About:
Sigh.
THIS WEEK’S MVP
Andrew hauled a ton of mulch and didn’t even get to make out with Spencer for his efforts.
THIS WEEK’S LVP
We feel for you, Aria, really we do. But please find a new groove to wear down, and a new age appropriate gentleman to seek out for consolation. Also, a new hat.
BIGGEST SHOCKER/BEST REVEAL
After an entire season+ defending her to the other Liars, Emily actually might want Alison to leave town.
BIGGEST NO-DUH
Alison’s building bigger and bigger lies, and she wants her friends 100% on board, letter-perfect. Or else?
PREVIOUSLY ON PRETTY LITTLE LIARS
Someone buried Mrs. DiLaurentis. Jason told Spencer not to trust their dad. Maybe Paige & Em will be friends? Mona is NO ONE’S FRIEND. Mona made Hanna into an Ali doll. But now Hanna is making changes, and Mona is gathering her army. Shana is dead. Aria did it. “A is gone”—HAHAHAHAHA.
THIS WEEK
We open on a pair of Liars trying out some head transplants, a la Jason and Malcolm. Aria’s efforts include this… hat. And Hanna’s include her awesome new hair. Although Aria is suspicious of Hanna’s explanation of “spontaneous!”
THE POWERFUL LUNGS OF ALISON DILAURENTIS
We guess Peter Hastings didn’t kidnap Ali after all. She’s home, purging her old wardrobe to make way for new clothes, new school supplies, new life. Her dad really seems to want her to just stay away from Rosewood High, even suggesting that they move away. But Ali is determined to stay with her friends, even if they maybe aren’t being as friendly as usual.
As in, no one is answering her calls, except poor Hanna, at last. Ali is frantic because she needs to go to the doctor for a police-ordered medical exam and doesn’t want to go alone, but no one else was picking up. So not only was Hanna her last resort, but now Hanna has to bear the brunt of Ali’s guilt-tripping, AND she has to be the one to bring Ali to the doctor.
SURE IS GREAT HAVING ALI BACK.
Ali’s complete lack of eye contact throughout her entire doctor’s exam is masterful. Equally masterful is Hanna’s mix of concern, distrust, irritation and boredom in the chair across the room. The doctor requests an x-ray to check for lingering particulates in Ali’s head wound, and then pauses at a significant scar on her thigh. We’ve seen Ali lie smoothly a zillion times, but somehow this makes her voice go all loud as she shouts about how she “fell on a rock when she jumped out of the car” and she was “BLINDFOLDED!! DIDN’T THE POLICE TELL YOU THAT!!”
Later, once the doctor has left the room, Ali gets dressed shakily. Hanna, all quiet solicitation, asks about the scar, but Ali won’t tell her either.
We wish we could see you as someone other than a master manipulator, Ali, but you can’t un-binge watch four seasons of this show.
Then she reaches into her bag and, shedding her trauma victim character, pulls out a tape recorder, which she hands to Hanna with the steely-eyed injunction to listen to it, memorize it, and pass it around for the other Liars to do the same. Someone will always be asking questions, and they have to know the perfect answers.
See what we mean?
TAKE AWAY ARIA’S YOUTUBE PRIVILEGES
After this week, Aria is #1 on our Radley Watch List 2014. She can’t get over the fact that she killed Shana—and while we don’t mean to make light of the actual gravity of this situation… maybe therapy would be a better coping strategy than obsessively scanning Shana’s left-behind copy of The ScArlet Letter for clues in its underlined passages, watching a video of Shana’s funeral (side note: how is this a thing??) over and over and over and over again until she’s worn a literal hole through the internet, and then barging into her ex-teacher/boyfriend’s apartment uninvited to unload.
She also does most of this STILL WEARING THAT GODDAMN HAT.
As soon as Ezra showed up on screen our brains turned into static white noise, so who even knows what happened for the rest of their scenes. Cards. Locks. Couches. Sitting. BlaghhHHhhhhh.
WE’RE NOT LOBSTERS
A brief interlude in which Hanna nails like forty of the episode’s best lines, right in a row.
Aria is still wearing The Hat.
SWIM TEAM TIME
Emily is evidently lippy Sydney Driscoll’s legit swim coach now. They keep running into Paige in the locker room, so Emily—who, we swear, had a total personality transplant this episode—invites her to tag along for track sprints and, eventually, pizza with many strange toppings. Then it’s like “Sydney who?” as Em and Paige banter back and forth cutely… until Paige spies Mona at another table and they have an epic staredown.
Later, Mona accosts Paige on the street to try to convince her to help #MonasArmy convince Alison to leave Rosewood. Paige still won’t sign up for the draft, but Mona says she can’t be “social Switzerland”: she’s either with Mona, or she’s against her. Paige, watch out. We, for two, would never ever want to be against Mona on anything.
Paige chooses a side: Emily’s, of course. That night she drops by to warn Em that certain people may be amassing certain armies of certain ex-losers determined to take down Alison DiLaurentis, were she to return to Rosewood High. She doesn’t want people to get hurt, but she also isn’t going to rat out the people trying (KIND OF reasonably) to keep themselves safe. She flees back into the dark street, leaving a bewildered Em to watch her go.
Emily, in a radical departure from the past MANY EPISODES, is now suddenly on Paige’s side. She goes over to Ali’s to suggest ever so gently that perhaps she should move away after all. Alison reminds Em not so gently that she was the one who convinced Ali to come home in the first place. She’s going back to school. And her own army of four is going to memorize their Liars’ Playbook and stand at her back, dammit. Emily concedes… but says that this is the last time.
THE HORRIBLE HASTINGSES
Over at the Hastings Manor, Veronica is terribly concerned about the inconvenience of having a pesky murder happen right in her own backyard. The shoveling noises! The threat to the landscaping! It is almost as if someone died or something.
Those secrets that Melissa and Peter were so ominously swapping back and forth the past few episodes have boiled up and overrun into Spencer and Veronica’s own plot. Veronica initially plays off Melissa’s sneakiness as “Oh, she’s just back together with Wren!” which MAY actually be worse than the real thing!
The real thing, though, is that back when Ali disappeared for the first time, Jessica almost went to the cops to tell them Spencer was involved, only backing off when Peter threatened to tell Jessica’s husband about their affair/child. Now, Veronica is stomach-churningly worried Peter might have bashed Jessica’s skull in to keep her from going back to the cops about her suspicions that Spencer killed the not-Ali girl in the grave.
Somehow Spencer roped Quiz Bowl Andrew into landscaping the Manor’s entire property, even though we’re pretty sure Jessica’s grave was like maximum eight feet square. Andrew awkwardly hits on Spencer (“I’d be good with a bottle of water and a snack, or…you making out with me.” “Um, still with the carpenter.”) and notes, quite rightly, “Shouldn’t your mom be less worried about what’s going into the ground that what came out of it?” Spencer is well aware that Veronica’s anxiety about azalea placement is just displaced fear, either of outside murderers or of, well, Spencer. Those Hastings parents need to get on the same page—one’s doing everything she can to dig in and nest, the other’s doing everything he can to uproot and flee. Both plans probably benefit from replanted azaleas, though, so thank god Andrew’s guest turn isn’t being wasted.
As they turn to leave the shed, Spencer and Andrew trip over a dead possum that’s gone face-up in a giant bucket of Rodenticide. You know, the kind of rat poison that could be fed to a human as human poison, as Spencer learns when she looks it up online later.
Spence’s freakout over this find is cut short by her turn for a private convo with Ali, who calls her over to tell her that the coroner’s toxicology report is back with news about her mother’s cause of death. Spencer almost faints with relief when the answer isn’t “rat poison,” but rather some drug called Lorastan that caused Jessica’s already-low blood pressure to plummet even more until her heart stopped. This bit of relief is short-lasting, though, and she and Alison share a moment as they think about how monumentally annoying their respective parents are.
Back home, Spencer talks to Hanna, and is pissed to hear about their tape recorder assignment, which of course Ali hadn’t even mentioned at their powwow. As she cleans up from the dinner she made for Andrew, she cuts herself on a giant knife. In the medicine cabinet, searching for a bandage, she finds—of course—a bottle of Lorastan. And her gears start whirly-girlying all over again.
Oh hey, they DID pay Peter Hastings to show up this episode! He drops by the Manor, sans pretzels this time, to tell Spencer that he’s buried her mother in the backyard with the others dropped her mother off at the spa to relax. Apparently she snapped at some cops, and thank GOODNESS Peter was there to smooth the damage. This will all blow over, he reassures Spence. But Spencer’s face says NOT IF I KILL YOU MYSELF.
BLACK HAIR DON’T CARE (ABOUT THE LAW ANYMORE, APPARENTLY)
Hanna, alone, lingers in a dressing room, in a very different scene than last week’s fashion montage. She has been Ali’s begrudging companion for the last few episodes, but she’s also always been the Liar least willing to forgive Ali her prior sins, and resentment is brewing. She doesn’t want to be like Ali anymore, or do Ali’s bidding, or participate in Ali’s lies. But she sees her old friend hurting and her best friends not stepping up to help, and she’s Hanna and she’s the heart so she steps up anyway.
But now, alone in this dressing room, a little bit of that old, insecure, self-destructive Hanna resurfaces. Maybe she just wants to control the one thing she can. She snaps the tag off the crop top she’s wearing, belts another shirt over it, and walks right out the door. Unlike in the pilot episode, though, this time her face is a mess of angst.
DON’T GOOGLE YOURSELF
Especially if you are a once-hated, not-so-dearly-departed, and extremely-recently-returned former Queen Bee of a small town.
…Unless, of course, you’re just going to use this information to plot your return to the top. That is most definitely not the chin tilt of a girl falling to pieces. That is the chin tilt of a girl gathering all the pieces to play with at her own leisure.
WHAT’S UP WITH A
Word on Rosewood’s single street is that A is still gone, for good. But a series of hints this episode suggest that our omniscient black-clad pal of yore may not have entirely vAnished. A pair of mysterious feet outside Hanna’s dressing room; a rustle in the bushes outside Emily’s house; Alison very nearly sending a text signed “- A”… Let’s just say we wouldn’t put it past A to rise drAmatically from the deAd.
Well, friends…
UNTIL—holy shiz, you guys, next week is the ONE HUNDRETH EPISODE. We’ll be right here (well, Alexis will—Catie is cruelly and carelessly abandoning her for the rocky shores of her ancestral homeland), and also over on tumblr as always. You’d better be here too.
KISSES,
A (lexis and Catie)
About the Contributor:
Catie grew up in Denver, Colorado, where she often stayed up past her bedtime reading with a flashlight and once sent homemade Hogwarts acceptance letters to her friends. Now an adult, she still loves books and TV meant for teens, but is grateful to no longer have a bedtime.
