How to Get Away With Murder recap: 'What Happened to You, Annalise?' 

'How to Get Away with Murder' boss teases new Murder Night and more

'How to Get Away With Murder' recap: 'What Did We Do?'

is back. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed the last three months of regular breathing and quiet, scandal-free evenings and not having a heart attack every Thursday night. But sorry — not anymore! We’re back for the second half of the second season, so keep the paramedics on standby while we once more return to the hellish clan of homicidal misfit attorneys of Keating & Associates.

All things considered, the midseason premiere was intense but actually digestible, at least by

standards. It served primarily a heaping helping of fine acting from Viola Davis and a side of strong character development for Annalise. There seemed to be no stroke-inducing reveal or shocking flash-forward involving a dead body (although the episode’s final few moments definitely raised a brief silent alarm that Wes was about to become a corpse).

Instead, the episode was all about Annalise’s recovery…and yet, she’s never been worse. She’s depressed. She’s traumatized. She is Ally McBroken.

Two weeks after Annalise was shot at the Hapstall mansion, Bonnie is doing what she can to ease her transition from hospital to home. Naturally, Annalise rejects a nurse (but welcomes pink silks and sensible moccasins, obvi). Still, Bonnie remains by her side — not just because Bonnie’s a loyal friend, but because she’d never seen Annalise exhibit a death wish like she did on murder night. It’s something Nate noticed, too: Annalise may have

A tired Annalise shoos Bonnie away, but she’s not alone in the house. Almost instantly, Annalise begins hallucinating a baby, forced into her arms by a crying woman whom we later discover to be Wes’ dead mother, Rose. Annalise holds the baby, soothes its cries, rocks it to sleep. And yet she’s not blessed by its presence; she’s haunted. Is the baby Wes? Or is it the boy Annalise was pregnant with — and presumably lost — when she first met Rose, ten years ago?

Bonnie gets wise to the visions and tries to snap Annalise back to reality — she has to testify at Catherine Hapstall’s preliminary hearing, after all, which has conveniently been scheduled right at the height of Annalise’s mental illness and the nadir of her physical recuperation.

The good news is, at least her plan seemed to work: Catherine has indeed been accused of shooting Annalise and killing ADA Emily Sinclair (may she rest in acting school) while a manhunt is underway for suspected accomplice Philip Jessup. All they need to take it to trial is testimony from Annalise, who’s working far beyond the capacity of her present trauma threshold to deliver a simple statement.

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Sensing her fragility, Bonnie basically drugs Annalise with ice cream while the kids and Frank draft a statement so Annalise won’t have to testify. Sadly, the judge won’t allow it unless it’s delivered in person, and since Annalise is so preoccupied with visions of babies and the stress of an uncertain future (girl,

) that she absolutely botches the whole thing when she finally rolls into the preliminary hearing.

Annalise fumbles on the stand, especially after locking eyes with Wes and hearing the eerie cries of phantom infants and Ken Kratz from the hallway. She says she doesn’t know if Catherine shot her and that she didn’t see anything that night and that she’s unsure if she’s lying. It’s enough to ruin the whole case against Catherine, but then Annalise does something so characteristically Annalise that I’m still unsure whether it was intentional or not: She breaks her former attorney-client privilege with Catherine and reveals on the stand that Catherine told her she didn’t kill the Hapstalls. Suddenly, the prosecutor throws out the useless testimony and Annalises’s mistakes are salvaged. I mean, sort of.

After a quick powwow with Caleb, she hatches a new story: They’re going to pin it all on Philip, saying he killed the Hapstalls, planted the gun in Catherine’s room, befriended her before she knew who he was. He then drugged Catherine, who shot Annalise and doesn’t remember any of it. That’s the new narrative, which basically goes against the entire point of murder night, but what the hell? Annalise convinces Caleb to convince Catherine to follow along as it’s her best shot at innocence. She plays the victim, and she delivers a late-in-the-game statement asserting Philip’s guilt. (She gets five years in minimum security prison, and he gets a manhunt.)

NEXT: Won’t someone think of the (fully grown and complicit in murder) children!?

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