CinePals React to How to Get Away with Murder 1x10-1x12: The Nate Twist Left Us Reeling

This was our first recording dedicated purely to How to Get Away with Murder. We had been experimenting with mixing our Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder reactions together, and as we said on camera, "it was an experiment and sometimes experiments fail and then you just got to course correct." So this reaction covers episodes 10, 11 and 12 back to back, and there was a lot to unpack.

The Nate Frame-Up Left Us Genuinely Shocked

The biggest gut punch for us came when Annalise had Sam's ring planted in the woods with Nate's fingerprint on it, leading to his arrest for Sam's murder. We spent a long stretch just trying to process it, admitting on camera, "I don't know if I said much in this one because I'm just like... this is like a lot of shock and awe, man." We could not get past how ruthless it felt given how helpful Nate had been to her throughout. The reaction was "It's still so messed up" given that the two of them were still involved romantically at the time.

We tried to reason through why she picked him specifically, since she needed to give the police someone with plausible motive, and Nate being her lover fit that bill in a way the sister or the students did not. We also noted the grim irony that Nate is a cop, and "they don't like cops in prison," which made the betrayal feel even heavier to us.

We Kept Drawing Real-Life True Crime Comparisons

Earlier in the season we had already brought up the real case of a girl found in a water tank on top of what we believed was the Cecil Hotel in downtown LA, and we returned to that comparison here while discussing Laya's body being found in the sorority house tank. When the plot shifted to Jackie holding two kidnapped girls captive and secretly raising a baby she told one victim had been stillborn, we thought out loud about a kidnapping case we remembered where girls were held for over a decade, and separately a case of a young man kept in his parents' house for around 26 years. We were careful to say we did not know the details for certain, just that the show felt like it was loosely echoing that kind of story, and we talked about how Stockholm syndrome likely explains why Jackie ended up an "unsavory" person despite being a victim herself, saying simply, "hurt people hurt people."

Our Running Comparison to Scandal

We kept weighing this show against Scandal throughout. The melodrama and the willingness of characters to throw people they care about under the bus felt familiar to us from Scandal, and we compared Frank directly to Huck, saying he is "like that dude on Scandal" who handles the things you do not want to know about. But we also said the pacing and the visual style are completely different, and we admitted, "the one thing I do not miss from it is the shutters," referring to Scandal's photograph-flashback style, which we joked never made much sense.

Do you think Annalise's plan to frame Nate can actually hold up, or is that going to blow up in her face?