How to Get Away with Murder – I Want To Be Free

By: Dustin Bradley

We open this week with the Keating Four’s final exam in Annalise’s (Viola Davis) class. The exam is not only for a final grade to pass the class, but it is also for that $64,000 that was on the line last semester that nobody won due to all of the drama. The case this week is a hypothetical about a conspiracy (Wow, if the FBI monitored Annalise’s class they would understand how she gets away with a lot of the things that she gets away with.) The hypothetical involves Snow White and a conspiracy with the dwarfs to kill the evil queen. She offers the money to whoever can convince her of a legal strategy that will best work in our corrupt legal system. More on that later.

We then flash to Nate ( Billy Brown) talking with Bonnie (Liza Weil) about his wrongful death case against the governor. Governor Birkhead (Laura Innes) holds a press conference saying that all of this is “fake news“ and has nothing to do with her and has everything to do with the late departed Emmett Crawford. (It’s a real shame that Emmett is getting all of this heat and he’s not even around for it.) Nate tries to tell Bonnie that the prosecution will try and get her thrown off the case due to her conflict of interest seeing as how she was dating D.A. Miller. She assures him that she already submitted paperwork that says that Nate is aware of their previous relationship but does not feel like she is at a conflict of interest and would like her to pursue the case.

The prosecution is no joke though and decides to try the conflict of interest in court and win. Bonnie objects against it due to the paperwork they put in, but the prosecution lets her know that they don’t care about her relationship with Miller, this is about her relationship with Miller’s mother. They put Mrs. Miller (Tess Harper) on the stand and asks her questions about Bonnie and their relationship and whether or not she believes that Bonnie truly thought that Miller is guilty. Throughout the whole exchange you can see how broken Bonnie is still over the Miller situation. 

The judge does decide that this conflict of interest is big enough that Bonnie cannot preside over the case so Teagan (Amirah Vann) steps up once again to handle it. At this point she’s not scared of the Castillos hurting Cora because Cora is out of the country and it would be hard for them to reach her that quickly. Plus, she truly thinks that she can win. Under her direction they put the governor on the stand and ask her about why her private car was outside of Miller’s residence way before he was murdered. She can’t come up with a genuine answer for that, so she lets the prosecution give her the “answer,” which is that her former aide stole her official vehicle because she was having a relationship with somebody who lived on Miller’s street. Honestly, how can the judge not see through this?

Over in our students world, Oliver (Conrad Ricamora) is trying to put our group in good spirits. They all are in the dumps about wasting their time and law school with all of the things that have gone on over the years and not doing what they all wished that they would have done when they first got there, which was to be at the top of their class. Oliver eventually hacks into the Middleton server and finds their admissions essays to remind them of what they came to law school to do. This doesn’t bode well for Connor (Jack Falahee) who is a little annoyed with Oliver and feels like he is overcompensating for the information that Connor gave to him at the end of the previous episode. Oliver though assures him that everybody has darkness within them and that he will never stop loving Connor, no matter what he does. He understands that Connor is not a goody-goody seeing as how the very first time they met Connor tricked him using sex to hack something for him. But none of that matters because Oliver loves him. 

Over in Michaela (Aja Naomi King) land things are still awkward between her and Gabriel (Rome Flynn) and her and Asher (Matt McGorry). Gabriel tells her that she is a hypocrite who has daddy issues and has been in a relationship for almost all of her time at Middleton. This truly upsets Michaela. She tries to talk about it with Asher, but also uses the opportunity to try and kiss Michaela which upsets her even more. At this point Michaela just wants to be single and try and focus on school. We’ll see about that though.

The next day in class the prize money is finally awarded to Asher, for eventually figuring out that the evil queen in fact faked her death. (The gang really should be relieved that the FBI is not monitoring Annalise’s study plans.)

Bonnie is on her way home from the office on the phone with Annalise talking about the case and Annalise and Frank’s (Charlie Weber) involvement in it. And who should pull up next to her but mysterious older sister Castillo. She uses some sort of remote device to cut Bonnie’s brake lines.  We don’t get to see the crash,but Bonnie does eventually hit something and get sent to the hospital where she is in bad shape. It’s being in the hospital that Annalise and Frank decide that in order for all of this to go away they just need to tell the truth.

This means that the next day at the trial the prison guard AG Harold Chavez (Alex Fernandez) who told Bonnie that Miller was in charge of the hit and was put on the stand last season at the inquest hearing returns. He tells the jury the truth that it wasn’t Miller who ordered the hit, but instead it was Xavier Castillo. Later that night Bonnie sees a recap of the court hearing on the local news and realizes that everything she thought about Miller and the things she did to Miller were based on lies.

With the focus on the Castillos the governor, who takes the position that it was eminent working with Xavier and not her, tells her constituents that she is cleared of all charges and is “exonerating herself.“ Furthermore, she states that the FBI should be putting out a statement doing so themselves.

This revelation shoots us into our flash forward for this episode, which shows Annalise calling in results and setting up her get away. It is unclear at this point whether or not this is graduation night or at a different point in time.