This show has always fascinated me in the most compelling way. It's a dark, dark series with a set of incredibly creative writing staff behind it, that not only delivers a great story telling, but also somehow a therapeutic release driven by the deep thoughts you face watching this series. For three seasons now, we've been following the challenges these five students had been facing, rooting for them, and hoping that they do find peace, unconsciously ignoring the fact the we are rooting for a family of murderers. Is is because the show captures real life so well, that we see ourselves possibly in their shows one day? Feeling guilty, paranoid, broken and yet still trying to live in a lie that you are not a bad person despite all the horrible things you had done. It is this kind of conflict inside me that makes the darkness of this series so compelling to me; am I really rooting for the good guys or the bad guys? I might have personally felt disappointed with HTGAWM in the past, particularly in season two, and I could not have been any happier to say that I should not have felt disappointed. Everything the characters say, all down to the words, is study and crafted towards building those deep, deep layers of insecurities and conclusions that seem very surprising to us at first, but on a re- watch you realize how much sense everything made, and how obvious it was. In Wes, we first started the episode with an epic scene involving Annalise facing off Sylvia Mahoney and lying all cards on the table. Their face off gets intense when Annalise becomes offensive and Sylvia becomes extremely defensive, being totally blind of the fact her husband is responsible for Annalise's miscarriage, she defended him in such a great way that showed exactly how innocent she is in all of this. What's even more fascinating, is that how the scene ends with the camera zooming on Viola Davis' expressions that summed up this conclusion in just one look. The episode continues these revealing moments, where you'd be both shocked and convinced of the outcome. Keating takes things into her own hands to get Conner release, while the rest of K4 go into their own kind of missions: tracking down Charles Mahoney. That scene was an intense one, it shows us just how far our students are willing to go to face their fears, how long they're willing to go not to lie to themselves anymore, because knowing the truth is much better than convincing yourself any other thing. The scene, though, did not give us a conclusion, but rather a new surprise and many confusing question: Laurel runs into Wes' killer, and he's a friend of her family hired by her father to kill Wes! This means that they were wrong, and that the Mahoneys are innocent on this one, but then this hunts us down with another question: why would Laurel's father do this to her? The most powerful scenes I saw, though, have to be the ones involving Annalise and Wes. We got a conclusion on the night of the fire and learned what really happened to Wes, and we saw that being unfolded in a way that assures us even the characters know deep down that this is what actually happened to Wes; they can all tell he died that horrible, horrible death, and it's all about who's willing to fight and who's not. Annalise never called Wes her son, and we never really did a clear answer despite their emotions on what kind of relationship they had. It made me cry, that Annalise could not make sense of their relationship until Wes was gone, that he was her son, that she felt like a mother to him, and that she feels failure. She feels failure because both of her sons are dead, and it was all her fault. If only she wasn't selfish, trying to get close to him to feel like a mother to him, yet ignoring the fact that you are a poison to him that he should avoid?
Could not think of a better finale that sets you into thinking mode more than this epic finale.
Job perfectly done.
Could not think of a better finale that sets you into thinking mode more than this epic finale.
Job perfectly done.