Source: How To Get Away with Murder ABC
This week’s super-sized HTGAWM gave us two separate episodes rolled up into one explosive finale. We finally find out #WhoKilledWes and in true HTGAWM fashion, I did not see that coming!
Episode 14 opens with Connor contemplating suicide by bus. He doesn’t do it but it’s clear that there’s something seriously haunting him. Annalise goes to a meeting and it seems like she’s totally over AA. She’s looking for a reason to keep going because she doesn’t really see how it helps her or anyone else. To Annalise, it’s just a bunch of people whining in a room who, at the end of the day, still want to drink. Also, the guy who asks her, “Have you tried mediation?” is basically every annoying person in the world who thinks that meditation/yoga/exercise/eating healthy hold the answer to everyone’s mental problems and she looks like she wants to smack him just as much as I do.
After Connor’s near-suicidal run, he goes to Ollie who tries to get him to tell the group the truth about what happened that night. Connor doesn’t think they will believe him but Oliver believes him and he’s optimistic that the group will, too. He ends up attending Annalise’s hearing and Michaela and Asher grill him about what he’s hiding. Asher thinks he’s working with the cops.
Atwood is on the stand getting grilled by Bonnie for her many sins. Annalise is backseat-lawyering Bonnie and DA Denver calls her out on it. Atwood claims that she didn’t order the cremation of Wes’s body even though she was the one responsible for having it moved. Asher is convinced that Atwood is lying and is totally in on it, working on behalf of the Mahoneys. As they bicker outside the courtroom, Laurel discovers that Charles Mahoney has been released from jail. In a press conference, Charles seems ready to let it go but his mother, Sylvia Mahoney, makes it clear that she’s not going to rest until she finds out who murdered her husband. Annalise tells the group that Atwood is the weak link and that they need to find proof of her connection with the Mahoneys to take all of them down.
Nate goes to Denver’s office and accuses him of being in contact with Annalise. He lies and then immediately meets up with Annalise to give her Atwood’s wifi password. She gives it to Oliver to do his thing and tells the rest of them to look through all the case material looking for evidence Atwood tampered with things. Oliver gets into Atwood’s phone records but it’s an untraceable number. Asher wants to call the number but Annalise shuts it down because then the guilty party will know that they are onto them.
Meanwhile, Michaela knows something is up with Connor and drags him into the bathroom to grill him. He ends up telling her the truth and urges him to tell everyone. Everyone starts hollering at Connor to spit it out and Michaela ends up telling everyone that Connor may have killed Wes. In flashback, we see Connor going to Annalise’s house after getting her voicemail. He sees a broken bottle on the floor and the door to the basement open. He goes downstairs and finds Wes’s body, which is still warm but with no pulse that he could find. He doesn’t call 911 because he doesn’t have him phone and he’s totally panicking (as Connor tends to do) but he tries to perform CPR on him and ends up breaking a rib. Connor seems to think that the broken bone may have been what killed him. At this point Laurel is losing her shit and accusing him of killing Wes by negligence and even being the one to cut the gas line to cover it up but it’s clear that Connor isn’t actually responsible for Wes’s death. Laurel isn’t having any of it, though, and she straight up tells him to go kill himself. Yikes.
Connor and Annalise end up having a private convo where they fling some insults back and forth, but ultimately they come to believe each other that neither of them killed Wes. Annalise tells the group (especially Laurel) to believe Connor and forgive him.
Source: How To Get Away With Murder ABC
Denver goes to Frank and tries to flip him by threatening Laurel. He’s got a file on her and he’s ready to use it. He calls Bonnie to tell her about the Laurel situation and she tells him not to do anything.
Nate is trailing Atwood and busts into her car to creep on her GPS. He finds out she was just in NYC, right after Charles Mahoney was released. Annalise tells him she can’t use that info and that he should just try to talk to her and use that ol’ Nate charm to get her to confess. Nate ends up confronting her about being in cahoots with the Mahoneys but she denies it. He calls her out on being in NYC and she tells him that she had a job interview and that she doesn’t want anything to do with him anymore. Clearly that Nate charm is a little rusty.
Laurel goes to the OB for an appointment and hears her baby’s heartbeat for the first time. She’s still undecided as to what she’s going to do and asks the doc how long she has before she needs to decide whether to terminate her pregnancy. She runs into Meggy at the hospital and Meggy is pretty cold to her. Laurel apologizes to her for having been nasty to her when she was in the hospital and tells her that she basically trusts no one anymore (which is understandable).
The group is still trying to find some way to jam up Atwood and Connor suggests that, because there’s nothing in the ME’s report about the cracked rib, they should put him on the stand to prove that the ME lied in her report. Of course, this would make him a suspect but he wants to do it because it will get Annalise off. He’s solidly back on Team Annalise but she won’t let him do it. Instead, she suggests that Laurel take the stand in his place.
Laurel testifies that she lied to the police because she was afraid she couldn’t trust them. She tells them Connor’s story, putting herself in his place, and tells them about the CPR and the broken rib that the ME didn’t report. In Denver’s cross-examination, he calls her out for perjury and discredits her by revealing that she lied to the police in the past—back in Mexico when she was a teenager and lied about being kidnapped. The squad is pretty pissed that Laurel is quite possibly a pathological liar but she tells them that she was actually kidnapped but had to lie and say she wasn’t to protect her father. That was the final nail in Annalise’s coffin and the judge rules that her case will go to trial.
Connor goes to Denver’s office on the DL and tells him that he wants Wes’s immunity deal. The squad calls him and tells him that it’s an absolutely terrible idea to tell him the truth about the fact that he was in the house that night. Asher finally snaps and decides it’s time to call the mystery number and¬¬—PLOT TWIST—a phone in Denver’s office drawer starts ringing. Turns out it’s him, not Atwood, who has been running the show the whole time. In flashback, we see Connor running from the house after the explosion. He runs past a car with a man inside who is on the phone with a mystery person telling them that it’s done, but it got messy. The assumption is that Denver is on the other end of the phone and this guy is his hitman, but we’re not through with this mystery yet.
Source: How To Get Away With Murder ABC
The second of the finale episodes begins in flashback and we learn that the man in the car is the one who attacked Wes in the house. He sneaks up behind Wes while he’s leaving a voicemail for Annalise.
Back in the present, Connor has gone missing. The squad hasn’t heard from him since he was in Denver’s office and Michaela and Oliver try to file a missing person’s report. It hasn’t been 24 hours, though, and the police are less than helpful. Asher goes to Denver’s office and busts in but he’s not there. Bonnie corners him in the men’s room and asks where Connor is, making it clear that they know about the burner phone. Meanwhile, Denver has Connor handcuffed in some creepy basement dungeon thing. He brings him an immunity deal and accuses him of killing Annalise’s husband.
Annalise goes to New York to meet with Sylvia Mahoney. Sylvia claims that her family is innocent of everything Annalise claims they’ve done, including the car accident that killed her son. Annalise also learns that Wes wasn’t Wallace Mahoney’s son—he was Charles Mahoney’s son. In flashback we see Sylvia and Charles walking down the street in NYC and running into Rose and Christophe/Wes. Sylvia almost immediately recognizes him as her grandson. In the present, she tells Annalise that Wes was her flesh and blood, her grandson, and she had nothing to do with his death. The meeting leaves Annalise unsure about everything she thought she knew about the Mahoneys and she no longer knows what is true and what is a lie.
Source: How To Get Away With Murder ABC
The mystery man/hitman meets with Denver in his car and gives him an envelope with Wes’s phone in it. He brings it to Connor and tells him that he will plant it in his car to frame him for Wes’s murder if he doesn’t sign the deal.
Oliver is in full panic mode trying to find Connor and Asher decides this is the perfect moment to drop the L bomb on Michaela. She’s historically not great when it comes to that stuff and, to absolutely no one’s surprise, she doesn’t say it back to him. Instead, she literally runs away to go to the bathroom to “help” Laurel. They end up having a heart-to-heart while Laurel deals with her morning sickness.
Nate goes to the police station and ends up confronting Denver. Denver loses it and ends up calling Annalise a bitch and telling Nate he’s going to jail with her. This guy is seriously unhinged. Denver then goes with the police to arrest Connor. He tells him his immunity deal is off the table but Connor says he will give him something to lock her up. The police get a warrant for Oliver’s apartment and find the copy of Annalise’s phone. In flashback we see Wes leaving the voicemail for Annalise where he says that the police found Rebecca’s body. It sounds like a confession for both Rebecca’s murder and Sam’s, and Annalise tells the group that they need to use it to implicate Wes, get Connor out of jail, and save the rest of the squad from going to jail. Laurel is, predictably, disgusted with the fact that Annalise wants to throw Wes under the bus to save her own ass but to be fair, Wes DID kill Sam…
Source: How To Get Away From Murder ABC
Annalise goes to Denver with the Wes confession plan. She paints him as a murderer (both Sam and Rebecca) and a monster ever since childhood. Annalise tells Denver that Wes killed himself instead of going to jail. In flashback we see the hitman take down Wes, inject him with something, and strangle him to death, then drag him down to the basement and cut the gas line.
Source: How To Get Away From Murder ABC
Denver knows that he’s out of options and he ends up releasing Connor and Frank, and dropping the case against Annalise. A bittersweet victory for sure, but the plan worked. Also, Oliver proposes to Connor, so that’s nice.
Laurel enlists Michaela and Asher in her plan to find out who killed Wes. She is still convinced that Charles Mahoney is involved and they go to New York where Michaela tries to seduce Charles at a bar.
Source: How To Get Away From Murder ABC
Laurel wants to confront him but Michaela gets cold feet/realizes it is a terrible plan. Then Laurel pulls out a friggin gun and tries to go after Charles but she runs into Mr. Hitman on the street who is, apparently, a “family friend” named Dominic. PLOT TWIST: Turns out it wasn’t Denver but Mr. Castillo who had Wes killed. I guess he wasn’t a Waurel shipper either…
Source: How To Get Away From Murder ABC
I have to say, I found this double-episode finale to be a little bit much. I think it could have easily (and should have been) split up into two weeks. Each episode could have stood on its own and it felt like Too Much for a single week. However, I’m happy that Laurel’s evil dad will be back in the picture going forward because I have always been curious about him and their screwed up relationship. I look forward to learning more about his motives for having his daughter’s boyfriend murdered, blown up, and burned because that’s just SO extra I don’t even know what to say about it. See you all next year!
P.S. – Congrats to Queen Viola Davis on her Oscar win!
