How to Get Away with Murder season 5 finale: Where is Laurel?

Laurel -

You knew that the How to Get Away with Murder season 5 finale was going to deliver some wallops … this is what this show is designed to do. It’s twisted, emotional, and it definitely finds a way to keep you guessing.

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So what did we learn tonight? Mostly, it is that the Castillo family is quite possibly the worst family ever. The more that we’ve come to learn about these people, the more we think that they may win an award for “most miserable people in existence.” Are Laurel and Christopher the only sane ones left? Maybe that’s why, in the close minutes of the finale tonight, they vanished almost out of thin air.

The cliffhanger tonight is a big one that can be summed up in just a couple of words: What happened? Were they snatched up by someone attached to Jorge, or was a different culprit at play here? We don’t exactly take this as a sign that Laurel is leaving the show, but it’s certainly a reveal that we’re supposed to be thinking about for weeks and months on end.

Obviously, this is not a finale meant to function as a series finale.

We don’t want to focus just on Laurel here, given that there was clearly a lot of other important stuff that went down. Take, for example, what transpired with Emmett — is he actually dead? Things didn’t look particularly good for him. He could have been poisoned, but this comes about right as the Governor is on TV declaring him a person of interest in both Nate Senior’s death and then also D.A. Miller’s. The Governor and Laurel’s brother Xavier were working together in order to destroy Annalise Keating and had plans to do more or less whatever it took — it doesn’t seem like what happened in the closing minutes was the original plan, but that is what transpired all the same.

There is another important question left to wonder here, and that is whether or not Laurel was actually taken at all, by the Castillos or otherwise. Did she leave on her own? As Karla Souza explains to TVLine, there is a case to be made for her just taking off and not wanting to deal with her son being in danger anymore:

Once Christopher’s involved and witnesses a murder, I would definitely make a decision about that, as a new mom. I couldn’t just keep saying, “Oh, this isn’t safe for my son,” and just not do anything. Something must be done. Laurel sees that however much they try to get out of the danger zone, they just keep coming back, and then after she receives her mom’s scalp, she realizes that her premonitions of how evil her family can be are true. In a way, it adds to the guilt of Laurel feeling that her family has been involved in all of the bad stuff that’s happened to the Keating Five since Wes’ death. That’s why it makes this disappearance interesting. The fans might think that Laurel disappeared of her own accord, or that maybe Laurel was abducted by her family in some way, or killed. Those are two avenues that could very well be plausible because of Laurel’s constant fear of having Christopher in this world.

For the record, our feeling is that it’s a little more interesting that Laurel went rogue and just took off, leaving Annalise and everyone else desperate to find her.

When could season 5 of How to Get Away with Murder arrive?

Be sure to visit the link here to get some more discussion on that.

What do you think happened to Laurel, and does this How to Get Away with Murder cliffhanger leave you a little more excited for the future of the show? Be sure to share now in the comments! (Photo: ABC.)

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