THIS IS WHERE I INTIMIDATE YOU Professor Keating (Viola Davis) keeps up her "Can you believe my teacher did
that!?"
reputation by using a class assignment to choose four students to work
for her firm during the school year. The assignment prize is a statue of
Lady Justice, which can be exchanged for extra credit and/or homicide.
Nicole Rivelli/ABC
"I don’t know what terrible things you’ve done in your life up
to this point, but clearly your karma’s out of balance to get assigned
my class. I’m Professor Annalise Keating and this is Criminal Law 100,
or as I prefer to call it,
How to Get
Away with
Murder." HEY-O! ANNALISE KEATING HAS SPOKEN.
Now, first things first—if you don’t immediately know how to pronounce the phrase
How to Get Away with Murder,
then you probably didn’t watch the show. Viola Davis says the phrase
approximately three and a half times in the pilot and each utterance is
more dramatic and eerie and fabulous than the last. If you don’t know
how to pronounce the phrase, then you may not recognize that
HTGAWM is
meant to be your newest guilty pleasure roller-coaster ride, custom
built for you to enjoy on Thursday nights paired with an entire pint of
ice cream, a well-assembled cheese board, or your favorite toasted
artisan crackers and Sauvignon Blanc (twist-cap only). And if you
still don’t
know how to perfectly over-pronounce “HOW to get a-WAY with MUR-der,”
then you clearly aren’t buckled in for what’s going to become your new
favorite legal thriller/Shondaland drama/time-wasting watercooler
theory-fest.
As my colleague Melissa Maerz writes,
the show is campy and colorful and solely intended to send you flying
into a world of escape, which entails wild cliffhangers, unrealistic
legal procedures, and shocking developments likely to spur a host of
all-caps tweeting.
True Detective this is not; I like to think
#HTGAWM is a juicy mix of
Pretty Little Liars ("We have to hide this body, girls!") and
Legally Blonde ("FOUR of you will come join me at my firm!") with just a little hint of
A Few Good Men to keep things classy.
And so, with those descriptions in mind, it’s my honor to be guiding
you through these weekly recaps wherein we’ll laugh, cry, reveal our
deepest fears and crippling insecurities, and try to unravel a few
answers to the two major mysteries that were introduced in the pilot.
Sometimes we’ll move chronologically and I’ll give you a solid
play-by-play. For this jam-packed pilot, I think the best approach is to
lay out exactly what we’re dealing with.
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Season 1 will chart two murders—college student Lila Stangard and
professor Sam Keating—and they’re cases which, I’d wager, are undeniably
connected. And that’s about the extent to which I will wager
anything from here on out because, much like visits to Taco Bell, you simply must plan for twists.
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF LILA STANGARD
FACTS: Looming over the episode is the disappearance
of a popular, pretty sorority girl named Lila Stangard who, according
to flyers trumpeted all over campus in a very uncreative font, was last
seen at a Kappa Kappa Theta party on August 30. The campus mourns and
holds a vigil—in which her athlete boyfriend Griffin delivers a
heartfelt speech—but shortly after her disappearance, Lila’s body is
found floating in the water tank on the roof of her sorority house.
(Fact: Sorority houses apparently have water tanks on their roofs.)
SUSPECT #1: Annalise Keating (Viola Davis)
Shocked? Our main conduit into the world of
How to Get Away with Murder
is Professor Keating, a fiercely terrifying yet wildly intelligent law
professor who exercises sketchy moral ambiguity in the courtroom and a
sick sense of humor about her awful reputation in the classroom. (Being
so brilliant, you might wonder why she’s spending her time teaching a
100-level course, but she’s probably one of those teachers who gets her
kicks frightening the young’uns at an early age to instill a proper
threshold of fear, like a George Bluthian tiger mom.)
Now, I don’t believe that Annalise killed Lila, but I do think
Annalise killed her husband Sam and Lila is the reason why. At the end
of the episode, the news report announcing the discovery of Lila’s body
appeared to distress Mr. Keating, but it left Annalise relatively
blank-faced. (The wistful, vague Guess-My-Emotion expressions are a
staple in Shondaland.) So, Lila is clearly a touchy subject in the
Keating household. Was she Sam’s mistress, and Annalise found out and
did something about it? Or will she take her vengeance out on Sam
himself? Or, as Michaela foreshadows when she's presenting a
case defense in class, "What better way to get revenge than to kill your
cheating husband and pin it on his mistress?" (Watch out, Bonnie?)
If her cavalier attitude toward guilty clients and her ambiguous
moral compass don’t already suggest Annalise's willingness to break bad,
her dubious motives were, to me, on major display at the Dean’s
cocktail party. Remember when she corners Wes in the bathroom? When she
cries and confesses that she and her husband have been trying for a
baby? When she rubs Wes’ chest and shoulders and arms in that slightly
creepy, horny weeping willow way? I submit to you that
it’s all an act,
a calculated effort by Annalise to paint herself as a lonely married
woman who fell victim to cheating in a moment of weakness—a helpful
portrait for Annalise should Wes ever find himself talking about her to
someone important. Granted, I could be wrong about whether those tears
and that story are fake—but I believe Annalise had
something to do with one of the murders. Because, like, let’s all just be up front and admit that on a show called
How to Get Away with Murder, the main character is proooobably getting away with murder.
