How to Get Away with Murder review: Justice is hard to find

“I Got Played” makes some of How to Get Away with Murder’s other recent episodes look worse by comparison, even though it likely won’t be the standout.

How to Get Away with Murder has just one hour left after this week’s episode to get fans ready for hiatus. After “I Got Played,” though, fans should be feeling a bit more confident in what’ll happen during next week’s midseason finale.

Annalise has clearly done some midnight snacking, because there are a lot of crumbs in her bed, and she rushes to get to a press conference. It’s been a month, and the investigation into Nate Sr.’s death basically sounds hinky, and the medical examiner calls it “justifiable homicide.” No one, from Connor and Oliver to Emmett Crawford to Nate Jr. and Annalise, buys it.

It turns out that the pardon never came through, and Governor Birkhead is unwilling to push for further investigation into the death. This ups Annalise’s fears, and she even has a car meeting with Tegan to try and get the dirt on Emmett in order to come back to Caplan and Gold for the money she needs to keep running her clinic.

Tegan, however, is not willing to do this — at first. What she does do, later in the episode, is judge the interview employee and try and get some cachet back with Crawford. It ends poorly for her.

DA Miller, however, is a bit more persuadable with Nate’s emotional argument, even with Bonnie doing her best to get him off of it. That means it’s a reunion of the Keating 4 + Oliver + Gabriel to dig into the case files. (That’s because Michaela invited him.) Laurel, who has basically moved back in with Frank, tells him that he has to tell Annalise who Gabriel is.

Ironically, she talks about not hiding secrets, and that’s exactly what the show is doing with this dialogue. There’s a lot of dancing around who Gabriel is still, with Frank unironically calling the 2L “Annalise’s worst nightmare.” All of this is just hype at this point, and though the show probably won’t deliver until the mid-season finale next week, it’s been overhyped.

About halfway through, Gabriel and Michaela team up yet again to come up with a strategy: digging into the guards’ personal lives to help win the inquest. Notably, there’s one female and one male guard, and the female guard is the person who turns out to be a domestic abuser. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite get them that far — to the point where Annalise tries to convince Miller to get her on the stand.

That’s bad enough for Birkhead to call Annalise back in, and they square off, with an adoption now factoring into things. Even though the dialogue is a little rough at points — would Annalise use “basic” as an insult when she’s in a huge fight like this? — Viola Davis and Laura Innes are well-matched as actors. The following scene, where Liza Weil’s Bonnie finds that Annalise is drinking again, doesn’t have the same fire to it, but the resignation that enters Weil’s voice when the adoption comes up? It’s some great delivery on her part.

And so, Bonnie swoops back into Annalise’s life in a big way, getting her a list of AA meetings and convincing Miller to put Annalise on the stand. Even though she’s coming out of a rough night, she delivers a speech.

Unfortunately, it does not help: the inquest fails. Aja Naomi King then gets to deliver a good piece of dialogue of her own, consoling Nate in a way that feels true to her character and doesn’t get sappy.

With the inquest done, Tegan gives Annalise the information on Emmett. Her pitch? Hire her back, and she’ll help fix things for him. She does, however, admit, “I’m desperate!” As we learn when she goes to see Nate, she does get her job back — and they get on the same team.

Meanwhile, after partying, we finally find out the reason that Connor’s face is busted at the wedding. Well, someone calls him and Oliver a slur on the street (how did the show get away with using it?), and so they get into a fight. Meanwhile, after putting a drunk Asher to bed (or so she thinks), Michaela pays a visit to Gabriel, and things become romantic.

While Laurel and Frank watch this, Bonnie walks in and finds out the secret … but before the camera does, it’s time to flash forward to the wedding again, where Bonnie talks to someone, saying to get out of here and trust her. If we had to take a guess, the gasps from the preview are feminine, but that’s absolutely a guess.

Frankly, How to Get Away with Murder put together a decent episode again. “I Got Played” moves along at a decent clip, doesn’t overhype too many of its ongoing storylines (aside from the Gabriel plot), and lets some of its best cast members do some heavy lifting.

Additional thoughts:

• I called it on Annalise saying “I Got Played” to name the episode.
• “Is this country a scary, evil, racist place?” Michaela asks, before answering her own question: yes … but then saying that they need to carry on anyway. For an episode that aired the week of some extremely stressful midterms, it sticks out.