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Two Birds, One Millstone
Original Air Date: Oct 29, 2015
Caitlin- Senior Staff Writer
caitlin@thetwocentscorp.com
Short summary of the previous episode: **** happened. Short summary of this episode, all episodes to come, and the show in general: More **** will continue to happen. With every single character and aspect of this show until the end of time. (Or the end of the series. Whichever.)
Specifically? There’s at least one more dead person, probably more. Basically every single person who has been on this show for five seconds has committed crimes on a federal level. And oh yes, nobody is as nice as they seem. But we already knew all that, too.
The siblings continue to understand who they’ve hired. Why didn’t they just watch season one?
The students are looking into potential other suspects. The possibility of the birth parents being jealous springs up, which pisses of both Caleb and Michaela (who is adopted herself). Caleb and Catherine are probably going to be even angrier, though, about what the kids say about them in their own home without realizing they’re secretly being recorded. Unlike what the promo indicated, Annalise does not fire everyone, but she probably would have had good reason.
Over all objections, though, the parent angle is pursued, and Oliver tracks down the adoption agency. More on that later, because it’s not the birth parents that jump to the forefront. It’s the secret love child the father’s sister/AKA dead key witness had with another man- a cousin who could stand to inherit the family fortune. So the students are forgiven, which could allow for a relationship between Michaela and Caleb. Catherine, however, is about to get into things even deeper. More on that later, too.
More LGBTQ* representation with a side order of vengeance, please.
Annalise’s first attempts to continue helping Catherine and Caleb is interrupted by a phone call. An old friend of hers, Jill, has just killed her husband and is claiming self-defense. Fact one: Jill is transgender. Fact two: the cops are total assholes about that fact. Fact three: Jill is almost certainly telling the truth about the years of abuse she endured. Fact four: This killing, however, was premeditated murder, and Jill almost admits as much in a fit of rage.
Annalise tells Jill some hard truths, and she throws some right back. Because she’s right- the court is often tragically unfair to transgender people. As such, when Annalise realizes Jill tried to get her student to lie for her, she loves the idea. And when the prosecution doesn’t take the bait, Annalise still convinces him to leave both Jill- and herself- be. How? By giving them Asher’s “bad judge” father on a golden platter. Which should have happened a long time ago anyway.
No, Annalise is not Wes’s mother.
Because, yes, that was a theory- and it was as valid as anything else anyone could speculate on when it comes to this show. See, Wes is continuing to try to find Rebecca in Levi’s absence, much as the fact is making all the other students hate him. When he tries calling Nate again, Nate says he’s done working with him or anyone associated with Annalise. So Wes goes to confront Annalise. They talk about his real mother, who committed suicide, and she says again and again that she only knows Rebecca ran away.
And speaking of Nate…
The reason Nate cuts away from Wes so fiercely is that his wife finally died. Does that timing seem pretty convenient? That would be because he gave her the pills she wanted from Annalise, allowing her to die peacefully. He only tells Annalise this after she drops off two peach cobblers she somehow found the time to make. He also tells her that she took away his last moments with his wife. And I’m sad for you and all, dude, but you left her on your own to cheat on her while she was dying, so…
PROTECT OLIVER AT ALL COSTS
Oliver is about the most innocent person on this show, even though he’s totally not innocent when you consider what he’s done for his boyfriend. (Ahem. I’m referring to the hacking.) He’s very curious about what Connor did, and will seemingly love him if he committed any of a number of heinous crimes. He also continues poking into that cousin against Connor’s wishes. But what neither of them realize is that the cousin hacked him back and is watching them OH NO.
Two Millstones, one…heck of a lot of reasons to worry.
So Annalise’s tactics have basically convinced Asher not to testify. He finally agrees on the condition that she help cover up something from his own past- something involving a girl named Tiffany- too. Annalise tells Bonnie she’s the reason for the change of heart, and Asher himself reaches out to her later. He really does seem to have a good heart under…all that, which is part of the reason Bonnie objects to what Annalise wants to do to his father. Annalise says he’ll get over it.
It might take a while. When Judge Millstone hears he’s being investigated, he assumes his own son sold him out and cuts him out of his life. Poor Asher…right? But there is still the matter of Tiffany. A defeated St. Clair gets one last act in by confronting Bonnie with that. Tiffany was gang raped. Is the good heart fake? Did Asher rape someone? Maybe I’ve let this white boy win me over too much, but that seems too obvious for this show. But he did something terrible. Helped cover it up, perhaps?
Frank is kind of terrifying, but at least his family is adorable.
Wes is, at least initially, still convinced Frank could have killed Rebecca. Laurel helps out a bit by investigating his phone, but soon decides that her boyfriend is really a good man. I’m not sure how much weight that holds, considering she jokes with him about how he could never kill a girl (haha), but I do mean it when I say “boyfriend”. Frank takes her to see his family, and they’re typical Italians in all the best ways. They love her immediately.
But that’s where the fluff ends and the confusing timelines and cliff-hanging acts begin. At the end of the episode, we see Frank dropping a body in the woods. But it’s not Rebecca. It’s Catherine. Oh, and she’s not dead. She sits up and gasps when cops come to investigate. And while you’re trying to figure THAT out, reflect on the flash forward beginning of the episode, when Frank, after chasing Annalise into the hospital, returns to a car with a seemingly actually dead Catherine in his car. And I have no idea what happened when. Is Catherine dead? What happened with her? Is anything real? Please save me.
Next Week: I Want You to Die