TV REVIEW: Wes is a puppy in How to Get Away With Murder’s “It’s All Her Fault”

By Chelsea Hensley

On last night’s How to Get Away With Murder, Bonnie Winterbottom refers to Wes as “the puppy”, and I hesitate to believe there’s ever been a more accurate description of a character. Wes is sweet-faced and bumbling, charming people with his dimples and his unassuming personality. He’s not a go-getter like Michaela or suave like Connor. He’s not even a loudmouth like Asher or quietly intellectual like Laurel. He’s a puppy.

Or is he?

Annalise lectures her class on not knowing who anyone is, a theme the show already highlighted in the pilot. There’s no way to know people completely because everyone has things they want to hide, perhaps even “the puppy”. After the pilot, Wes is the character we know the most, and he appears to be as sweet and adorable as a Yorkie. But there’s obviously much more than that. Wes’ proactiveness in the flashforwards don’t gel with the Wes who appears nauseous at a crime scene or fumbles his way through his first day of law school. Wes’ first great act was the coin toss, separating himself from his freaked out counterparts, but “It’s All Her Fault” proves there’s more to it. Wes suggests the coin toss and lies about the result to ensure they move the body.

Meanwhile his fellow students don’t even ask to see the coin he flipped, too stricken with the reality of what they’ve just done and despite earlier worries that Wes would perhaps betray them (on behalf of a mysterious “she”), they don’t think anything of it. In the present day they don’t think of him much him either, questioning why Annalise selected him to join her at her firm since he’s not all that impressive aside from the fact that Annalise likes something about him.

The “she” seems to be Annalise whose husband’s body they dispose of. Going off of Wes’ and Annalise’s interactions last week, Annalise’s magnetic personality and the potential for something less than professional brewing between them, it seems likely that Wes could fall under her spell and want to protect her as he promises someone over the phone in the convenience store before rushing to a motel to see them. When “It’s Her Fault” dives deeper into Sam and Annalise’s relationship, it seems even more likely that Annalise has reason to want her husband dead. His past affair with a student fractured their relationship so completely that Annalise immediately suspects it again. Scrolling through Sam’s emails from Lila only reveals a very casual “L” as a signature, and after confronting Sam about it, the emails disappear. It’s a confirmation of her worst fears, that not only was Sam involved with her but that he may have killed her, too.

Annalise’s emotions are always hard to gauge just because they seem to clash so much with the image of herself she projects. Of course people have many sides, and Annalise is no exception but it’s still a jarring switch from ruthlessly questioning a witness in the courtroom to pleading with Nate to forgive her for putting him on the stand last week. It’s easy to hypothesize that perhaps Annalise is simply manipulating these people, but if that was the case I imagine she’d be more successful and her sad faces wouldn’t last so long after said people were gone. Her quickness to go to Nate and tell him about Sam indicates that she really is concerned though she could also be using this as a way to renew their relationship since Sam is obviously still unfaithful. But she returns home to sleep with her husband, turning her back and crying once it’s all over.

Throw in a case of the week about a husband perhaps brutally murdering his wife and it seems like Murder is going the route of Annalise killing Sam. Perhaps in self-defense after she discovers that he really did kill Lila or maybe just because she snaps and can’t stand to be with him, a cheater/murderer. But since nothing’s simple, we learn the client did kill his wife — his first one — though he isn’t guilty of killing the second, a victim of his daughter’s vendetta. As complicated as this is, it’s probably no less complicated than what actually befell Sam Keating.

There was no question of Rebecca Sutter having some involvement in it, not with Lila’s boyfriend marching out of her apartment in a rage, but Rebecca’s hardly mysterious. Sure, she’s mysterious, but it’s not a kind of mysteriousness that’s very original. She has piercings, works in a bar and doesn’t seem to gel with “the puppy”, but that’s all we know of her. But no one is what they seem, and Rebecca’s arrested (along with Lila’s boyfriend), suspected of having killed her and with long rap sheet of drug charges. And it’s not Annalise but Rebecca who Wes has sworn to protect, and who Michaela’s certain would convince Wes to sell them all out.

Stray Observations

• Asher: “Maybe he’s her secret baby. Like she gave him up for adoption and he doesn’t even know.”
  Michaela: “Yeah because all black people are related.”
• I’m pretty sure everyone loves Wes (even the client thinks he’d make beautiful babies with his daughter), and I’m wondering how long it will take them all to realize that he’s trouble.
• Connor and Oliver (Conrad Ricamora) are really going places.
• The case of the week had an interesting resolution. Annalise told her class earlier she didn’t care about her client’s guilt, and though their trial has him confessing to murdering his first wife, he’s still proven innocent on the second. And despite the enraged public, Annalise walks out of the courtroom with a smile on her face because she won.

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