Someone drape a prayer cloth over my legs, because I still feel faint from all the twists, turns and masterfully crafted flashbacks in the How to Get Away With Murder two-hour season finale!
First, absolutely no one cared about the case of the week involving the guilty/not-guilty priest and his lover/not lover. In fact, I’m mad that I wasted a sentence on it.
Let’s sort out everything else that happened over the two-part finale.
Question: Who Killed Lila?
Bury me in my pink Dior! Frank killed Lila. If you say that you knew it was Frank all along, you’re lying!
Through a lengthy series of flashbacks, we finally found out what happened the night of Lila’s murder:
Lila tells Rebecca that she’s pregnant with Sam’s baby and she blames Rebecca, saying that if she hadn’t been slumming with Rebecca, she would never have been smanging Sam. Instead, she would still be in a celibate relationship with her boyfriend Griffin.
This hurts Rebecca’s feelings, so she shows up at Griffin’s frat house, convinces him to sleep with her (it didn’t take much) and makes sure that Lila catches them in the act to prove that Griffin is no good. (Wait, I thought Griffin was celibate!) Lila storms out.
Lila calls Sam, who was supposed to be giving a lecture at Yale that night, and threatens to tell Annalise that she’s pregnant. Sam hightails it back to Philly, but he doesn’t make it back in time to stop Lila from showing up at Annalise’s door to break the news, but Lila can’t get past Bonnie.
Sam meets Lila on the roof of her sorority house, where she’s having a meltdown. Sam assures her that he loves her and only her, and he’s going to go home and tell Annalise. But instead of going home, he calls Frank, saying, “I need you to do what we talked about. You owe me.” Frank shows up, strangles Lila and tosses her body in the water tank. Gasp!
Rebecca goes to the roof of the sorority house looking for Lila and discovers her dead body in the water tank. When she hears people coming onto the roof, she jumps inside the water tank to hide.
When Rebecca returns home, she’s soaking wet, and her across-the-hall neighbor Rudy sees her. She knows that if Rudy tells anyone she was wet, they will figure out that she was in the water tank, so she offers Rudy a combination of PCP and “Purple X,” which literally drives him up the wall. Then she calls the police and has him carted away to an insane asylum.
There you have it, folks. The murder mystery is finally solved! We can all go home now.
Wait! No, we can’t because now Rebecca’s dead!
Question: Who Killed Rebecca?
Sorry, folks. We probably won’t have this answer until the end of the season 2 finale.
In the midst of these flashbacks, Wes is trying to find out if Rebecca, the woman he loves (for some inexplicable reason), has been lying about killing Lila.
The Keating Five (minus Asher) confront Rebecca in Wes’ apartment. Rebecca is looking at Wes like, “You’re going to let them do this to me?” And Wes is like, “Speak louder. And can you project, please?” Ouch. It gets gnarly. Michaela slaps her, and by the time Annalise arrives on the scene, they’ve tied Rebecca up in the bathroom and covered her mouth with duct tape.
Annalise brings the party back to her house, and she asks the group to make the case for Rebecca’s guilt, but they all come up short (because Frank killed Lila, remember?), so Annalise says they have to let Rebecca go. But before they get the chance, Rebecca is already gone and no one has any answers.
Wes breaks down in tears in Annalise’s lap because everything is his fault. (No, but seriously, it is.) Sam is dead and Rebecca is gone. Annalise comforts him and assures him that they will find Rebecca and sends him home.
Then Annalise goes downstairs to the basement to find Frank … and Rebecca’s dead body.
They both swear that they didn’t kill her.
Other Things That Happened
It’s hard to believe they could pack even more into this finale, but they did:
* Annalise went to great lengths to ensure that Nate isn’t convicted of the murder for which she framed him. She got him out of jail on bail, she provided an explanation to the prosecution for why his fingerprint is on Sam’s ring and she finally convinced him to call the lawyer at the number she slipped him.
* When Asher busted into Annalise’s house to tell Frank about his super-sweet feelings for Bonnie, Rebecca grabbed Michaela’s phone and texted “Eggs 911 Lawyer’s House” to someone before Michaela could stop her.
* The snoopy prosecutor showed up on Asher’s door late at night with questions about Annalise.
* Before Rebecca died (may she rest in peace), she told Connor that Wes’ mother didn’t commit suicide when he was 12 as he’d told her. Instead, she implied that Wes killed his mother.
* When Michaela’s ex-future-mother-in-law begged her to get back together with Ayden, Michaela confessed to being Southern backwater trash (with an accent to match) who was just trying to marry up with Ayden. However, she tells her XFMIL that they both know that Ayden is gay, and she just wants Michaela to be his beard. Michaela says, “He doesn’t love me, but here’s the thing … I love me. So I’m done.” Then she packed up both of her accents and strutted out.
* Connor and Oliver decided to get tested for sexually transmitted diseases before they have sex again. Connor test results are negative, but Oliver finds out that he’s HIV-positive. I feel for sweet Oliver as he grapples with this news, and I’m thrilled to watch a show that addresses sexual health in addition to sex.
* And for my favorite reveal: Laurel had Michaela’s engagement ring all along! Laurel found Michaela’s ring as soon as Michaela said she lost it the night of Sam’s murder, but she held on to it because she knew that Michaela wouldn’t talk to the police as long as she thought her ring could possibly be recovered at the crime scene. So slick, so shrewd, Laurel. I’ve got both eyes on you. Did you kill Rebecca??
HTGAWM, get back here! We have so many questions!
Akilah Green is a recovering Washington, D.C., lawyer-lobbyist-politico turned TV and film writer and producer living in Los Angeles. She currently works for Chelsea Handler’s Netflix talk show, Chelsea. She has also worked as a staff writer for Kevin Hart’s production company, HartBeat Productions, and as a consultant for Real Time With Bill Maher on HBO. In addition, she co-wrote and is producing Scratch, an indie horror-comedy feature film, and is a regular contributor to The Root. Follow Green’s adventures in La La Land on her blog, Twitter and Facebook.