"How do you smoothly conclude a show that so often went off the rails?" asks Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya. "That so often was fueled by leaving viewers jaw-dropped with its ridiculous twists? How To Get Away With Murder doesn’t have a real answer. It doesn’t have a whole lot of answers period. And yet, Annalise Keating indeed is its greatest accomplishment." In the series finale, Upadhyaya says, "Annalise’s is really one of the only arcs that gets closed out in a satisfying way. The rest is bulldoze, bulldoze, bulldoze" Upadhyaya adds: "The central themes on this show have always been immensely compelling, even when the writing sometimes loses grasp of its characters. Trauma and its long-term psychological effects, systemic racism and sexism, and paranoia and privacy have been some of the most consistent themes that the show keeps returning to. And it does so with depth and style, unfurling legal cases that always have more to them than meets the eye. There is always, always more beneath the surface of How To Get Away With Murder’s drama. The show doesn’t always excavate those underpinnings seamlessly, but when it does manage to tell a deeper story, some of the chaos and narrative whiplash comes into clearer focus. That’s not entirely missing from the finale. It touches, at times, on ideas about justice, trauma, sacrifice, identity. But these touches are just grazes. Outside of Annalise’s courtroom monologue, very little about this finale is firmly held in place. No series finale needs to be completely satisfying in the sense that it feels complete or cathartic, but this one struggles to find a whole lot of meaning in the way it closes its characters’ arcs. What does it mean that Annalise survives and lives a long life even after so many around her were lost or otherwise permanently altered? The show doesn’t have time to address any of the meaning of this, favoring the fanservicey time-jump epilogue instead. Instead of meaningful narrative conclusions, we get more deaths, more chaos."
ALSO:
TOPICS: How to Get Away with Murder, ABC, Pete Nowalk, Shonda Rhimes, Viola Davis, Series Finales, Shondaland