How to Get Away with Murder review: A different format isn’t so bad

After a scattershot episode last week, How to Get Away with Murder streamlined itself as much as it can at this point and did some experimenting.

It’s rare that How to Get Away with Murder doesn’t open with a brief flash-forward these days to the same event. In this season, it’s been the wedding of Oliver and Connor. But “It Was the Worst Day of My Life” goes forward to the aftermath of the trial of Nate Lahey, Sr. — and it turns out that Annalise and company are not doing well with the case. What follows after that is somewhat exciting for the show as a whole.

The episode flashes back to one week ago, going back and forth between the events of the trial and that specific class. In some ways, it removes a lot of the tension of the episode, although it does its best to replace that with character tension between both Nates as well as Connor and Gabriel. For the most part, this works; the storylines in both conflicts have put all four characters in places where their clashing makes sense. Even when Senior takes the stand, talking about how he lost a photo of his son and how it made solitary that much worse for him, there’s still an underlying sense that things won’t be right in this family.

There’s even some crossover. Gabriel asks why Nate Jr. became a cop, and then Billy Brown gets some meaty material explaining this motive of Nate’s — and all because of his father. Asher and Michaela look like they’re back to a physical, but not emotional (yet) relationship, and Michaela leverages that to score one win for Annalise in Senior’s trial to discredit the prosecution’s mental health expert. Connor’s anger with Annalise and Gabriel spills over into his relationship with Oliver, even as they’re trying to pick a date for their wedding.

Interestingly, though, Annalise doesn’t follow Gabriel’s advice in trying for a mistrial. (Also, in a later scene, it turns out Connor created the mistrial strategy anyway.) Her move of having Gabriel tape out the space of a solitary confinement cell on the floor probably wouldn’t work in real life, but it’s hard to deny the powerful image created by the silence Annalise leaves the courtroom in to give the jury a sense of what it was like in solitary for him.

It works, of course, despite the episode using some time to note that having the defendant testify in an insanity case usually doesn’t work. How to Get Away with Murder deals in the improbable often, and the note isn’t entirely happy, because Governor Birkhead wants to see Annalise.

Unfortunately, there’s also a bit of an investment into Bonnie here, and Liza Weil spends a significant amount of time basically just looking sad. This isn’t to say that the behavior is out of character for Bonnie so much as it’s just a time sink, and though she gets to repeat her entire story to DA Miller, her love interest … it’s, well, painful to hear again, although it helps remind viewers why this should all be important in the first place. And, of course, things end on a Bonnie flash-forward to the wedding. Even as Bonnie hugs herself and looks really distraught, Connor finds his mom and Asher in the parking lot, with Asher, well, kneeling and Connor’s mom standing. How is this relevant, other than to make Asher and Michaela starting to get back together look like a terrible idea?

How to Get Away with Murder takes some risks in format in this episode. For the most part, they actually pay off, although making us feel like Senior’s trial didn’t result in a win before yanking that out from under us (and sure, the “one week earlier” at the start of the episode maybe should have tipped us off) seems a bit disingenuous. But for once, the focus remains mostly on the now of the show’s timeline, and much of the bloat seems trimmed down or at least more clearly tied to other aspects of the story.

Additional thoughts:

• In ongoing bad choices, Gabriel and Laurel also share a moment set to meaningful music, all while Frank watches on the camera he installed.
• DA Miller is probably going to be the one who’s dead at the wedding, isn’t he? So much of How to Get Away with Murder has been about how people who get sucked into Annalise’s orbit end up in bad places, and though he’s in Bonnie’s orbit right now, he’s still not that removed from Annalise.