Meta: The Only Winning Move is Not to Play (HTGAWM s6)-- DFvQ

[xandromedovna]

CW: incarceration, discussion of racism, rape mention (also you can just assume all of these have spoilers)

This may be a rather obvious and cliché question to ask of the final season of HTGAWM, but I’ll ask it anyway: how do you get away with murder? Do they actually get away with it? The answer of course depends on how you define ‘getting away with it’. Does it entail no jail time? No conviction? No suspicion? Not being murdered yourself? Certainly staying alive seems to be a prerequisite for getting away with something, but in the world of HTGAWM (and in ours) prison is such a cruel and all-to-usual punishment that avoiding it at any cost is paramount. Annalise justifies framing a dead Wes by saying “I’m doing this for you—each of you—so you don’t have to go to prison and get naked in group showers and crap in front of people that might rape you. It’s death in there. And this horrible thing that we must do, it’s life.” (3x15)

The central irony of the series is that Annalise is such an embedded expert in Getting Away with Murder despite never herself having killed anyone, so ultimately there’s nothing for her to get away with (except for conspiracy, obstruction of justice, accessory after the fact…). As befits the moralism of mainstream US television, the answer seems to be, to quote the 1983 film WarGames: “the only winning move is not to play.” Wanna not get in trouble for murdering someone? Easy, don’t murder anyone and you’ll be fine. Probably.

Of course, one of the central points of the show is that the legal system is quite unjust, leading to innocent people dying or being arrested and known criminals going free. The situation is more complicated than murderers being punished narratively and innocent people getting narrative justice. So I decided to be a nerd and calculate various measures of whether or not the main characters “got away with it”. There are 14 mains, and I tracked how many murders they committed, whether they live to old age, whether they were ever convicted of a crime, and whether they are ever arrested during the show. Here’s my data:

I gave half-credit to Nate for Miller, Annalise for Rose, Connor for Pax, Michaela for Sam, and Oliver for Asher. The average number of murders committed was 1.32 (median and mode 1). With the exception of Tegan (as far as I remember), all of them were arrested at least once over the course of the series. This makes Tegan the only character to truly ‘get away with it’ on every measure.

While they were virtually all arrested and many of them did at least some jail time, there were surprisingly few convictions. Many of the episodes centre around Annalise’s successful attempts to make sure the charges don’t stick or at least get them out on bail. Frank’s convictions predate the events of the series, and the remaining convictions are for the Keating 3 after Annalise wins her own trial. Connor’s the only one of the three who does any jail time, though. The average number of murders by those convicted of a crime is 2.25 (mode .5), whereas the average number of murders by those who weren’t is .95 (mode 1).

Probably the clearest measure of ‘getting away with it’ narratively is whether or not the character is themselves killed off or if they live to old age. The average number of murders committed by mains who live to old age—Annalise, Connor, Oliver, Michaela, Laurel— is .6 (median and mode .5). The average number of murders committed by mains who probably lived to the end—Nate, Tegan, Gabe— is 1.5. The average number of murders committed by mains who don’t live to the end—Bonnie, Frank, Wes, Asher, Emmett, Rebecca— is 1.83 (median 1, modes 1 and 0; Frank is Spiders Georg with at least 7 murders). For both convictions and not-dying, Nate gets away with the most murders.

Thus, if one were actually to use this show as a handbook for how to get away with murder, Annalise isn’t the paradigm to follow, because she doesn’t murder anyone. Tegan, Nate, and Gabe are the paradigms to follow, and for each of them the answer is: “have an excellent lawyer”. Annalise isn’t the example, she’s the solution; she bends over backwards to help everyone in her life, often to her own detriment and to the point of almost taking the fall for them herself. One of the most important aspects of Annalise’s characterization is how she’s a deconstruction of the Mammy/Maid trope, where Black women are expected to clean up after and take care of everyone without receiving care in return (an expectation she calls out on several occasions). So much of her time is spent trying to keep her loved ones from facing the consequences of their actions out of a sense of duty. While the others are trying to get away with murder, Annalise is constantly trying to get away from murder. She tries to run away from it by fleeing the country or going to rehab, because ultimately to do so she has to save herself and stop protecting everyone else. But she isn’t allowed to move on until the kids answer for their crimes and Frank and Bonnie are dead. Tegan and Nate get away with it because they keep getting dragged into Annalise’s shit instead of the other way around. The ones who keep roping her into their problems are the ones who get punished narratively.

(Also, interestingly, white and cishet characters have both a higher murder rate and a higher death count than characters of colour and LGBTQ characters, which seems to be a deliberate reversal of the villain-coding and devalued life that marginalized characters often face in fiction.)

On another measure though, none of them have gotten away with anything, because all of them are profoundly traumatized by the past three years. As long as they’re trying to get away with it, they’re stuck in this perpetual turmoil of intrigue and conspiracy and life-and-death decisions. This tanks their mental, emotional, professional, and sometimes even physical health. When Laurel’s brother Xavier is revealed to be involved, Annalise tears into Laurel and says many unnecessarily hurtful things to her and Frank, and when Frank says “fine, hate me, then,” Annalise responds: “I don’t want to hate anyone! I just want my life back, because this isn’t a life! It’s Hell. We’re all living in Hell and I want out!” (5x15) Their punishment for their crimes is being forced to prevent them from being discovered indefinitely.

Of course, HTGAWM isn’t intended as a manual, and if it were, the answer to “how do you get away with murder?” would be: “you don’t”. In fact, the show title itself and ones similar to it actually seem designed to impede would-be criminals; now, when someone does an Internet search for “how to get away with murder”, they are much more likely to find the show than actual instructions. While the title and premise promise something salacious, in fact the point is that crime doesn’t pay.

On the other hand, as an author who often has to look up suspicious things, it's a comfort to know that googling “how to get away with murder” likely won’t get me on an FBI watchlist anymore, as I’m simply a humble meme farmer fangirling about a show. What did you think I was looking for?