How To Get Away With Murder season 1, episode 2 showed us how far Annalise is willing to go in order to defend her clients. Read our full recap of the episode here.
This week’s episode of How To Get Away With Murder starts off at a crime scene. Annalise has taken her students (does this group have a name yet?) to help her gather evidence that will prove her client, Max St. Vincent, innocent of killing his second wife in their own bed.
After a sort of erotic demonstration by Max, the gang is watching the news when we find out that Lila’s death was pronounced a murder. We also learn that Lila had a boyfriend, Griffin O’Reily, who also happens to be the same guy that was storming out of Rebecca’s apartment in last week’s episode.
Wes is studying as hard as ever in his apartment, and we can’t help but notice that the camera is always panning to those scratch marks etched into the solid concrete wall. It makes us think that this show may secretly be about werewolves. That’s really the only explanation we can come up with that would justify those deep claw marks.
We flash forward to the night of the bonfire when Wes is in the gas station getting supplies. Before he leaves, he buys a prepaid cell phone and makes a phone call. We don’t know who he is calling, but he keeps saying things like, “It’s being taken care of,” and, “We’ll make sure you’re safe.”
Back to the present day, Annalise comes home after work and immediately goes through Sam’s cell phone. We see her type in Lilia’s name in order to look up conversations between the two. The emails seem innocent enough, but what catches Annalise’s eye is that instead of using her full name, like most students not having an affair with their professor would do, she simply signed them “-L.”
Laurel brings prep questions in to Bonnie, who is particularly chilly in this episode, and tries to pull some advice out of her. Laurel is having trouble finding her place in the group, but Bonnie, frankly, just doesn’t give a damn. And neither do we.
The next day at work, Max’s daughter, Eloise, comes in to testify in court in favor of her father’s innocence. Her whole life is derailed when it is revealed that her father’s first wife, Eloise’s mother, was also stabbed to death.
Annalise thinks she’s going to fail, so she takes the students — seriously, we need a group name — back to the scene of the murder for another look. Everyone is shouting out ideas, but Laurel finally finds her chance to shine. She simply yells out, “He hunts!” and the whole room immediately knows what this means.
They take this information back to court and what proceeds is an extremely Hannibal Lector-esque demonstration on how to humanely murder an animal. This is how, Max confesses, he killed his first wife. The cuts the second wife endured didn’t match up to the calculated slices on his first wife, which leads to Max being proven innocent.
Turns out it was Eloise who did it in a fit of revenge against her father once she found out he murdered her mother.
The case is closed, so it’s time for a celebration. Mr. I Don’t Date goes to see Oliver with a bag full of takeout as a peace offering, and he barely makes it past the door frame before the pair is taking each other’s shirts off. We sort of have a crush on Oliver already, which means he’s probably going to be killed off pretty soon. Hopefully there are more shirtless scenes before that happens.
Back at Keating’s house, Sam cooks a romantic dinner, but that doesn’t stop Annalise from looking through Sam’s phone again. She searches Lila’s name, but finds that all of his messages from her have been deleted. Infuriated, and maybe a bit scared, she heads straight to Nate’s house to give him information about her husband and Lila’s relationship.
Wes comes back to her apartment and finds Rebecca being hauled off by the police. Upon listening to the news, he learns about Rebecca and her drug use. This makes him flash back to when she came over to use his shower and he believes she may have hidden drugs in his bathroom. He goes to look, but instead finds a cell phone that was left under his sink. It’s locked, which is a bummer, but we’re sure it’ll lead to a nice montage of Wes desperately going mad in his dungeon of a room trying to figure out the password.
It’s three months later again and Wes is at a motel. He goes into room 203, where Rebecca has been hiding out. Considering she seems like she may be the one who killed Sam, she looks sort of great. Well, at least her eyes have significantly less bags under them and her hair looks clean. They kiss and Wes tells her that she’s finally safe.