Wes (without actually telling him what Frank told her). She says Frank is like her own father, who was a very bad guy, and starts knocking herself down as a person. Wes reassures her. And then he kisses her. Two seconds later, they’re both panicking over it. But not nearly as much as the others. Annalise tells them the best thing to do is nothing. Shame, as it almost worked, too.
The deadline Phillip sent for wiring the money passes without incident, but just as Asher starts to celebrate the fact in typical Asher style, a new video comes in- of Annalise and Nate together. (Shoulda just listened to me and ended this long ago). As everyone stares at the screen, thunderstruck, Laurel returns to the scene. She demands to talk to Annalise about something so important, it even overrides how totally screwed that all appear to be now.
See, despite comforting Wes over their trip being a seeming failure, she stole a page from the files when he wasn’t looking. A page that could confirm his suspicions that his mother’s death wasn’t a suicide. But, then, who killed her? Charles Mahoney, angry that Rose didn’t show up? No- according to what Laurel found, Rose may have been killed by her own son- a young Wes, whose memory about that night is still only coming back in flashes. Admit it- you yelled at your TV screen, too.
Next Week: Something Bad Happened