How to Get Away with Murder – What If Sam Wasn’t the Bad Guy This Whole Time?

By: Dustin Bradley

We open on Frank (Charlie Webber) and Nate (Billy Brown) driving away from the warehouse where they were torturing Xavier. Frank picks up on Nate’s not so subtle clues about killing Xavier. Nate tells him that there’s no need to go back for the body because he has a plan and he is the one calling the shots. 

We then see Connor (Jack Falahee) and Michaela (Aja Naomi King) back at the FBI’s office where Agent Langford (William R. Moses) is interrogating them about the recording that Annalise played at her DOJ hearing. Langford is proposing that they renegotiate the terms of their immunity deal seeing as how Connor and Michaela breached their previous one and are seemingly unhappy with it. Both the kids are understandably weary of the FBI‘s motives here considering that they now know the truth about Asher’s death. The FBI is trying to get them to commit perjury and lie on the stand on multiple accounts and they’re not sure how to proceed. 

We then flash to Annalise (Viola Davis) and Vivian (Marsha Stephanie Blake) talking more about the “Sam and Hannah thing” that Vivian teased us about at the end of the previous episode. It turns out that Vivian believes that Sam and Hannah were more than just siblings, that they were perhaps lovers. Now, although she doesn’t have substantial and concrete evidence that this is fact she does have the immense research that she has done on the subject of incestuous relationships since her marriage to Sam. All of the trauma and sexual manipulation that was born out of Sam‘s childhood could all be related to his sister Hannah. Annalise, of course, knows that this is not factual and is based on a theory that Vivian has, but she does admit internally that it’s a theory that she thought of herself at one point or another during and after her time with Sam. She dismisses Vivian’s claims to her face and throws her out of her apartment. However, as soon as she shuts the door you can see it in her eyes that she knows that it’s true and now she just has to prove it.

This conversation leads us to our first set of flashbacks with Sam (Tom Verica) this episode. We see Sam emailing Vivian after the death of his and Annalise’s baby in 2005 to try and connect with Viv and Gabriel and be a part of their lives. Vivian invites him to her apartment in Chicago under the false pretenses of him getting to officially meet Gabriel, but really it was just so that she could get some closure on her past with him. All of this leads to the sexual manipulation of her where Sam tries to convince her that she was always “The One” and that he will do anything to be able to get to know her and her son. They have sex and it starts to get more complicated because then Frank calls assuming that Sam is visiting his sister which is what he told Annalise, Bonnie, and Frank. Sam freaks out at the mention of Frank wanting to talk to Hannah and has a sense that Frank is only calling to keep tabs on him. This is where Vivian first finds out about Frank and his connection to the Keatings. After Sam returns home to Philadelphia he confronts Frank about checking up on him as tensions start to rise between Sam and Annaliise as her drinking has increased exponentially during her grief.

Annalise invites Bonnie (Liza Weil) and Frank over to discuss Vivian’s theory and Frank tells her the news about Nate’s little mishap with Xavier. We then flash to Nate meeting with the FBI and getting to officially meet Agent Murderer a.k.a. Pollack (Deborah Levin) to receive information on the FBI’s efforts to locate Xavier. Pollack gives him a bunch of hoopla and non-starters and he begins to believe Xavier about the dirty FBI agent. The next morning Annalise calls Tegan (Amirah Vann) to inform her about the Vivian theory and have her get her best investigators on looking into Hannah, her connections and her past.

Vivian goes back to Gabriel’s (Rome Flynn) apartment to once again try to convince him to leave town and come back to Chicago with her. They talk about “what if’s,” but Vivian knows she doesn’t regret not having Sam in her life after their past. This leads us to another flashback, this time opening on Vivian receiving a call from Frank threatening her and Gabriel’s life if she ever talks to Sam again. Bonnie walks in on the tail end of this conversation and Frank lies to her about who it was he was talking to on the phone. They flirt a little and one thing leads to another. They end up having sex in the basement of the Keating house. Not too long after Sam returns home and catches them in the act. He begins to freak out and tells Annalise that their relationship is not okay with him and that it needs to cease to exist anymore. Annalise confronts him over what seems to be jealousy over Bonnie’s love life and Sam acts dramatic about it all.

Back in the present day Annalise and Frank meet up with Tegan to find out what her investigators have dug up so far and it seems that Hannah has been in Philly four different times in the past year and each time was somewhere near the FBI building. This isn’t enough and Annalise tells her that they need to find proof that Hannah and Sam had something incestuous going. So, she sends Tegan back to her investigators. Nate is doing an investigation of his own and looking into some of the stuff that Xavier told him, including Bonnie’s car crash last season calls up an old friend to get traffic cam footage trying to place Agent Pollack at the scene of the crime. And he does, in fact, get confirmation that Pollack was near the scene and takes that information to Langford where he begins to place doubt in his mind that one of his agents may be compromised.

Back in 2005 Sam forces Frank to break up with Bonnie and Annalise is looking into Christoph/Wes and adopting him. In the present Annalise and Bonnie are discussing Sam and wondering if maybe everything that he put them through was rooted in the trauma of his past and his relationship to not only Hannah but his parents and their neglect. Speaking of Sam‘s parents, back in 2005 Sam comes home to greet a drunk Annalise with their baby’s ashes that he would like to go spread on his parents grave. Annalise isn’t at all up for it and they get into a fight about how Annalise is still so full of grief and can’t help but feel that Sam blames her for the death. Sam assures her that he doesn’t but he also makes it a point to express to Annalise how broken he is and not just over the death of the baby but also in general. He believes there’s some parts of him that will remain broken for the rest of his life. In the present Annalise is slowly realizing that all of Sam‘s trauma in the way that he was with them was all just a manifestation of his lack of control and understanding. Even though she doesn’t forgive him for anything that he put her through, she does somehow understand him and his pain.

Gabriel seems to finally be taking his mother’s advice and leaving Philly. He has his apartment all packed up and ready to go, but is still upset that he’s leaving without any more knowledge about what happened with his father. Michaela and Connor return home to Oliver (Conrad Ricamora) and talk about their events with the FBI in the past twenty-four hours. Connor reveals to Oliver after Michaela has left the room that he signed the new immunity deal and Michaela did not. But he only signed it because the FBI decided to throw in charges for Oliver, so he did it to protect him. The only issue is that the audience doesn’t know what the new terms of the deal are.

Finally, we get to the end of the episode where Tegan and Annalise meet up at C&G with the new information that the investigators have dug up on Hannah and it seems that in her senior year of high school she missed eighty-three days of school due to “mono,” but Annalise has a thought that it may be due to her final trimester of a pregnancy. This puts them into a spiral of wondering when she had the baby. They come to the conclusion that she must have had the baby only a few days before returning back to school. Annalise looks through the calendar on her phone to see if she knows anybody who’s birthday is in early March and she does in fact find someone. And who is that someone? Luckily, they left behind a bloody Band-Aid in Tegan‘s office that she can send off to get tested against Sam’s DNA and it comes back as a match. So, who was that somebody? Well, it’s none other than… Frank! Yeah, that’s right, Frank is the child of Sam and his sister Hannah.