THIS WEEK’S MVP
Brian M. Holdman, this episode’s writer, for stepping back and letting silence—and acting—convey volumes. From Emily forcing Ezra to speak first, to Hanna staring down the interrogating detectives, to Aria’s icy departure from Ezra’s apartment, the quiet was pointed and deadly.
THIS WEEK’S LVP
The Montgomery parents, for letting their eldest child host a party in her pants in the adjoining hotel room to her own father, and letting their youngest stay home alone for a week. Byron almost gets a pass for at least being in the country and not off swooning in Austrian Donut Castle.
BIGGEST SHOCK/BEST REVEAL
BIGGEST NO-DUH
The Rosewood (imported) police have it out for our Liars.
PREVIOUSLY ON PRETTY LITTLE LIARS
Spencer looked horrid.
THIS WEEK
Spencer looks great! Rehab was FAST.
Oh, you guys want more? Well, since you’re so very nice…
Emily
SOMEBODY’S got to put in some facetime at the ol’ alma mater, so Emily and Hanna do the school thing (ACT NORMAL, BITCH!), catching us up: Spencer is taking a few days off school! Aria is still in Syracuse with her dad! Hanna saw Fitz’s car in the parking lot!
Ick, really? Emily can’t believe he’s back and at school like a real person. Us either, Em. The girls are interrupted by an argument between Mike and Mona (right; they’re dating). Mike storms off. Mona looks sadly at the floor, then at the girls. Nope, not at—PAST. To Fitz, creepin’ on Mona from his classroom door.
That’s it. Em is MAD and is going to confront Fitz, NOW. Hanna’s on board with the Fitz-hating, but will wait to contribute until they’re smashing in his car windows or something; she can’t stomach being in the same room with the psycho. Fair. Emily leaves her in the hall.
Fitz, not looking up from his grading, admonishes: “Emily, class doesn’t start for another few minutes.” Emily, gloriously, only stares at him, wielding her silence excellently.
Fitz looks up. She says NOTHING. He is forced to continue. He’d love to talk to her about it, he says, but (disappointed tone), he’d “really rather do it outside of the classroom.” At last, Emily breaks her silence: “I don’t think that’s going to happen.” She slays him with the truth of his own lies, then pulls a total Fields and slaps her homework down in front of him.
Emily again excels in the Art of Silence when Mike accosts her later at work and demands that she tell Aria that “she got what she wanted.” Mona sent him a text early that morning with the meager message, We’re done. Emily is sorry that happened but doesn’t think Aria was involved. “No?? It’s not because you guys all hate her?” Em, silently, lets Mike come around to his own point. “Because I can’t think of any other reason Mona would cut me off like a wart!” (Well, when two hearts become one…)
Emily, juiced on her new superpower, seeks out Mona in the most dramatic way possible.
Em: I need to talk to you.
Mona (looking fly as hell): I have somewhere to be.
Em: Going to meet with EZRA FITZ?
Mona: (MASSIVE EYE ROLL) Get in.
Mona is surprised it took them so long to figure it all out. She wasn’t helping Ezra at first; she wanted to stop him. They made a deal. She’d give him details about her A days he couldn’t get on his own, and he’d edit out anything she’d done that was “…less than legal.” So…the whole book?? (SPOILER ALERT: yes, but not for adult, self-aware reasons)
Does Mona know what the manuscript said about Alison? No; Ezra only gave Mona parts of chapters she was in. And Mike? “He’s a really sweet guy. I fell for him.” She wanted out (of Fitz’s scheme) when the Liars caught on, but “that wasn’t an option,” so she broke it off with Baby Montgomery rather than drag him into her mess.
“So you got nothing?” Emily scoffs. Not nothing, Mona says. “It’s…murky. But it’s big. Remember how I told you that someone stole the game from me while I was at Radley?” (A+C note: “someone” = Red Coat; “told” = screamed maniacally at) Emily & the Liars thought that was Cece. “Well, whoever it was,” Mona says, “Ezra thinks he knows…”
Hanna
While Emily is busy staring daggers at Fitz, Hanna heads to the Brew, where she finds Holbrook working.
Holbrook suggest Travis will be happy to hear that; he saw how the two were making eyes at each other outside the courtroom. Apropos of CLUES, though, Holbrook wants Hanna to sit and chat. He brings out Paige’s anonymous card, and Hanna, clever heart, is cucumber cool even caught off guard like that. Does she recognize the handwriting? Does she know anything about the tip? She, like Em, wields her silence masterfully, and Holbrook eventually shrugs that it’s probably “just another crackpot.”
At school the next day, while Hanna is bringing Em in on the Holbrook reveal, Travis catches her eye. She had texted him because Mama Marin wanted to invite his family over for a thank you dinner. Travis, also, has been thinking: he wants Hanna and he to do a meal sometime…just the two of them. “Like…a date?” Hanna asks, cute-hopeful.
“I actually…hope it will be?” Travis cute-hopefully replies. They make plans for the next night.
The next afternoon, Hanna runs into Holbrook AND Detective Roma Maffia. Detective Maffia is certain Hanna’s handwriting will match the anonymous note. Hanna still won’t flinch (because she really doesn’t know the source, yes, but she would act the same even if she had), and invites Detective Maffia to run all the tests she wants. “It’s not blood on an anklet, lady. Get back to me when you’re in the big kid league.”
Detective Maffia, watching Hanna sashay away, says she’s convinced Hanna is intentionally giving them the runaround in retaliation for the hell they put her and Ashley through. Gabe wields his silence lamely. WAY TO NOT STAND UP FOR YOUR BOOK CLUB PAL, GABE. He at least thinks the note’s legit. Detective Maffia lets him run with that theory, but still wants to keep an eye on Hanna.
Hanna and Travis’ sidewalk café date! We know we’re not in real time, show, but do you even know what time of year it is? The middle of the Liars’ senior year is NOT PATIO SEATING WEATHER. Anyway, Hanna warns Travis that she’s a picker, meaning, whatever the other person orders will always look better, meaning, “whatever you order, get a side of garlic bread.”
Mrs. D runs into them, and we were one thousand percent certain she was going to comment on Han-na’s “hefty” past right there in front of Travis, but instead she acts weird then wanders off into the waiting arms of Detectives Holbrook and Maffia, ruining the date instead by becoming interesting to the A case. Hanna apologizes, then pulls out her phone to text Emily with the DiLaurentis update.
Later, Travis HAS THE DESSERT FORK IN HIS HAND and is trying to feed cake to Hanna. He is perfect, but she is too distracted by Aria’s SOS to make things right. She says she’s rusty with this first date business, then gets up to leave. Her guilt is strong, and she turns back just long enough to lean down and kiss Travis and say that, even though it totally didn’t look like it, she really had a great time. Then she heads to the Liar summit.
Aria
Apparently Aria ran away…straight to her dad in Syracuse. That’s not how you rebel, Aria! We catch up with her in a frat house rager, chugging a beer and macking on a hipster-y blonde guy in a leather jacket.
The next morning, she tells Emily over the phone that she’s taking advantage of “Prospective Students’ Week” as a cover. She’s still dressed in a Heartbreak Sweatshirt, although this one has happy faces on it, so maybe we’re making some crazypants emotional progress. Leather-jacket guy (we can’t catch his name so we shall call him Dude) from the night before shows up, establishes that he is another prospective student, and convinces her to skive off the organized tour in favor of diner pancakes.
The next time we see Dude, he and Aria are in a hotel room together, supes naked, surrounded by the contents of the minibar.
Dude strums his guitar, explaining that “Antonio needed some air.” “You named your guitar?” Aria asks, with maybe less incredulity than we would have offered up ourselves. “I like to think Antonio named himself,” Dude says, and whoa sorry there, our douche siren just starting blaring. So: he’s perfect for you, Aria! Aria and Dude chat about their college plans, and she tells him she likes to write. Aria, ya gotta stop starting relationships this way. She heads to the minibar for some “hair of the dog,” and when she finds it empty she’s basically like “lol my dad’s gonna be soooooo mad.”
They head down to a nearby lake to wear flannel and sit on a dock and talk about their feelings. Dude wants to go to Berklee College of Music, but his parents have basically already filled his closet with Syracuse gear, assuming he’ll be following family tradition. Aria’s heart has been broken into a bazillionty pieces.
Later, Aria is wearing leopard print again! Syracuse is working its magic: she looks nuttier; things are right-er in the world. She encourages Dude to talk to his parents about Berklee, and tells him to find her if he’s ever in Rosewood. Dude, you seem like an okay guy, so we should probably warn you that like 75% of Rosewood visitors get murdered. He slips a little piece of paper into her hand…
And you know what? She CAN handle it. She handles it right up by going to Ezra’s apartment and finally laying down the law in a way we thought she was constitutionally unable of doing.
Before he flees town, Ezra tells Aria he was in New York to give back his publisher’s advance (“It’s too late!” she spits), and hands her a copy of his manuscript, which he says could help her. “I guess this is goodbye,” he sighs, and she just stares at him, turns heel, and leaves in beautiful stony silence. ARIA!!!! At home, she does pick up the manuscript, and what she reads causes her to text the other girls an immediate SOS.
When she finds them at Emily’s house, she drops the bomb: Ezra thinks A is ALI’S MOM.
Spencer
Okay, yep. Spencer did go to rehab, for three whole days of sweaty, shaky detox. Back home, Veronica helps her unpack 1000 rehab sweaters and talks about how nice it is to have Spencer rejoin them in the land of the sober. Sober Sally herself has some auditory hallucinations, flashing back to the night Ali went missing.
The next morning, Spencer comes downstairs to find a brand-new generic white boy sitting in her very own kitchen. Listen—they gave us Sean and Ben and Noel, and we said nothing. They gave us Wilden and Wren and Ezra and Gabe, and still we said nothing. They gave us Ian and Holden and Jason and Nigel and Caleb and Toby and Jake and Lucas and Mike and Jonah and Andrew and Travis and Wes, and still we held our tongues, but the hour has come that now we must speak: There are far too many generic white boys in Rosewood, and we cannot tell any of them apart.
The parents Hastings have thrown their money at the Spencer problem and hired her a sobriety babysitter. He is Dean Stavros, a drugs & alcohol counselor who’s going to be living in the barn Spencer renovated in episode 1 and never got to move into. Until she can demonstrate that she won’t backslide, he’s her best friend, and she’s not allowed to talk on the phone, go to school, or get online. Oh, and she can’t call Toby. Spencer pitches a fit, but Dean shows off his counselor chops and calmly suggests that she start by forking over her electronics, to show her mom she’s willing to cooperate. Then he hands her a urine cup.
That night, Spencer climbs into bed only to find it is already full of a PILE OF GRAVE DIRT (aughhhh terrifying nightmares), and a note from A: “I know you dug her grave. Now I’m digging yours.”
The next morning, Sober Coach Dean tries to juice-cleanse Spencer, and tells her it’s weird she was up doing her laundry at 2 AM because usually people going through rehab get really tired, not wired. Spencer obviously can’t explain that the laundry was more of an emergency grave dirt situation thing, so she latches on to his question about nightmares. “What about… hallucinations?” Sure, detox could cause you to spontaneously introduce new plot twists!
The moment Dean turns his back, Spencer sneakily grabs the phone and dashes into her room to call Toby, desperate for him to reassure her that she’s not a terrible person. Unfortunately, Sober Coach catches her, so she’ll have to wrestle her own demons for just a little while longer.
Later, Spencer is doing just that with forced Hastings family time in the twelfth dimension of Hell. Wait, thirteenth level! Jessica DiLaurentis shows up at the door to ask Veronica if she’ll be attending her upcoming Bridal Fashion Show For Starving Children, a totally normal charity thing. Veronica ducks out of the room to write a check, and Mrs. D takes the opportunity to pointedly note Spencer’s clean sheets (which are sitting on the counter) and say, “No mother should have to watch her child die.”
As punishment for her phone stunt, Dean makes Spencer run a bunch of laps through the woods. She passes by a shovel and has a dramatic hallucination/flashback to the night Ali disappeared: running through the woods, being taunted by Ali, and then: a whack, a splatter, and…
Poor Spencer can’t trust her own memory, so she’s been reconstructing That Night based on others’ recollections…which is the real joke, since all she has is Cece (murderer), Jessica (crAzypAnts), and Veronica (obfuscator). But the raw and cruel part of her mind can’t help but believe the something-awful she saw in her flashback; she confesses to Dean that she’s “done terrible things before.” Oh, honey. He spins her terror into a positive sign that she’s ready to take responsibility for her actions. Then he hands her a letter from Toby, postmarked from LONDON, and leaves her alone.
She reads the letter, but we don’t see what it says. As she finishes, she hears her phone buzzing (real smart, Veronica) in a nearby drawer, and uses a letter opener to jimmy it open. It’s Aria’s SOS.
At Emily’s, Aria’s reveal about Mrs. D has Spencer putting some pieces together, and the picture is ominous: the grave dirt, the laundry comment, the dead child guilt trip… Spencer is fully, tragically convinced that she might be an awful murder-type person. The others can’t believe that she would ever hurt Ali. In the end, they agree: Ali is the only one who can really know for sure. And she’s not here.
When Spencer sneaks back home, her mom’s waiting for her, and she’s maaaaad. Veronica sighs about how DIFFICULT it is to keep protecting Spencer, and Spence suggests that maybe she should just stop. “It’s about a quarter past sarcasm, Spencer, you want to try another tone?” I dunno, you wanna try ANOTHER DAUGHTER (answer: yes, almost always).
Spencer is sent to bed, but she’s distracted in her room by a light turning on at the DiLaurentis house across the way. As she stares out the window, Mrs. DiLaurentis appears like a terrifying specter in the shadows behind her. Oh, no — it’s just Veronica, coming to see what’s happening. As she settles Spencer back into bed, truth bends and shifts again: Mrs. D flits like a ghost behind them and out the door. What’s real? What’s true? WHO IS A?
WHO IS A?
Whoever A is, s/he’s getting married! Or maybe just prepping for someone’s upcoming bridal fashion show…
NEXT WEEK…
Spencer reenacts a horror movie by dressing up in a wedding dress and getting chased through the woods, very, very creepily.
Are y’all participating in FYA Teen TV Madness? PLL is currently losing to Roswell, and we just cannot stand for that. Vote in round 1 here!
About the Contributor:
Alexis Gunderson is a TV critic and audiobibliophile. A Wyoming expat, she now lives in Maryland, where she runs the DC chapter of the FYA Book Club. She can be found talking about Teen TV on Twitter, and her longform criticism can be found on Authory.
