Ridiculousness, Television

Standard Of Review: 'How To Get Away With Murder' Concludes A Lackluster Half-Season

The season finale is a cheat and unfair to the audience; how can we trust anything the show does in the future?

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How To Get Away With Murder 2 LF RFWhat is the purpose of a twist? No, I am not talking about pretzels (in which case, I definitely know that the purpose is to be delicious). I am talking about twists in television and movies (don’t worry — I will eventually get to How To Get Away With Murder, which I will spoil — this column also contains a light spoiler for The Walking Dead, and reveals that certain movies and shows from the 1990s and early 2000s had twists).

When was the first time that you saw a twist that blew you away? If you are my age, maybe it was in films like The Sixth Sense or Fight Club. Maybe it was the first season of 24. Maybe it was the end of the third season of Lost (yes, Witness for the Prosecution fans; I know twists did not begin in the 1990s).

But somewhere along the way, plot twists just did not pack the same punch that they used to. There are certain types of films in which we expect there to be a twist (probably thanks to The Sixth Sense and Fight Club), and therefore we watch those films specifically looking for it. Television is even worse, because the audience is not captive in a movie theater for two hours, but instead, shows are parceled out for an hour each week. In between, viewers can read reviews and Reddit threads that posit potential theories of what is going to happen next. As a result, it is almost impossible for a show to pull of a truly shocking twist; either the internet has already figured it out (as with what happened with a certain show over the summer and another show just last week), or the twist has no basis in reality such that it feels cheap.

That brings us to The Walking Dead (I am getting to How To Get Away With Murder soon, I swear). In the final episode of last season of The Walking Dead, our intrepid heroes came across Negan, the leader of an unsavory group called The Saviors. Negan’s appearance had been teased for a long time, and the casting of Jeffrey Dean Morgan in the role made headlines. And even though I have never read the comic on which The Walking Dead is based, even I knew that Negan’s first appearance is characterized by his brutal murder of one of Rick’s crew. On the show, once Negan appears, he does in fact kill someone (after monologuing for a seemingly long amount of time given that he is in the middle of a zombie apocalypse). But that particular episode of The Walking Dead does not actually reveal the identity of Negan’s victim, instead forcing viewers to wait an entire summer (and then a good portion of the season premiere) before finding out.

This tactic was almost universally criticized as a cheap ploy. And thanks to leaks from the set, the internet basically figured out which character died. Furthermore, by waiting an entire summer to fully reveal this twist, The Walking Dead lost its narrative momentum.

The same is true with this half season of How To Get Away With Murder. As I wrote about in October, the season premiere included a flashforward depicting Annalise Keating sobbing over the fact that an unknown character is dead in front of her burning house. ABC’s narrator informed the audience that each week, the show would reveal one character who was not dead. While I initially predicted that the dead character was Annalise’s sometimes lover Eve, I soon began to suspect that it was actually Annalise’s other sometimes lover Nate, and I became more confident in my prediction due to the revelation that Oliver, Bonnie, Laurel, Michaela, Asher, Wes, and Connor were safe. Nevertheless, I hated myself for even venturing a guess. Because ultimately, who cares? The identity of the dead character in front of Annalise’s house is not a clever or interesting twist at all; it is just a twist for the sake of a twist, completely unearned.

Then came last Thursday’s midseason finale. The episode initially implies that Nate is indeed the cadaver (though for a split second I was kind of amused by the possibility that the victim could be Wes’s hapless attorney), as he walks into Annalise’s house – shortly before Laurel does the same – on the day of the inevitable fire.

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However, in yet another twist, the final minutes of the episode reveal that Nate is in fact alive and the victim is . . . Wes. And to make matters more intriguing, it turns out that he did not die in the fire but instead died by some other unknown means.

Admittedly, I did not see this coming. Frankly I was so convinced that Nate was going to die that I wrote a good chunk of this column before last Thursday under that assumption.

But the more I reflected on the episode, the more I was angry on what the writers and ABC had done. I don’t still have the first episode on my DVR, but I distinctly remember the ABC announcer stating that each week the show would reveal one character who is not the dead body. Indeed, I wrote that very thing in my October 13 column. Wes was one of those characters; at the end of the November 3 episode, the police detectives who arrest Annalise tell her that they have an anonymous source, and that source is revealed to be Wes. In reality, as we learned last Thursday, Wes did in fact give information to the police, but then walked out of the police station and to Annalise’s house. For ABC and How To Get Away With Murder to renege on that gimmick at the last minute is a cheat and is unfair to the audience. How can audience members trust anything the show does in the future?

Even more infuriating is that the flashforward and the “one alive person per week” gimmick were completely unnecessary. What would have happened if there were no flashforwards and the audience had no idea that anyone was going to die? Wes’s death still might have come out of nowhere, but it would have packed a much greater emotional punch than for the audience to spend nine weeks growing accustomed to the idea of a main character dying. It also would have prevented message-board speculation or obsessed viewers from figuring out the mystery through clues such as set photos or actors’ IMDB pages (I have no idea if anyone actually does this for How To Get Away With Murder, but they definitely do it for The Walking Dead).

The amount of time that How To Get Away With Murder spent teasing the death was a weak attempt to paper over the fact that this season was for the most part dramatically inert. The show had inconsistent interest in the “case of the week” law clinic structure it introduced earlier in the season, sometimes eschewing a case of the week altogether. The cases of the week also had varying degrees of effectiveness; there were a couple solid ones (such as the episode in which Amy Madigan guest starred and the episode in which the class represented three siblings accused of murdering their mother), but most were boring.

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Weirdly, How To Get Away With Murder leans heavily on a strange crutch: computer hacking. Virtually every week, Annalise and her minions search for alibis for their clients by forcing Oliver to hack random third parties. In one episode, Annalise’s entire class brainstorms a list of people for Oliver to hack. This is an extremely reductive way to portray criminal defense, as if all successful criminal defense lawyers frequently hack into other potential suspects in order to defend their clients. Further, Oliver seemingly has superhuman hacking powers, able to hack into the computer systems of government entities like the District Attorney’s office in a matter of seconds. The show does not even attempt to show what Oliver is doing on screen; he just types in a few things and voila, hacked! I am certainly no hacking expert, but I have watched enough Mr. Robot to know that hacking is not that simple or quick.

The show also resorts to romantically pairing up virtually every potential combination of characters. In the past, we had Bonnie and Asher, Frank and Laurel, Annalise and Nate, and Annalise’s weird sexual tension with Wes. This season, we have Asher and Michaela, Laurel and Wes, Bonnie and Frank, and Bonnie and Annalise. With one exception (noted below), those pairings don’t work. In particularly, Laurel and Wes’s romance is extremely forced; it is a total retcon to say that they have always had romantic feelings for the other. And I always enjoyed Bonnie and Frank’s relationship as platonic co-workers, so I struggled to believe that they would get together and that Bonnie would develop feelings for Frank.

There were some elements of this season that were actually effective. Connor and Oliver’s relationship continues to be the most interesting on the show, and this season adds the wrinkle of their breakup, Connor’s realization that Oliver is not the “nice guy” he had perceived him to be, and Oliver’s difficulty dating other guys while being HIV-positive.

Despite my initial skepticism, Asher and Michaela have excellent chemistry, and their relationship was about 100 times more believable than Wes and Laurel’s. I also particularly liked how the show finally gave Aja Naomi King something interesting to do when her mother showed up at her apartment in the season finale.

While I am a frequent critic of How To Get Away With Murder, I sometimes forget how terrific an actress Viola Davis is. Davis’s best scene is her searing expression in the half-season’s penultimate episode, when she encourages Frank to kill himself. Davis is also heartbreaking in her portrayal of Annalise’s descent into alcoholism.

I will definitely check in on How To Get Away With Murder in the spring, in which apparently, despite his death, Wes is going to still be a character, presumably through flashbacks. Unless Wes has an evil twin, died in someone’s dream, faked his death, or any other stereotypical twist.

Earlier: Standard Of Review: How To Not Get Away With Bad Storytelling
Standard Of Review: ‘How To Get Away With Murder’ Is Back And As Bland As Ever

Harry Graff is a litigation associate at a firm, but he spends days wishing that he was writing about film, television, literature, and pop culture instead of writing briefs. If there is a law-related movie, television show, book, or any other form of media that you would like Harry Graff to discuss, he can be reached at harrygraff19@gmail.com. Be sure to follow Harry Graff on Twitter at @harrygraff19.

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