TV Review: HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER: Season 3, Episode 4: Don’t Tell Annalise [ABC]

How To Get Away With Murder Don’t Tell Annalise Review

How To Get Away With Murder: Season 3, Episode 4: Don’t Tell Annalise grants viewers another, highly-coveted opportunity to see Annalise struggle to cope as she finds herself up against the ropes.

Part of what makes Annalise Keating (Viola Davis) such an arresting character is her ability to function even under the most dire circumstances. Faced with events and deeds that would make the rest of us collapse in despair, the indomitable lawyer directs her students and staff to do the unthinkable without so much as flinching. So the few times when we see that something is getting Annalise, then we know it’s bad, and by extension, something we as viewers don’t want to miss.

When Annalise slapped her client in last week’s episode, we weren’t so much surprised at the fact that she smacked him as we were that it took as long as it did for her to. What we weren’t expecting, however, was for this incident to have any real repercussions (at least, this reviewer didn’t), which, as we saw on Thursday night, it absolutely did. After an unknown party secretly recorded the altercation, Annalise has her license to practice law revoked literally in the middle of a trial, while whatever remaining goodwill university president Soraya Hargrove (Lauren Luna Velez) harbored towards her evaporates as she terminates her position at the college.

With even Nate (Billy Brown) turning his back on her after she succumbs to the temptation of imbibing excessive amounts of alcohol, Annalise is stuck in what might be the lowest point of her career, if not life. It’s great to watch, but not because of any sadistic pleasure that might be elicited from seeing her struggle to get back on her feet: it’s because we know that someway, somehow, Annalise will overcome these seemingly-insurmountable obstacles and remind us why the brilliant law professor emerged as one of the most beloved characters on TV today in the first place.

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