TV REVIEW: Laurel proves herself in HTGAWM’s “We’re Not Friends”

By Chelsea Hensley

“We’re Not Friends” is an episode that proves how disconnected all HTGAWM‘s characters are from one another. Besides working together, they share zero personal information. The small details about Michaela being engaged, Connor being gay and having something of a relationship with a hacker, Wes being waitlisted, Laurel being morally upright and Asher being annoying are only surface-level. It’s going to be the murder that links them together (except for Asher because who knows where he is?). And that murder hasn’t even happened yet. In the meantime, the students, Annalise, even Bonnie and Frank might as well be in their own worlds, overlapping only occasionally when a case demands it.

Laurel speaks the title line tonight when she explains why she didn’t tell anyone she and Frank had slept together (why would she?). It’s only once Sam’s dead body is being carried between them and they’re all creeping through the woods that this information becomes known. As they become clearer to us, they still see each other through varying degrees of fog. They see each other only on the surface, and all the deeper dives are reserved for us.

It’s Laurel’s turn underneath the microscope as Annalise finally takes on a client she doesn’t mind helping: a son who kills his abusive, policeman father. The first interaction between Laurel and Annalise in the pilot was a tense one, with Laurel earning Annalise’s ire by stealing an answer from Wes. “We’re Not Friends” seems to imply that Laurel’s been trying to work her way back from this moment. Not to mention that Frank picked her for this job, not Annalise, and Laurel’s eager to prove that she deserves to be there which is probably difficult when Annalise has taken one morally objectionable client on after another which clashes greatly with Laurel’s own moral code.

That’s not to say that Laurel isn’t skeezy. She doesn’t mind doing questionable things if she’s doing them for the right reasons. We can assume that with her moral objections to their previous clients, Laurel wouldn’t take the risk of going to prison for just anyone. When their case looks impossible, she goes to their one option: jury nullification. But for that to happen the jury would actually have to know that they’re allowed to vote emotionally.

So someone has to tell them, and that someone is Laurel who drops a handy print-out where a juror will stumble upon it. Frank sees Laurel do this and goes to Annalise, though he omits the name of the person responsible. Granted, he ruins Laurel’s attempts at proving herself to Annalise. Though her tactics get them a mistrial, Annalise will never know she engineered it.

It probably doesn’t matter since Frank has been forgiven for his intervention as he and Laurel kiss while arguing about it. Their relationship is weird. It’s kind of skeevy, but it’s also kind of…sweet? One minute Frank’s a crass horndog looking for students to sleep with and the next he’s not that bad. Making puppy faces at Laurel and swearing his fealty in six months helps a lot in this matter. He at least folds well into Laurel’s attempts at proving herself something other than “Frank’s girl” while simultaneously proving that she wouldn’t mind being Frank’s girl. She stops their kiss, but still makes her way to Khan to relieve her sexual frustration. And it’s Frank she goes to the night of the murder, reminding him of his desperation to make amends for something and putting him on statue duty.

Then there are Wes and Annalise, who may as well be on a different show for how well their storylines overlap with Laurel’s. They’re both occupied with the Lila case for very different reasons. Wes is focused on helping Rebecca, and Annalise has personal stakes to consider. But neither of them are sharing these problems with anyone else. The rest of the group has no idea about Wes’ semi-friendship with Rebecca or his new role as her confidant, and they certainly have no idea about Sam’s pictures on Lila’s phone.

The morning after Annalise’s confrontation with Sam there’s nothing to indicate anything’s amiss. She’s back in fine form, revealing nothing while the return to her and Sam’s chat has her revealing everything. She’s devastated by Sam’s deceit (perhaps even more so because their relationship also began with an affair) despite his assurances that he and Lila were nothing more than sex. Though her pain is clear, she’s not quick to reveal his involvement with her to anyone or even to plan on using it to help Rebecca’s case. First, she has to establish if Sam’s guilty.

Of course, he says he’s innocent, but going by the way he sort of attacks Annalise it doesn’t seem that likely. Strangely the episode glosses over this moment. We’re supposed to think Sam may actually hurt her, and the threat of violence is already there if we’re suspecting that Sam killed Lila, but it’s odd that it’s never revisited especially when Annalise is doubting him so much already.

On this note, Bonnie being in the office draws up questions of what she would have done had Annalise and Sam’s argument escalated. She’s definitely not Annalise’s friend either, despite a timid offer to listen if she wants to talk about her marital problems. When Annalise finds out that Nate’s been fired she realizes how Bonnie got Rebecca’s confession, and their subsequent conversation is one that elicits more questions than it answers. Annalise knows Bonnie’s into Sam (“But thank you for protecting my husband though”), but she keeps her around anyway, despite Sam’s history of infidelity. So what it is about Bonnie that makes Annalise fine with this tradeoff? Is Bonnie just that good to have around? Does she doubt that Sam would reciprocate Bonnie’s feelings? And what’s Bonnie’s deal anyway?

The closest HTGAWM has to friends, or at least people who know intimate things about one another, are Wes and Annalise. He knows about her affair and now he knows about her husband sexting Lila. More importantly he knows that Annalise knows about her husband sexting Lila, and he knows she lied about it. It throws a wrench into their already twisted relationship. Now that Wes has been warned not to trust Annalise, it adds a different dynamic to their interactions going forward. He’s going to constantly be second-guessing her which greatly undercuts whatever power she had over him before.

Stray Observations

• So do any of them actually have friends? You know, outside of work?
• Nate admits that he lied about Sam’s alibi, but he doesn’t really explain why he did that so…still waiting on that one.
• “Your husband is Mr. Darcy” is significantly less impressive than “Why is your penis on a dead girl’s phone?”
• No one was very concerned about Michaela’s lost ring perhaps being found later and proving that she was in the woods. It seems like an oversight on everyone’s parts so if that ring doesn’t come back to bite them I’m going to be very disappointed.
• My hope for next week is that Annalise’s talk with Wes leads to more vaguely confusing and inappropriate touching as she explains to him why she has to protect Sam.

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