How to Get Away with Characters Making Terrible Decisions
The best thing about How to Get Away with Murder is Viola Davis.(1) The second best thing about HTGAWM is that it is a show about smart people making stupid decisions. I might have mentioned this is one of my favorite characterization themes. Annalise is brilliant from the start, shown to be both creative and ruthless in her problem solving abilities. She habitually takes the most difficult cases and prides herself on being able to turn around desperate situations.
In keeping with the traditional characterization, her emotional intelligence is commensurately low. When it comes to her personal life, she consistently makes poor decisions, which are then followed by increasingly messy consequences. The downwards spiral of snap decisions leading to spit-and-bubblegum solutions has defined the first half of the second season… even more than the first season, I think. She is a character designed to respond well in a crisis, and the first season mostly showcased her as such.
Last season, Annalise served as a shadow mentor and protector to her students, and her responses to their actions were alarming, but considered. And ultimately effective. The finale reveal showing Rebecca’s fate was actually the first hint that in this second season, Annalise’s direct, immediate decision-making style would increasingly backfire and lead her (and her students) deeper into trouble.
Instead of making cold, calculated choices and paying a personal price for them, she makes dubious gut-directed choices which are doomed to fail. A ruthless choice is coming up with a plan to frame her lover for her husband’s murder. It threw her personal life into chaos, but achieved its intended purpose — diverting suspicion from the people actually responsible for his death. Season two Annalise skips over the ruthless to the outrageously stupid, as the mid-season finale shows her instructing her student to shoot her.
There’s no question that Annalise Keating is meant to be seen as a smart character. She’s a highly successful lawyer and law professor. She has an impressive education and an illustrious career. Within the confines of the show’s sensationalistic reality, she is shown to dominate the courts she argues in and continually sways people to her opinion, even against their better judgment. Her force of personality inspires intense loyalty from her subordinates. Now, midway through the second season, all her strengths have turned to weaknesses, until even that inspired devotion can be turned into equally intense hate.
It’s painful but fascinating to watch. Annalise is a living, breathing trainwreck of a woman. Watching her life fall apart around her, in consequence of her own increasingly erratic actions, it’s hard to know whether to root for or against her. Or just sit back and watch the disaster unfold.
(1) I may have teared up just a little when I found out she would be playing the incomparable Amanda Waller for DC’s Suicide Squad movie.
Crossposted to Dreamwidth.
This entry was posted in Meta, Reviews and tagged how to get away with murder, television.
Hazel Gold 