Warning: SPOILERS ahead for How To Get Away With Murder’s season 6 premiere.
How To Get Away With Murder is back for a final season - and the premiere is packed with twists, including the introduction of Gabriel’s mother in the flesh. How To Get Away With Murder doesn’t hold back when it comes to big reveals and fake-outs in the season 6 premiere. Annalise may or may not be dead by the end of the show; Michaela finds out that Annalise knew her father (the mysterious Dwight); Laurel and Christopher are still missing; and Tegan is being portrayed as potentially villainous. Meanwhile, Gabriel is still playing a big role in the series, and his part seems about to get even more complicated.
Gabriel was briefly introduced in How To Get Away With Murder season 4, signing up for school, before becoming a major player in season 5. Over the course of last season, it was revealed that he, like seemingly everyone else at Middleton, is connected to Annalise. Gabriel is actually Sam’s son from his first marriage, and intentionally transferred to Middleton to see what he could find out about Sam and Annalise. In addition, he was being blackmailed by the FBI, who threatened to frame his mother, Vivian, for the murder of her ex-boyfriend unless he digs up dirt on Annalise. And while all that is going on, Gabriel and Michaela also started a relationship, although that seemed to be going down the tubes by the end of the season as Michaela realizes that she can’t tell him about all the murdering and criminal activity that the Keating Crew have been up to.
In the How To Get Away With Murder season 6 premiere, “Say Goodbye”, things get even more complicated for Gabriel - although for much of the episode, it looks like things may actually be going right for him. Gabriel and Michaela decide to give things a real shot (albeit with the threat of castration should he leave her without an explanation), and after they have a nice romp together, he gets a call from his mother. As he chats with her, the camera moves to a woman sitting in a car outside his building, thus revealing Gabriel’s mother, Vivian, who is shown spying on her son through the window. After the conversation, Vivian is then seen unpacking in what looks like a hotel room, including a box that has one of Sam’s case files in it (which is put in the closet). While there, Vivian gets a text from a withheld number, saying that Annalise is back.
While it’s exciting to see Vivian appear, there are all kinds of suspicious things happening. For one, Vivian wasn’t supposed to know that Gabriel was at Middleton, and she specifically asks him about UVA on the phone. Which means that he is lying to her, and she knows it - but how? And why isn’t she confronting her son about the move to Middleton? In addition, she’s clearly got more going on than just finding out that Gabriel was lying and coming to see him; the shoebox with the (presumably stolen) patient files from Sam? The message about Annalise? Vivan appears to have a devious plan unfolding that will surely be explored throughout the rest of How To Get Away With Murder season 6.
What Vivian’s arrival means for the final season isn’t clear, but there are plenty of possibilities. She could still be gunning for Annalise as the other woman that broke up her marriage. And if she is, then that’s potentially Annalise’s file that Vivian has stashed away. When the FBI failed to get what they wanted from Gabriel, someone from the agency could have decided to blackmail Vivian directly. Only time will tell - and with mothers and children at the center of this series from the start, it’s clear that Vivian’s sudden appearance is going to be a big part of How To Get Away With Murder season 6.
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