How To Get Away With Murder reveals a major piece of the Sam Keating murder puzzle very early on. We see Wes carrying a bloodied Rebecca away from Sam’s body and into a bathroom to clean her up. In tonight’s episode, it’s all about Rebecca. We get more insight to her role in Sam’s murder as well as get knee deep into her pending murder case, with plenty of bombshells exploding along the way.
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All About A Body
Annalise and her team get Rebecca’s trial prep underway when they’re hit with a bombshell — someone leaked to the press that there was a sexual relationship between Rebecca and Griffin, Lila’s boyfriend. They watch as the news reports of anonymous source that said Rebecca was the one to make Griffin break his virginity pledge to Lilah, giving her motive to manipulate him into killing her. Annalise quickly gets to court and gets a gag order in place but not before Griffin’s lawyer asks to exhume Lilah’s body. He believes there’s overlooked evidence that points to Rebecca as the sole murderer.
The first step in getting this motion to exhume thrown out is to discredit the expert witness Griffin’s lawyer has. This expert claims that the marks on the victims neck where that of fingernails on someone with small hands — aka Rebecca’s hands. Annalise gets a year old case that can do just that — by the prosecutor herself. She doesn’t want this motion to go through either and because presenting herself would make her office look bad, she hands it over to Annalise. In that case, the expert was banned for negligent work. Score for Keating! Next, they need an expert to outexpert the expert (tongue twister, I know!). Wes finds an expert who testifies that the marks on Lilah’s neck could be that of bugs that thrive in water
Finally, they need Lilah’s family to make a statement against exhuming the body. Laurel is sent to meet with the mother, armed with information from Sam Keating. Since Sam and Lilah were intimate, he knew that her family was very suspicious of Griffin. They didn’t trust him because he was so religious and felt that his beliefs were controlling Lilah. Laurel uses that to her advantage, telling Lilah’s mother that this attorney has pulled this stunt before and gotten his clients off because of it. Laurel tells her that if she lets this motion go through, Griffin would go free. Lilah’s mother doesn’t want to let that happen, so she makes a heart breaking plea in court to leave her daughter’s body in peace. This is the first time we see Rebecca shaken up during the entire process, showing us that she really did consider Lilah a friend and she didn’t do it (though I’m still not all the way convinced).
So when it starts to look like we have this whole body business behind us, the prosecution comes out of left field with their own expert — that says the marks were made by fingernails. The DA flipped and Keating needs to find out why. She first turns to her ex-detective ex-boyfriend but not only is he still pissed, he knows all about the phone Frank planted in Griffin’s car.
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So it’s up to Bonnie to figure it out. She sends the boys to a local bar where the DA’s assistants hang out to find out some information. Asher gets drunk, Connor can’t stop talking about his fall out with the IT guy so Wes gets the info they need. The DA and Griffin’s lawyer agreed to a plea deal if they both got together to get the body exhumed. Rebecca would be painted as the murderer and Griffin would get less time for testifying against her.
So how does Annalise get around this one? Leak information so deplorable about Griffin that it would be impossible for the DA to strike a deal. Since she can’t leak it herself because of the gag order, Rebecca can do it using ignorance as a defense. So she tells the press that Griffin raped her and when they show up in court the plea deal blows up in the prosecution face. Annalise won the battle but not necessarily the war — the exhumation of Lilah’s body moves forward with a medical examiner chosen by the court to do a full external and internal examination.
What does the new exam reveal? The marks are her necks were ant bites and the girl was 6 weeks pregnant.
Love is in the Air
As we all suspected, it was only a matter of time before Rebecca and Wes became romantic. The night of Sam’s murder it’s clear that Wes would do anything for her — including cleaning up her mess. She admits that she was defending herself, hitting Sam with the trophy because he was going to kill her. With her trial in a few days, she doesn’t want Wes going down with her. His infatuation with her won’t let that happen leading to the series of events that unfolded in previous episodes. Rewind two weeks earlier and the romantic tension between them is so obvious. After Wes gets mad at her for lying about Griffin raping her, they do what always happens on TV — sleep with each other.
In other romantic news: Annalise and Sam try to get their marriage back on the romantic track (until Annalise gets hit with the Lilah preggo news), Frank and Laurel succumb to the sexual tension that’s been building (again!) and Connor’s chances at getting back with the nerdy, IT guy are looking really slim.
How to Get Away With Murder airs on Thursdays at 10pm on ABC.
(Image courtesy of ABC)
Contributing Writer, BuddyTV
