Let’s talk about Shonda Rhimes newest show How to get away with Murder. From the moment I saw the teaser trailer I was hooked, granted it was mainly due to the ever wonderful and amazingly talented Viola Davis but still I was hooked. I already watch one of Shonda Rhimes’ shows in Scandal so I’m familiar with how out there the plots can be, how the characters can be and the drama. I’m not expecting it to be the best show on television and I’m not expecting it to be terrible but I’m going open minded and curious. Probably also a bit fascinated to see if I pick up any legal jargon since I work at a law office currently.
The episode starts at some kind of pep rally and out in the woods is a group of students talking about a murder that has happened and they are somehow involved in the death of this person. 2 students are for hiding the body while the other 2 are for leaving it where it is. One of the students tells them that they have to flip a coin to make the decision and while they are all looking the coin in the air flipping, it jumps back to 3 months earlier.
There is a student riding his bike to a classroom making his way into a brick building of the law school and makes his way into a filled of students, listening into the conversations. He sits in the front of the class only to have the student next to him that she’s engaged and the seating chart is in the front of the room. He barely glances at the seating chart before another student tells him he is going to want to be sitting before she comes in, and he looks completely confused about what he means. Before the conversation can continue the professor walks in and introduces herself as Professor Annalise Keating (Viola Davis) and the class is criminal law 100 or as she likes to call it ‘how to get away with murder’.
She tells her students that she will not be teaching them the law or how to theorize it but rather how to practice it in the courtroom like a real lawyer. She brings up their first ‘case’ about the Aspirin Assassin aka Gina Sadowski and calls on a student, Connor Walsh (Jack Falahee), for the facts. Connor gives out the facts and she runs through the case while the student from the bike (who is still nameless at the moment) watches on in amazement. After asking a general question and most students raising their hands, the girl he had sat next to, stands up to answer and introduces herself as Michaela Pratt (Aja Naomi King). Keating asks another question and ends up calling on the boy on the bike, whose name we finally learn is Wesley Gibbins (Alfred Enoch (and as a side note he played Dean Thomas in the Harry Potter series.)) and he has no idea what she is talking about because he only got accepted into the class two days prior from the wait list. She simplifies the question for him and asks him again but he still has the deer in the headlights look and doesn’t respond. Instead another student answers it, a Laurel Castillo (Karla Souza), and gets flack for answering it when it wasn’t directed towards her. Keating tells her never to take a learning opportunity from another student no matter how smart she thinks she is. Connor Walsh asks Keating if she did it and Keating tells them to ask Gina herself because it isn’t an old case but rather one she took the previous week when Gina fired her former attorney.
At Keating’s office all the students are crowded around listening to Gina talk about how she became involved with supposed victim, her former boss Arthur Kaufman, and then on the last day at her job she was coming back from lunch to see Arthur being taken away by the paramedics. She is crying as she tells them that she loved him and wouldn’t have wanted to hurt him. Keating tells them that tomorrow they have one minute to present the best defense possible for the case and see if they can beat her current plan. She informs Wesley that he will be going last, a terrible spot because no two students can put forth the same idea. She is going to let them use the books in her office and talk to the people who know her well, her associates, Frank (Charlie Webber) and Bonnie (Liza Weil (Hey its Paris Gellar from Gilmore Girls and Amanda Tanner from Scandal)). Keating tells the class as a final note that every year she invites the top four students to work for her and the top student get a statue of lady justice and they can turn it in at any time to get out of an exam. During the speech about the statue we get little jumps to present day where Wesley had pulled it out of his bag covered in blood.
Wes is in his apartment trying to figure out a defense for the client and can’t think of anything because he thinks she’s guilty. We get jumped back to the present and the coin has decided that they are going to move the body. Connor and Wes are wrapping the body up in a carpet in Keating’s office, Michaela is standing not looking because she doesn’t agree to what is going on and Laurel has washed the statue and bleached the sink. The four students grab the carpet wrapped body and are about to leave when they see a cop outside asking about a car parked outside and they slowly drop the carpet wrapped body and step out. [You know they aren’t going to get caught so early on because that would defeat the purpose of the show.] Connor says he can move the car since it’s his and the cop is asking them why they are in the law professor’s office/house. Michaela quickly comes up with a story of how they were asked to take the old carpet to the bonfire and if the cop wants they can call her to prove their story granted she is out of town and had to go to a funeral. This story along with some disturbance off scene convinces the cop to let them go and warns them to be careful because there are lots of crazies out tonight.
It’s back to 3 months earlier and the next day in class. Michaela is up giving up idea for a defense by offering up the wife, Agnes, as a suspect. It goes on to show snippets of all the other students’ ideas while Wes is crossing out the list he had done for himself. Finally it is Wes’s turn and you can totally tell he is trying to pull something out of his ass and comes up with self-defense by saying she was suffering from Stockholm syndrome and the affair is proof of that. Most of the class is treating his idea like a joke and when he moves to go stand with those that haven’t kept their seats Keating tells him to sit down. She congratulates those that are able to keep their seats but that none of them have beat her approach which is to discredit the witness, introduce a new suspect and then bury the evidence by overwhelming the jury with so much information that they can’t help but rule it as not guilty.
The next day is the trial for the client and Michaela is running late. It is Ms. Keating’s turn to question the witness, the first assistant. Michaela comes in, whispers something to Frank which leads her to whisper something to Ms Keating which she uses against the witness. That being SPOILERS the witness is color blind so she can’t actually see what color the pill on Gina’s desk was. END SPOILER. That night Wes is doing research when he comes across something and rides his bike over to Keating’s office/house. He knocks on the door and when no one answers, he opens it and starts walking through when he hears a noise and it’s the professor getting it on with a guy. She asks Wes what he is doing there and he says the door was open and tells her his idea but she disregards it because it’s a bad idea before kicking him out.
In the present time, the students are at a gas station while Connor is singing along to some Christmas carols because it’s annoying Michaela. Wes comes back with a bag full of stuff and says it’s so that it looks like he was buying other stuff on camera. We flash to 3 months in the past and Connor is a bar talking to another guy after bringing over a drink for him. Connor is making moves on the guy by telling him he thinks he’s hot and lying to him by saying he works at the bank. He is using the guy he was hitting on, that happened to work at the Kaufman Company and in IT, to get information for the case before sleeping with him. He gives the email to the professor who fudges to the court on how they got it.
As they break for the day, Laurel goes into the bathroom and sees the client Gina there with her face down and quietly makes her to a stall and watches as Agnes Kaufman comes into the bathroom. You would expect a blow up between the wife and the mistress but nothing happened, instead Agnes just places a hand on Gina’s shoulder and Gina lightly puts her hand on top of it before leaving. That night at what looks to be a mixer, Wes joins Michaela, Connor and some other students talking to another professor but one in psychology named Sam (Tom Verica). Sam it turns out is Professor Keating’s husband and Wes is looking very confused because Sam was not the man he saw the professor with when he stopped by the other night.
Back in the present the students are trying to hid the body when they hear voices and quickly have to hid. Just when they think they are safe from the two students, Laurel’s phone begins to ring and its Frank calling her. Michaela wants to know why Frank is calling Laurel which is when it jumps back to the past. Laurel is talking to Frank about what she saw in the bathroom. Laurel realizes that Frank already knew that Gina probably did attempt to kill Arthur but to say it out loud would mean admitting that they are defending a guilty client. Frank sort of goes off on her about young idealistic girls that never really make it because they end up at a corporate, pregnant and would rather stay home with the baby. Laurel storms out and Bonnie tells Frank to stop screwing the students. Wes meanwhile can’t completely handle what is going on and goes to the bathroom where he is followed in by Professor Keating. Wes says he’s not going to say anything and she tells Wes that she needs to apologize to him and tells him that she and her husband are trying to have a baby and its putting pressure on their marriage. She stops again and then thanks him for keeping it between them and while it looks like she might be making a move on him, Wes hightails it out of there while Keating stops to compose herself and wipe her tears away.
At Keating’s office/house Bonnie and Frank are doing work on the case while the tv is on showing about the missing student Lila. Sam and Annalise come home and Bonnie goes over to him, all smiles and sunshine and you can tell she has a thing for him. Wes back at his place finds a bottle of alcohol from his neighbor Rebecca and asks if she wants to drink with him. She tells him she can’t tonight and goes in. Something is going on there because she is connected to the missing student’s boyfriend Griffin.
The next day in court the prosecution has a detective on the stand and showing video surveillance from a convenience store of Gina buying some aspirin. Keating gets pissed at Gina, Bonnie, and Frank for not sharing the information and not doing their jobs respectively. The next day in court Keating calls her first witness, which is another detective and it happens to be the man she is having the affair with. Can we just get a holy fucking shit batman reaction…especially from Wes who recognizes him as the guy he saw.
Keating asks the detective where he was 2 nights ago when his partner got the tape. He looks confused and she asks where he was, offering a suggestion of maybe he had been at home. He says he had been at a friend’s house and she says its odd because his partner got the tape at 8 pm but it wasn’t logged in till 2 am. She asks him if in the 12 years he has worked for the city of Philadelphia if he has ever known the cops to alter evidence/doctor surveillance to help the prosecution with a case and he says yes. You can tell that both Keating and the detective know their fling is over.
Gina is found innocent and Laurel watches as she and Agnes share a look before Agnes gets in the car with her husband. Back in the classroom Keating is announcing who is joining the firm, first being the one that gets the prize statue, Connor. She then calls Asher Millstone (Matt McGorry (he’s rather annoying and pompous)), Michaela, Laurel (who looks completely surprised but then looks at Frank), and because of the workload that has grown (as her excuse), Wes, who is as equally as shocked.
Wes talks to Keating after class and asks about the detective, who she says is her boyfriend. Wes tells Keating that he doesn’t want the job after watching her get her boyfriend to lie on the stand and Keating says that the reason she gave him the job was because he can think quickly on his feet as seen by his self defense argument. She tells him to think hard about whether or not he wants the job.
The episode ends with the body of a woman being found at a sorority house water tank and the possibility that the student might be the missing girl, Lila. Griffin, Lila’s boyfriend, storms into Rebecca’s apartment to show her the news while Sam is watching it while drinking and Keating comes in asking what is wrong. After being told, Keating tells her husband that she bet the boyfriend did it, and Sam responds with we shall see.
Back in the present in the wood; Connor, Michaela, Wes and Laurel, unroll the body before stacking wood and covering it in fluid. Wes says they need to all be in agreement before he strikes the match and waits for Michaela to add her agreement to the other two. She says it’s the only way to destroy the evidence and so Wes strikes the match and throws it on the wood pile and we see it’s the body of Sam Keating.
What a way to end an episode. The episode brought up some interesting questions that I hope we don’t have to wait too long for an answer. Questions like what is going on between Rebecca and Griffin? Why did Sam get killed and how does it involve the students? I have to say I’m looking forward to the next episode to see if it lives up to this first one. It also shows what an amazing actress Viola Davis is when you watch her as Annalise Keating.
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