When last we met, we finally found out who shot Annalise. And if her bleeding body wasn’t enough, Shonda Rhimes threw two more on the pile, and then one off the side of a building, for good measure.
But that was three months ago. Now we’re back from the mid-season break and How to Get Away With Murder‘s law students are recovering from their finals and stressing about finding summer gigs. Well, not quite. Here’s your spoiler-filled recap of last night’s boozy, druggy, hallucinating HTGAWM episode.
What Happened to Annalise — and Everyone Else?
In the mid-season finale, we found out that Wes shot Annalise in a murder cover up gone wrong. Annalise survived, in case you were worried.
We’re now two weeks from that frenetic night and Annalise is out of the hospital, but her wounds, both mental and physical, are still raw. She stumbles around, rejects a nurse, pops a few fistfuls of Vicodin and, well, just isn’t looking too good. While Annalise is in shambles, Bonnie takes over, keeping Annalise from working and feeding her a steady diet of pain killer-topped ice cream.
The rest of the gang is struggling as well. Wes is having trouble leaving his room, having almost killed his mother/mentor a few weeks before. Asher is still distraught by his father’s death, which he now believes was a murder, not a suicide. He seems less concerned with having killed A.D.A. Sinclair. Douche Face has quickly turned into Douche Drunk.
When Wes and Asher finally crawl back in to work, Asher lets Wes know that “whiskey helps,” though we think they’ll need a lot more than brown liquor to pull their lives back together.
Bringing up Hallucibaby
And here’s where things get interesting. Annalise is temporarily woken from her stupor by a frantic woman shoving a baby into her hands, demanding that Annalise take the tot. That woman, of course, bears a striking resemblance to Wes and we find out later that she was probably his actual mother.
Except that baby isn’t Wes and that woman isn’t real. Annalise has hallucinated the whole thing and continues to see hallucibaby on and off throughout the episode. As Bonnie points out, it’s “just like last time.” When it comes to imaginary babies on TV, Annalise’s is a little darker than Ally McBeal’s diaper-clad dancer.
Remember, This Is a Court Show
There is, of course, a bit of court drama. Catherine Hapstall (remember her?) is on trial for shooting Annalise and killing her parents. But, of course, it’s not that simple. As of this episode, it seems the plan is to pin the murders on Philip Jessup, the Hapstall twins’ inbred brother. Caleb and Catherine have both been enlisted in the cover up.
A still-out-of-it Annalise shows up at trial, testifies that Catherine shot her but breaks privilege and declares that there’s no way Catherine could have killed her parents. That wins Catherine’s loyalty and she, right before the gavel falls, declares that Philip had drugged her and made her shoot Annalise.
“You Ruined Me.”
The show ends when Annalise finds Wes lying in her bed. (The writers seem to really be in to the oedipal thing with Annalise and Wes.) Remember, Annalise had called out “Christophe,” likely Wes’s secret childhood name, as she lay dying. “I get it now. Why my Mom did it,” Wes tells Annalise. “She just needed to make it all stop.”
Wes, it seems, is starting to figure it all out. Or at least figure something out. Annalise knew his mother, Annalise is why he got off the waitlist, Annalise is the reason he was pulled into this fun world of murder and deception and Intro to Torts. When he demands that Annalise tell him the whole story, she declares “I think you ruined me.” The feeling is probably mutual.
Flash back ten years ago and Annalise meets Wes’s mom, the same woman who gave her hallucibaby, at the playground. Wes, about ten years old, is running around. Annalise is very, very pregnant — with a boy, but definitely not with Wes.
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