CinePals React to How to Get Away with Murder's Season 1 Finale: Frank May Be Behind Rebecca's Fate

Watching the final three episodes of How to Get Away with Murder's first season, we spent a good chunk of the ending trying to work out whether Frank killed Rebecca. "Well, I think it's supposed to remain ambiguous, but I believe it's talking about Rebecca. I think Frank did it," was the read once the episode ended, and it took a moment for that to sink in. "This is crazy. I wasn't, I didn't think that this was going to be the whole show," we said, and "Wow, dude. I need a second to like process everything," was the honest reaction in the room right after.

The clue we pointed to afterward was hiding in Frank's own dialogue. When he snapped, "You think I'm going to whack Rebecca? Whack? You said whack? Is that what you think I am? Some freaking hitman?" we flagged that moment as a giveaway, saying the phrasing was something only "who speaks like that except people who whack people" would use, comparing his manner of talking to a mob character who repeats himself, like Tommy from Goodfellas saying things three times. On whether we'd suspected Frank before that, we differed: on one side Frank was never suspected at all during the season, not even in passing, while on the other there had been a passing suspicion at some point: "I had wondered... I thought I said it, I thought something about him, but anyway."

On the reveal that Sam killed Lyla, we worked through whether Annalise knew about it beforehand and concluded she likely did not, based on the real time arguments we had watched play out between her and Sam earlier in the season. We also flagged as an unresolved question why Rebecca confessed to Lyla's murder in the first place, calling that "never made clear" despite her character being written as very smart, and we noted a separate loose end around who tipped off the discovery of the water tank dump site, which the show also never explained.

We felt for Rebecca by the end, given she turned out to be innocent of Lyla's murder, saying "it really sucks what happened to Rebecca cuz she was innocent," though we pointed out she was not blameless either, since she had drugged her neighbor Rudy with a drug the show called Purple X, contributing to the breakdown that got him institutionalized.

Our overall verdict on the stretch of episodes was positive. We said the season's early habit of repeatedly flashing back to the woods and the murder scene got old, but that once the show moved past that device it "got even better," pointing to moments where flashback replays of earlier alibis, like Lyla's boyfriend's story, turned out to be embellished truth rather than outright lies. We called the season's overall approach "good misdirection," adding that misdirection is "the theme of this show."

So what do you think the main throughline will be in season two, and could this storyline actually wrap up in the very first episode?