About:
Welcome back to the best show on television, friends! We apologize for making you wait for this, the recap of the scariest hour cataloguing the Liars’ lives yet. LEGIT HORROR. We’ve been anxious, too! All three of us agreed to share the burden/excitement and weigh in, but each of the three of us somehow ALSO managed to incur the wrath of season 1 A in some way in the last 24 hours. Rosemary has had no internet for almost two whole days! The Do No Evil G∞gle cloud did some evil and swallowed all of Alexis’ notes then came back asking for more! Catie’s dog was possessed by Ella’s attack bees and nearly ate her computer whole!!
However, unlike Detective Tanner, we have LEARNED from all of Rosewood’s evils. UNBREAKABLE. WE ALIVE, DAMMIT. This recap is long as hell.
(jk it’s no longer or shorter than anything else we’ve ever written)
AWARDS
THIS WEEK’S MVP
The whole group!
Everyone RALLIED to save each other as season six kicked off—the Liars devoting all their strength to keeping each other’s spirits up and scheming to rescue Mona and keep Ali from joining them, even after suffering untold trauma alone behind closed doors; Mona womaning up to defy Charles, even though she knew perfectly well what punishment awaited her; Ali putting not just her freedom but her actual life on the line in her first truest act of selflessness. Females are strong as hell.
Runner-up: Detective né Officer Barry. Congrats, dude! Keep a low profile and do your work and don’t jump to conclusions. Everyone else in the RPD, take note!
THIS WEEK’S LVP
Detective “Ali figured it out before the rest of us!” Tanner. She didn’t get Detective Officer Barry’s notes, apparently, so was stuck spinning her wheels while working out of Spencer Hastings’ season one playbook.
BIGGEST SHOCK/BEST SURPRISE
Shock: The legit terrifying reveal of ChArles staring at our Liars through the glass observation wall between his lair and vault. You know, the wall that had zero reason to exist because who was ever going to be in either of those rooms except Charles himself?? Oh, SHOW. You’re such a flirt!
Surprise: The shadow doll who’s been living under ChArles’ watchful eye for 2+ years! That not even Mona (seemed to have) know(n) she was there was the true surprise, honestly (the fact that she turned out to be Sarah Harvey, not so much—there were really very few possibilities for her identity, after all).
Runner-up: the morgue slab shot, for sheer visual shock value.
BIGGEST NO-DUH
The Rosewood police are forty steps and a hundred and twenty episodes behind.
THAT’S SO ALI
Girl’s got a double-cross hidden inside a scheme hidden inside a lie, all locked in a locket in her (fashionable bootie’s heel) pocket.
PREVIOUSLY ON PRETTY LITTLE LIARS
Short version? The girls were ‘napped; Andrew was “so over” everyone mourning Mona; Mona was a total badass; the blocks spelled Charles; A recreated Hell Prom; Toby was a cop (but Caleb solved the mysteries); Spencer made a thing from a thing from her brain; Jessica D had a secret second son.
Long version? Our hearts raced out of our chests as all four Liars were arrested for amateur sleuthing/annoying a police detective, kidnapped from their transport van, and trapped in an underground dollhouse approximation of their already horrifying Rosewood lives, where Our Queen Mona Vanderwaal was revealed to have been living for months dressed up to play an obsequious Alison DiLaurentis for the omnipresent digital camera eye of ÜberCreep A, aka Charles DiLaurentis. WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE. Meanwhile, back in ol’ one-street Rosewood, Creepy Andrew did many creepy things, while our boys (Toby, Caleb, and it pains us to add his name but we guess he was there too, Ezra) teamed up with the Parents Hastings to try to get the girls back. Much like the Rosewood PD, they failed. Everyone knows that if you want anything to actually be accomplished around these parts, you need to ask our girls, who, WHILE BURIED IN AN UNDERGROUND DOLLHOUSE, simultaneously organized Charles’ dream horror deathprom and constructed an electromagnetic pulse machine that knocked out all the electricity and allowed them to make a run for it. However, while Spencer very nearly unmAsked Charles, in the end he and his 40-foot high electrified fence buried in the heart of the Poconos were a hundred steps ahead of the girls and the #LiarsWereTrapped once again.
THIS WEEK
Got a Secret, Can You Keep It?
Our hellscape opens on a Yellow Blouse’d blonde chalking a sun on the cement wall of a windowless underground room. Oh, Mona! Our hearts hurt so bad for you.
Only, wait! The camera pulls back to reveal that this grimly cheerful image sits next to approximately one bajillion prisoner’s calendar tic marks. Either this is a flash forward to the solitary confinement punishment visited upon the girls after their failed escape attempt, or…
It IS. It IS another Faux Ali, obviously Sara Harvey, all waxy-skinned and dead-eyed and trapped like all the others in Charles’ dollhouse, peering stoically from her dank, lightless cell as the five Liars race through the halls in all their Hell Prom finery, still unaware their Big Escape is going to fail. SHE knows, though. She knows there is no escape, no hope, no light. There is only Charles’ obsession, and the patriarchy’s universal promise to teen girls that not one single one of them is ever truly safe from any man’s hidden violence. “Boys will be boys,” SarAli shrugs to herself, teetering on suede camel booties back into her cell.
Aboveground, the newbie Liar Dolls+Mona are just starting to figure this out. It helps that there are very obvious clues, like the hundred thousand gigavolt electrified fence, and the bone-chilling warble of “Don’t Fence Me In” over the PA system, and the remote controlled bunker doors that slam shut and leave the five of them exposed to the elements for two entire nights and days with nothing but Spencer’s voluminous tartan monstrosity of a prom dress for the girls huddle together under for warmth.
“How long can a person live without food?” Hanna/all of us ask. “Three weeks,” Mona and Spencer answer simultaneously (don’t worry about Hanna’s lack of this particular piece of trivia—she manages to shock Mona with her hidden book smarts/extensive vocabulary after Spencer throws out her own extra piece of expert knowledge by recognizing the waning moon as a feature of the current season in the northern hemisphere). However, most people can only go a few days without water. Aria’s considering drinking her own pee. Emily would lick sweat off a jock strap. Things are bleak, guys! Aria doesn’t know how much longer she can handle this, but Mona, who’s been surviving for longer than the rest of them, reminds them that they’re, well, unbreakable, if you will. (Females are strong as hell.)
Eventually, Charles does crack the dollhouse back open, “inviting” them to return. Still, the girls aren’t broken. They’ll accept Charles’ offer of “not death,” but they will goddamn stick together like glue the whole way.
Okay not the WHOLE way. While they re-entered the dollhouse with the best arm-in-arm intentions (“Let’s stick together.”/”Always.”), we guess at some point they…forgot? And let each other go? And you know what happens when you girls separate, even across inches of space: YOU DIE.
So the Liars got gassed and Mona got snatched and they didn’t get to see each other again until after the Liars had been stripped and washed and laid out like corpses as “stop looking” messages to their families in Charles’ totally normal personal morgue, where Mona, dressed to the nines in Ali’s candy striper pinafore and bitchy attitude cheerfully brings them juice and water.
Side note: the fact that Emily, lifting her sheet to look at the state of her body, is relieved not because she isn’t naked after all (she is), but because she still has all her organs. Have we already said how g-d BLEAK this show suddenly, acutely is? FRICK.
MonAli isn’t totally brainwashed, at least. She quietly informs the girls they were only out for a couple of hours, during which time she was locked in her room. She is as scared as they are. But then her own scary-chipper Voice From Above comes on to tell them all to go to their rooms and find there surprises. Ooh! Surprises! That sounds g—
“NO,” Mona declares wobbily, turning to stare Charles’ camera eye down. The Voice From Above repeats itself. So does Mona. “NO,” she says, more firmly this time. But then Charles puts his foot down by sounding the triple chime. “Oh shit,” Mona whimpers. “Three chimes means we have to go to our rooms…or else.” And she goes racing our of the morgue so fast the Liars barely have time to wrap their sheets around their organ-full bodies before following her.
“Or else what?” they all ask in turn, pressing Mona to answer. GIRLS. YOU DO NOT WANT THE ANSWER. Because the answer? Verbatim is: “It will steal you in the night and put you in the hole.”
……………………Okay. FUCK. Now properly frightened, the girls finally follow Mona’s lead, creeping back to their nightmare dollhouse doors to continue their nightmare dollhouse lives, barely able to tear their gazes away from one another as they all sense just how alone they are each about to become. One by one, the doors slam shut.
::Cue fade-in of Liars screaming::
::Cue fade-in of us screaming::
…THREE WEEKS LATER…
::Cue us screaming louder::
A news conference is about to start at the DiLaurentis house, with scruffy Ezra and Caleb watching from the side. Ali’s murder conviction has been overturned and—we learn from a reporter—Creepy Andrew, “star athlete and honor roll student,” is A) the top suspect and B) nowhere to be found. And C) definitely NOT actually the kidnapper. At least, according to the Hastings Law of False Surety.
Ali comes out to make a statement. She’s wearing lots of flowy neutrals, looking as innocent and benign as possible. She’s as Ali as ever—big doe eyes and a deliberate quake in her voice, secretly orchestrating the entire affair. She reads a few lines about how sad she is that her friends have been kidnapped, and then looks right at the camera and says “ROCK. LOST IN THE WOODS. TOTALLY ALONE. ANDREW, please come meet me at the kissing rock. Alone. I’ll be there. By myself. NO COPS. I’m sending them ALL AWAY so I can be ALONE with my loving family.” Wait—did she not actually say all of that out loud? We could have sworn…
Caleb and Ezra, please shave, you are distracting us.
Swear This One You’ll Save
Well, the boys don’t shave, but they DO leave, and when they do there is no longer anything to distract us from the literal circus going on inside the DiLaurentis house. Rosewood cops everywhere! Some are Tanner shaped. Some are Toby shaped. SOME are Officer Barry shaped, but that can’t be right, because this Officer Barry shape is wearing—gasp! Officer Barry has been promoted to detective! We mean, he’s still stuck doing the exact same phone-call monitoring grunt work he’s been so diligent at these past many head-down years, but at least now he’s doing it in a fancy suit. Good for you, Detective Officer Barry. We wish you all the best. Stay away from Rosewood’s teens.
Daddy DiLaurentis brings us back to the scheme at hand by repeating A LOT and AT VOLUME that he does not feel great about using his only daughter as bait. Like he thinks that maybe, if he is juuuuuuust loud enough, no one will remember how he went Out Of Town on a thousand work trips every other day after Ali returned from the dead and found her murdered mother buried in the garden. NO PARENTING AWARDS FOR YOU, DADDY DEAREST.
Anyway, they are Ali’s friends, and it is Ali’s choice. If Andrew thinks Ali’s alone, he’ll come to her house to get her. Obviously, this was Ali’s idea—or at least, the part where she lures Andrew in by claiming to be alone with two of the topmost contenders for least effectual male allies in Rosewood. The part where a hundred men and women in blue mill around openly in front of well-lit windows, surrounded by all their sting equipment, that part was all Tanner. Good job, Tanner!
“She’ll have police protection 24/7,” Tanner promises Daddy D tersely. ‘We’re leaving NOTHING up to chance. Wait! What’s the shadow! GUNS OUT!”
But it’s not Andrew, or Charles, or any iteration of A. It’s just Jason, coming through the garage with their dinner order. Oh man, RPD. You can’t even account for Jason DiLaurentis—how do you expect to account for ALI?
Who, at that very moment, gets a call from a blocked ID. Another old timey nightmare hit plays when she picks up, and continues playing in our heads forever and ever, echoing through our nightmares: I wrote my mother/I wrote my father/and now I’m writing you too.
“I know I’m the one you want,” Ali quavers, drawing every single word out so that Detective Officer Barry can keep the tracking software from crashing long enough to pinpoint the call’s origin. “Just tell me where to go.” DUM DUM DUMMMM! The call was coming from inside the house!!! No one can believe it! No one in the RPD, we mean. Ali and Toby and Jason can totally believe it because duh. The call coming from inside the house? LiterAl child’s play. For a full season, Red Coat’s terror was coming from inside the DiLaurentis peephole-drilled basement. For a half season, the call was coming from inside Ali’s childhood BFF partnership with crazypants Shana Swimteam. For another half season, the call was coming from literally inside a bird. Inside the house? Child’s. PlAy.
But World’s Greatest Detective Tanner is willfully unaware of all of this, and so locks Ali in a crafting closet on the first floor and leaves some random beat cop to watch her, because Safety. Toby cops his way through the house (ACTUALLY SCARY) to find a black-hoodied mannequin with a pig mask over its masklike face, rocking Norman Bates’ mom-style in a rocking chair in Ali’s room (ALSO ACTUALLY SCARY). It has a cell phone on it, ringing, but when Tanner answers, it’s just pig noises. LOL. Nice flair, A. The unnamed lackey they had on Ali duty wanders in, like, “Wait, was I supposed to be doing something?” and of course the Safety Craft Closet is now empty of Ali but full of a broken wine bottle (Ashley’s kind of crafting!). At that very moment, Toby has a visible epiphany (srsly, his epiphany face is almost as painful to watch as his poker face later on) “recognizes” A’s old timey phone ditty as “Sitting Under the Apple Tree.”
“Call it in!” Tanner shrieks, pointing at everyone as the male DiLaurentises look on, mystified. “Ali figured it out before any of us,” (duh) “She’s gone to the old Campbell farm.”
Got a Locket in Your Pocket? Better Lock it in Your Pocket.
But psych! Ali’s not going to the old Campbell farm—she’s going straight into the backseat of a car where Ezra and Caleb are awaiting her, hacker computer and tracking technology at the ready (wait is getting into a car with Ezra better or worse than being in the woods alone?). SNAP. This time, A really was Ali! And Toby’s timing fake-recognizing the apple tree song they baited Ali’s phone with was impeccable. Any bumbling RPD officer who might have accidently gotten in the way of A/Andrew/Charles kidnapping Ali is now racing to the other side of town, where for once they will all only be like fourteen steps behind Ali, rather than the usual seventy two. And as far as Andrew is concerned, if he is the genius he thinks he is, he’ll for sure have picked up the kissing rock hints Ali was laying down in her fake-real press conference.
“Cool cool cool,” the scruffy bed buddies say. “Now put those incredibly practical and easy to run from a psycho kidnapper ankle bookties on.” Yep! Our resident tech genius Caleb has put a tracking device in the heel of a cute pair of boots that definitely match Ali’s outfit, but just as definitely are the least reasonable accessory he could have stashed the tracker in. We mean, he has been pretty well trained in the art of appropriate footwear by Hanna “Hey, I wear 3 inches or I wear nothing” Marin, so in his defense he probably does think these low-heeled booties are practical. But seriously. How about a bangle? How about an earring? How about a fitbit tracker that clips to her bra?
Anyway, much like the RPD, Caleb and Ezra assure Ali they’ll be tracking her every step of the way, and that she’ll never be alone. Boys! At least YOU ALL have been dealing with A for the past six or one years (who knows)—you should know better than to believe that.
Anyway, this is why we live in a surveillance state, in case any of you are really wondering (/conspiracy theorists). It’s all A’s fault.
Taking This One to the Grave
For the three weeks the Liars were locked away behind their steel bedroom doors, SarAli has been delivering their food and water. Not that the girls know this. A terrorized blonde wearing Ali’s disappearance outfit? “Mona!!” Spencer shouts brokenly through her floor-level food grate, obviously for the millionth time. “Mona! Are you there? Is that you?!?”
Then, the Voice: Please proceed to Ali’s room, and prepare for arrival. Please proceed to Ali’s room, and prepare for arrival. Please proceed to Ali’s room, and prepare for arrival. And the doors that have been locked for so long, finally open.
The girls that emerge cautiously from their dollhouse rooms aren’t the girls that went in there three weeks ago, though: they’re all dressed in their Labor Day outfits, what they were wearing the day Ali went missing. Argyle for Spence, sporty for Em, pink streaks for Aria, and floral for Hanna, who is the last to emerge and the shakiest on her feet. They can’t process the trauma they’ve just gone through (which is scarier than any explicit description of the ordeals could ever be), but they’re glad—and stronger—to finally be together again.
Ali’s room when Mona lived in it was already another uncanny dollhouse mimic, but now Charles has delivered a trio of cardboard boxes filled with actual treasures from Ali’s actual life—past AND present. Spencer finds a newspaper report that Ali was released from prison (“We can’t know if that’s really real,” Hanna bitterly cautions from her post at the door), and Emily realizes that they’re prepping for the REAL Ali to arrive. Which means… “What about Mona?”
Cut to Mona alone and shaking in a pit (there are layers and layers of psychological torture in this dungeon horror hellhole), barely hanging on to her sanity. “Charles!” she screams up when he comes in and shines an industrial flashlight straight into her face. “I’m sorry! I’ll be good! Don’t leave me here!” But he leaves. She’s evidently finally done something so bad “it” put her in the hole for good. Or who knows how long. Alexis, at least, would totally buy all three weeks.
The girls are unpacking Ali’s stuff like no bigs, it’s just whatever! Which, like the elision of the details of what happened to them behind their bedroom doors, is more frightening than if they were freaking out of the task. Hanna cracks open a photo album and lands on a shot of them at the lakefront that one time that Ali totally ripped into everyone they knew (and most that they didn’t). What a monster she used to be! they agree. What monsters we all were to let her get away with it!. But, “we’re not the same people we were,” Emily reminds everyone, “Ali, too.” Another clue that the show really is going for the Ali Redemption storyline.
Then, Spence and Aria have dual revelations: Spencer finds a wooden toy car with C.D. scratched into the base; Aria finds the only camera-blind spot in MonAli’s yellow tank-filled closet with HE’S GOING TO KILL ME – M scratched into the back. Spencer’s revelation has to shared out of the camera’s line of sight; Aria’s has to be shared out of Hanna’s. Neither is anything like a comfort.
Also not a comfort? The girls’ discovery of their own “arrival day” boxes back in their respective bedrooms, filled with real treasures from their real lives, half of which they’ve been missing for months. “He’s been planning to bring us here the whole time,” they chorus in dawning horror. “My mom is so sick she’s in the hospital,” Hanna chokes, thrusting another fake/real Rosewood paper with a story of fallout from their disappearance into the other Liars’ hands. And that is just it for Aria, who swings around and fixes the camera’s eye in her furious gaze. She is going to KILL HIM for what he’s done to their families, you hear her, Charles? KILL HIM.
Recognizing that her friends are so close to the edge they’re basically already falling, Spencer makes up her mind that tonight, tonight is the night they are getting out, and so loudly encourages the group to help Hanna unpack while in between shouts whispering/whizzing her way through and Etch-a-Sketch that A) they are going to find Mona and escape, and B) Charles is a DiLaurentis. “The generator still shuts down every night,” she whispers. And tonight is the night they’ll again take advantage of that fact.
GIFs from emrys
And then, just for kicks, we’re back in the hole with Mona brokenly singing a rendition of “Hush Little Baby” that chills us all to the BONE.
If I Show You
Back in Rosewood, Detective Officer Barry and LOL Cop Toby are the only ones obviously hard at work after the bust that was the intended Campbell farm bust. They’re watching all available footage of the crowd outside Ali’s press conference that morning, looking, evidently, for the moment where Andrew danced in a chicken costume behind the reporter, waving a bird with both hands. Okay, obviously not that. But they DO see the muted tail-end of a report that Radley Sanitarium is closed indefinitely after a surprise sale to a shadowy business entity (DECLODYNE???? DECLODYNE!!!!! DECLODYNE?!?!), which is really as shocking as that chicken suit thing could ever have been. Anyway, Tanner comes in to loom over Toby with her unfounded but also completely true suspicions that Toby might know where Ali went. And all we can say for his reaction to her is, Toby: we are glad you aren’t trying to make a career as a poker player. Get better game!
Tanner doesn’t have a chance to follow through on her suspicions/Toby’s kicked puppy expression, though, because just then Detective Officer Barry spots the back of a tall young man crossing, as luck would have it, right behind the reporter towards a blue sedan with a partially visible, fully blurry plate. “Enhance it!” the whole Rosewood Police Department shouts. They finally have a lead!
Alone in the woods at the Kissing Rock, just like she promised, Ali waits. Patsy Cline’s “Walking after Midnight”—the same song that was playing in A’s vault when Spencer found it—leads her to an empty car that is all prepped with a murderous GPS leading her to some nowhere woods. It seems dumb, but this really is the best outcome of the Andrew-trapping scheme they intentionally put in motion, so she gets in and starts driving. Caleb, Ezra and Ezra’s gross pedo beard follow behind her. “Don’t get too close!” Caleb cautions, following Ali’s tracker progress on his hacker laptop. “This had better not be a colossal mistake,” Ezra mutters, white-knuckling the steering wheel. Oh, Ezra. With you, it always is.
Meanwhile, Ali finds her murder GPS bringing her to a stop at Tyler State Park. Like, a complete stop. Gas tank’s empty, electrical system’s dead. Cell service? HA. Ali’s still driving in the murder GPS machine, which shuts off when she reaches her destination. Hey, remember OnStar? Ali calls OnStar for help, even though we’re pretty sure Ali was never alive when OnStar was a thing, and the OnStar voice tells her to look in the trunk, Alison. Oh right, A IS A TECHNOLOGICAL WIZARD AND HACKED THE SYSTEM, are you actually surprised???
When Ezra and Caleb get to the car, Ali’s long gone. Her clothes are in the trunk with the trilingual Welcome card that A forced (we have shivers imagining how they could possibly have been forced) the girls to sign. It’s one of those cards where you can record a voice message! It tells her to leave everything behind or “they die.” Sweet. So Ali changed clothes. But she left her magic tracker boots in the grass like a real life Blue’s Clue, pointing toward the woods in the direction she was told to walk. Ezra literally stares into space, waiting for a clue to bonk him over the head like a dodgeball hurled by Hanna or something, but Caleb has a brain/his eye on the ground and so sees the fine footwear breadcrumbs Ali was laying down. And Ali? She is, of course, lost in the woods in that g-d yellow tank. If you factor cost per wear, they have REALLY gotten their money’s worth out of that thing. Anyway, Ezra has finally decided that the whole business feels wrong and they should for real call the cops in. Good luck getting cell service!
Back at the precinct, Tanner is settling in for her nightly reading of boy genius Andrew’s totally real, definitely not fake planted journal about how much he hates all the girls and wants to watch them scream. COOL. But then Toby rushes in with news: the partial plate identified a car that was recently stolen! ALSO that car was just spotted on a frontage road out at Tyler State Park! They’ve solved the whole thing! COINCIDENCE? We think…maybe? It’s hard to tell. Maybe they did really find the car. Maybe Toby is just using it as a smokescreen to communicate Ezra’s report on Ali’s last known location, without giving away his part in the scheme. Either way—the RPD is (sigh) on the case.
Then I Know You
When the generator finally shuts down that night Spencer wastes no time retrieving the others from their nightmare fake rooms. Spencer memorized and solved all the anagrams, she explains to them as they race down the halls, and they all spelled out Charles DiLaurentis. We love you, Spencer’s brain. In other Spencer’s brain news, she has a plan to bargain with Charles, and has paced out the hallways and identified the possible vault location juuuust on the other side of the bunk bed in the playroom.
The sirens scream on as the girls collectively put their multidirectional oomph into moving the damn thing, but the girls are undeterred. Emily spies a bookcase with and odd light shining underneath, so they shift their efforts and uncover a large air shaft whose grate they pop open with ease. The whole set-up is very confusing—too complex (and low) for Charles to have really used to such Phantom of the Hell Prom success the night he disappeared from under Spencer’s nose, but way too easy for a likely escape route that he’d presumably want to really keep hidden from his dolls. OH WELL. Pop open the grate they do, and with the action, the sirens shut off. The silence as the girls start crawling through the vent is somehow more unsettling than the noise.
At least Spencer’s hunches were right. The vault is, indeed, on the other side of the playroom wall, and it is, indeed, filled with evidence of A’s twisted soul: baby announcements, childhood pictures, that video of the two boys and the baby sister, with Jessica D, just queued up and ready to play for anyone masochistic enough (Rosemary’s brain immediately switched from panic to “Ohh, popcorn! Eat some popcorn, Liars! Aren’t you hungry? I’d be hungry if I were you!” A full popcorn machine! What a terrible, awesome set detail).
Luckily, if they have learned anything in their time as Charles’ captives it is that he’s always watching, and so to kick off Spencer’s blackmail plan? They stop the film long enough for the celluloid (and Charles’ precious memories) to catch fire and they start BURNING SHIT DOWN.
Emily: “Grab everything! The pictures, the baby clothes, and throw them in the fire.”
GIFs from aussietonkin
Too bad for Charles, Ali arrives at the same time. Decision time! Which is more important to him: the girl he’s been trying to capture for mumble mumble years, or all of his prized baby possessions??
[In the woods, meanwhile, Caleb and Ezra find Ali. They did it! They did a thing! We’re honestly astounded.]
The flames spread faster and faster as Charles is frozen with indecision, until finally Aria (ARIA! of all of them!) considers the possibility, “Wait, what if Charles isn’t actually watching this??” They mean, they do NOT want to die in that hellhole, which maybe they should have thought of before they started BURNING EVERYTHING in a TINY ROOM IN AN UNDERGROUND CONCRETE BUNKER WITH NO EVIDENT EXIT OR EVEN VENTILATION SYSTEM.
“We need something like a blanket!” one of the shouts, standing in front of a wall of giant curtains, as they look around for like a full, fiery minute for anything that might even remotely resemble a smother-ready blanket. “Wait!” Emily shouts, turning around. “Paige trained me for drapes!!” And she proceeds to pull down the wall of red and fling it onto the bassinet fire when OH SHIT. {INEXPLICABLE} WALL OF GLASS. And Charles, in a high tech new full face mask, is staring straight at them through it.
All Rosemary wants in life is for the girls to have jumped on him, ripped off his mask and knocked him out with something. But there’s that whole wall of glass detail, so instead they start throwing even more of his stuff in the fire. And while he was willing to build an underground terror chamber and perform other hair dye-related acts of torture on these girls, burning his baby clothes just totally CROSSES THE LINE. He pulls the fire alarm (did he have the fire department out to his torture bunker to install that thing? IS THE ROSEWOOD FIRED DEPARTMENT AS BAD AS RPD??) which turns on the sprinklers and opens all the locked doors, and the girls use the opportunity to run, screaming for Mona the whole time. They find her, and it is all tearful shock and relief and girls saving girls and our embattled, unbreakable heroines limping their way as one being through the halls and to freedom.
Meanwhile, outside, Ali, Ezra, and Caleb are just about to shrug off Ali’s horror film misadventure as yet another of A’s red herrings when they hear the blaring alarms from down in the dollhouse and see the smoke coming from a well-hidden vent. And as they are scrambling to find a way, any way inside, EZRA (Ezra!) spies a hidden aboveground entrance a couple hundred feet away. They uncover the doors just as the Liars burst through.
Imma let you finish, menfolk (and Ali), but females are strong as hell.
And then there are tearful hugs and kisses as the whole of the Rosewood Police Force descends to liberate the dollhouse and Spencer is hugging Mona and Ali is hugging Mona and Spoby is tripping all over themselves to reveal the solutions to the various mysteries they have each independently been working on. And then another lady beat cop is inside the dollhouse approaching the silent, statue-still sixth girl who was living in the shadows with our crew that whole time. “What’s your name?” lady cop asks gently. “Sara Harvey,” SarAli says, voice cracking. And she is rushed out on gurney to the ministrations of the EMTs.
“We met her friends,” Emily says sadly, watching her go by. It is literally impossible to imagine either what hell Sara went through that whole time, or the added layers of trauma and guilt the girls will suffer knowing this other, even more innocent girl was trapped in Charles/Ali’s net even longer than they were.
Which, speaking of. #Emison. Except, not for the reason we anticipate. No, Emily needs answers. “Ali,” she says firmly, as Ali takes her hands. “Who is Charles DiLaurentis?”
NEXT WEEK
Won’t Tell What I Said
The aftermath begins. The girls clearly have some serious PTSD and they’re dealing with it in different ways. Emily is at the shooting range, Hanna wonders if they’re all just hallucinating, Ali retraces her steps by wearing the same Haute Hippie shirt she wore in this episode and asking her dad who the hell Charles DiLaurentis is. “What??” he responds. “Not what, dad,” Ali corrects. “Who?”
Abed: “This is the best show I’ve ever seen in my entire life.”
GIFs from aleithio
Preach.
Two can keep a secret, if one of them is dead.
Kisses,
A(lexis, Catie, and Rosemary)
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.
