How to Get Away with Murder season 6, episode 13 recap: What If Sam Wasn’t the Bad Guy This Whole Time?

After a close shave on How to Get Away with Murder, Annalise is faced with yet more secrets and revelations. What do we learn about Sam?

Vivian promised to reveal new details about Sam Keating’s (Tom Verica) past. The man was a significant figure in the lives of most of the main characters in How to Get Away with Murder, and also the primary reason why the Keating Five ended up in the mess they did.

Sam was a right rotter with nothing redeeming him – or was there? This episode of the show tries desperately to give Sam some layers.

Sam and Hannah

Sam was bad enough, but his sister Hannah (Marcia Gay Harden) really had it in for Annalise. Vivian has a theory about why that was; through deduction and instinct, Vivian believes that Sam and Hannah’s relationship may have been romantic in nature.

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She doesn’t have proof, but they were neglected as children and desperate for love. Vivian believes they turned to each other for affection, which explains why Hannah hated all the women in Sam’s life. She was jealous.

Vivian has come to Annalise with this theory because Hannah could be the firestarter who started the witch-hunt for Annalise’s head. But it’s hard to believe anything Vivian tells Annalise.

She swore that she hadn’t met Sam after he abandoned her, but in this episode of How to Get Away with Murder, Vivian reveals that she had accepted Sam’s invitation to meet and that they hadn’t just talked during their encounter.

The whole incident just re-establishes Sam’s weakness – when the going got tough after he and Annalise lost their baby, Sam made a run for it. And then he came crawling back the moment it became obvious that Sam would be losing Annalise for good.

After consulting with Frank and Bonnie, Annalise decides to investigate this possibility. The thought that Hannah might be pulling the Castillos’ and the FBI’s strings could be the lynchpin in Annalise’s case.

Digging a Deeper Grave

Connor and Michaela were taken into custody by Special Agent Lanford for breaking their deal. They are clever enough to deflect his accusations by explaining that Annalise already knew that the two of them were FBI informants so they played into it by pointing the finger at Lanford. That way, the two of them assure Lanford, they would gain Annalise’s trust and the case wouldn’t be hampered.

Lanford, for some reason, isn’t so easily fooled. He informs Connor and Michaela that outing themselves as informants were against the deal, so he’s re-writing the rules. His new deal is so full of lies that Michaela and Connor spend the entire night debating on their own about it. They’ll perjure themselves too much if they take the new deal.

So Lanford threatens Connor with the possibility of putting Oliver away for life for all his digital indiscretions. Connor stands strong, willing to go to jail if it means he can out Lanford’s corruption. In the end, both Connor and Michaela are free and Michaela’s deal hasn’t changed. But Connor tells Oliver that he took a new deal. What does that mean for them in the future?

Lanford is up in everyone’s business. He and Pollack call in Nate with absolutely no updates about his father’s case. But this gives Nate an opportunity he’s been looking for since speaking to Xavier. In the previous episode of How to Get Away with Murder, Nate had killed Xavier – a bad move according to Frank as Xavier was supposed to be their bargaining chip to set Annalise free. But Nate has a plan and it involves turning the FBI against each other.

Nate conjures up an image of Pollack on the night that Bonnie’s brakes were cut and she almost died. He shows it to Lanford and suggests that Pollack was in cahoots with the Castillos and was the person who cut the breaks.

This is surprisingly a true fact, not just a theory that Nate’s thought up. Nate’s plan seems to be working because it’s not long before Lanford calls Nate and tells him that he’s found Pollack’s connection to the Castillos and she’s been put in interrogation.

The Proof

Annalise asks Teagan to check in with her contacts about the possibility of Sam and Hannah’s relationship. It’s a tough ask, and what will this achieve? Annalise suggests to Bonnie that if Vivian’s hypothesis is correct, it might explain why Sam was so good at understanding all the women in his life.

Hannah was his older sister and could have been the instigator of the incest. As hard as the writers are trying, the entire premise of this How to Get Away with Murder episode is pretty thin. It almost seems like the showrunners want to forgive and absolve Sam of his guilt by pinning it all on Hannah – a luxury that Annalise hasn’t been given.

Sam may have been manipulated and abused by Hannah, but that doesn’t explain away all the horrible stuff he’s done in the past, which is what Bonnie tells Annalise. Serial cheating, ordering Frank to kill Lyla because she was an inconvenience, being manipulative, tearing Bonnie and Frank apart because of his own obsession with Bonnie – these are just some of the things that Sam did. And, he never came clean about what happened to him, which estranged his partners and families even more.

Teagan digs up Hannah’s old school reports where she and Annalise discover that Hannah missed nearly three months of school at one point. They realize that it might have been because Hannah was hiding a pregnancy. They discover, much to their horror, that not only was Vivian correct, but Sam and Hannah also have a child. A child who is now the grown man they all know as Frank!

Final Thoughts

How to Get Away with Murder is a show known for its suspension of disbelief. It’s outrageous most of the time, but the characters and actors constantly make it compelling. So, when the show trips up, it does so hard. This episode is definitely one of its poorer efforts to drum up some intrigue.

Perhaps centering an entire episode on the least interesting character on the show – Sam Keating – and then attempting to make him sympathetic was redundant. There are precious few episodes left, do we need to add more layers to this series?

New episodes of How to Get Away with Murder air Thursday nights at 10/9c on ABC.