Who killed Sam? Well, it’s not the person I thought. Or is it? Maybe. It probably is, not really. But what did I really think? Wait, did
I do it? That’s a recap of my thought process during Thursday night’s winter finale of How to Get Away with Murder.
It’s been a whirlwind first season thus far, and if it wasn’t for Viola Davis I would’ve checked out after two episodes. After last night, we know how one of the murders on HTGAWM happened, as well as its messy cover-up. “Kill Me, Kill Me, Kill Me” begins with Annalise and her husband Sam arguing about the possibility that he impregnated his murdered mistress-student Lila Stangard, and it’s another one of Davis’ intense, screaming Emmy-selling scenes.
**Serious spoilers ahead. If you missed the winter finale, go straight to jail and do not pass go.**
“I’m done believing in you! I’m done loving you!” screams Annalise. She then stabs him—verbally, with her words!—by admitting that she’s been cheating on him with Nate: “He knows how to make me scream and groan and sweat,” she brags. Sam is compelled to then choke her, and Annalise dares him to just kill her.
“You want the truth? You’re nothing but a piece of ass,” he says, calling her a “disgusting slut.” Both of these people are foul and cold-blooded, but Sam’s words in this moment are meant to make us empathize more with Annalise and it works.
In the meantime, her bumbling-and-fumbling law students are burying Sam’s body and devising alibis while I’m trying to piece together this crazy timeline. Throughout the season, the show teased bits of the Sam murder cover-up in flashbacks and now it’s all sort of coming together.
Post-argument, Annalise heads to her side-dude’s place for some consoling and vertical wall sex.
While Annalise is away, the murderous students will play. Michaela goes to Annalise’s home to return the trophy, at the same time that Rebecca’s there to…what? I don’t remember. (Oh yeah, get some incriminating evidence against Sam that he killed Lila).
Sam is drunk. Rebecca runs upstairs. Sam chases her. Michaela phones a friend. Wes. Everyone powwows at Annalise’s. There’s an argument on the stairs. Sam lunges and falls over the railing. He’s dead, maybe.
The gang stands around and, naturally, discusses their options. As with most TV murders, the seemingly dead person takes this time to wake back up. While Sam’s straddling Rebecca’s body and choking her, Wes comes through and whacks him over the head with the trophy.
The killer is Wes. It was Wes. Never underestimate the wait-list doofus. Although, at that point I was hoping to see Annalise holding the bloody trophy with a smirk.
As the finale wraps up, Annalise calls the students to her home to be questioned by police about Sam’s affair with Lila. “The police are gonna ask you a lot of questions about my husband,” she says, urging them to tell the truth.
The twist is that she already knows Sam is dead because she and Wes worked together in some capacity. We know this because when Wes returns to her house to retrieve the bloody trophy, Sam’s dead body is still on the floor, and there’s Annalise sitting at her desk, one crazy motherfucker.
Here’s where I realized that she left that lengthy to Sam voicemail earlier in the episode in order to clear herself of a motive—although dead or not, he’d never hear that voicemail.
Color me not surprised, but intrigued.
Now it all makes sense. I think.
