About:
Catie and Alexis here! We’re in the thick of season 6A, now, and also, amazingly, in the thick of answers. Who would have guessed? Anyway, we hope some of you were following along with Rosemary’s live-tweeting on @popticstv last night—she killed it! Alexis will be on tweeting duty next week, as she takes the week off from recapping PLL to recap both the 2-night premiere of TEEN WOLF (Monday and Tuesday) and the series premiere of MTV’S SCREAM (Tuesday).
AWARDS
THIS WEEK’S MVP
As much as we truly believe their blood is toxic, we are going to give this prize to all (probably) three living DiLaurentises.
To Kenneth (gag) for coming clean with the truth about Charles, in detail, even if by doing so he proved further what a lousy human and father he is. To Jason, for having and sharing actually useful information with the girls for once in his gd life (and for fleshing out the ludicrous Out of Town excuse that kept him out of the budget after he fell down an elevator shaft that one time and then just walked out of the hospital). And finally, to Ali, for working so damn hard, first to be dogged in her hunt for any truth at all from her family, even when it hurt, and second to be honest with the other girls about that truth (for once in her gd life).
OMG they did it. The production team did it. They made us completely root for Ali. ALI. STOP THE PRESSES. (By which we mean, keep scrolling, we never stop writing.)
THIS WEEK’S LVP
Okay, Clark. You are cute and all, but when a girl is locked alone in a room that by definition has no windows or other possible escape routes, and you know she was trapped there by a wedge that someone has specifically stuck into the door to specifically trap her specifically there, and she is freaking the eff out and KNOWS someone was after her, then maybe the best response isn’t “LOL chillax, IRL emoji shrug.”
Runner-up to every man who thinks that girls have to share everything with them all the time, and when they don’t share, the girls need men to give them advice on how to do so. MAYBE ARIA IS TAKING PICTURES FOR HERSELF, CLARK. MAYBE SHE IS LOOKING AT THE INTERNET AS A SOLITARY ACTIVITY, EZRA.
Anyway, hope Clark doesn’t end up using Aria as the subject for his Nat Geo profile. We know she wears a lot of feathers, but she’s not actually a bird.
BIGGEST SHOCK/BEST SURPRISE
We are actually getting some answers! And from a DILAURENTIS!
Runner-up: The Dragonfly Inn is where all the bodies are buried. We knew that Michel was up to no good…
BIGGEST NO-DUH
Spencer’s repressed dollhouse memory is waking up with literal blood all over her literal hands (and body, and room, and lips). Aria’s is getting a haircut.
All things are relative.
Runner-up: Emily’s new story arc is fixing another broken girl. Quelle surprise.
THAT’S ALI, FOLKS
Her earliest formative experience was being simultaneously drowned and scalded as a psychotic blond child looked on, fascinated by their own power. No wonder she became the Alison DiLaurentis of Rosewood’s nightmares.
PREVIOUSLY ON PRETTY LITTLE LIARS
Everything was the scariest, then it was the saddest, then it was the grimmest. Not one of the girls has successfully made it to therapy yet, but they do at least know themselves well enough to know that the best therapy they’ll ever be able to find in Rosewood, Pennsylvania is a mystery wrapped in a conspiracy wrapped in a lie that only they can Scooby after. So they may barely be speaking to one another, and may barely be able to look their loved ones in the eye, but at least they are out on the mean street of Rosewood chasing after the ghost of yet another psychotic DiLaurentis. They’ll be fine.
THIS WEEK
Liars Summit
The liars Summitting at the top of this episode are, again, of the DiLaurentis variety, as Ali and her father sit down for some actual #Answers to finally begin to fulfill the promise of this #SummerOfAnswers. Mr. D pretty much just lays it all right out there: Charles was born a DiLaurentis, fifteen months before Jason [ed note: notably, no mention of paternity], and was clearly “troubled” from a young age. His parents, thus, locked him up in Radley, because what, were they supposed to ACTUALLY DEAL WITH their son???
“Why did he want to kill me, then?” Alison asks. “Why did he kidnap and torture my friends?” But here’s the kicker: A isn’t (probably) Charles—because Charles is (probably) dead. And cremated! Which two facts Kenneth completely believes, even though he was out of the country when both happened and only knows them to be true because Saint Jessica told him they were.
Alison catches the girls up on the story, and they respond in predictable ways:
Aria: Why was this such a big secret? (They wanted Ali to have a normal childhood, without the “distraction.”)
Spencer: How did he kill himself? (Pills)
Emily: Where did they bury him? (As noted above: cremated, with no funeral, his ashes scattered on a lake by Jessica alone [“She didn’t want me there,” Kenneth the New Worst shrugs.])
YOU GUYS. WE ACTUALLY KNOW SOMETHING. (Unless of course this is all just another lie on top of a lie wrapped in a warm flour tortilla of a lie. Wait, what’s the title of this show again?)
Em’s Got a Brand New Gal
Sara checking new wrecking ball pixie cut in Em’s mirror, wearing eye makeup on her eyes, not under them. Looks unsure. Em, in bathrobe getting her day’s outfit put together, blindly, reassures Sara that the new ‘do suits her. Sara’s not so sure, but is sure she likes Em’s smiling approval. Pam comes in with news about Sullivan having time that afternoon to meet with BOTH girls. “Dr. Sullivan is a therapist,” Pam explains. “She works with people who have been through trauma,” Em adds. And she doesn’t even have to add a caveat about how Dr. Sullivan is also a person who can’t keep her office or personal life clear of A’s tampering for Sara to completely shut down. “I’M GOING TO TAKE A SHOWER,” her fresh, clean, recently showered face says before making tracks out of the room.
Pam is confounded at such a strong reaction from a girl who was trapped underground for two years and has proven herself so unable to rejoin the real world that she is camping out in a complete stranger’s home, in a complete stranger’s haircut. “You can’t force her to talk if she’s not ready, Mom,” Em shrugs. True enough. But Em was out shooting Wayne’s guns without permission last week, and Pam CAN dictate her life, so: she’s talking to Sullivan, no backing out.
Em comes clean about her therapy chats with Hanna later that afternoon when they are prowling around the document warehouse for proof of Charles’ death. “My mom made me,” she sighs. “Sullivan wanted to know if things were alright between the four of us…did you say something?” Hanna, all come at me brodefiance, crosses her arms and says yeah she might have. ARE things good?!? “They’ll get there,” Em says sadly. “That’s what I thought,” Hanna’s face replies, silently. Oh, girls.
When Em returns home from her day sleuthing, Pam pulls her into her room and closes the door behind her. “I don’t want Sara to hear,” she whispers urgently. And why is that, exactly? Well, earlier that evening Pam found Sara on the ROOF. She was worried Sara was going to jump, but nope! “She just wanted to watch the sunset,” Pam says, like it is such an unbelievable thing to want. Anyway, she is no longer so sure that it was a good idea that they agreed to let Sara stay with them. POINT, Pam says: she doesn’t want to go to therapy, and Pam doesn’t have the tools to help her. COUNTERPOINT, Em says: they cannot send Sara back to her mom’s. POINT, Pam says: if something happens to Sara at the Fieldses’, she will be held responsible! COUNTERPOINT, Em says: nothing will happen to her! SHENANIGANS, we say: A literally held a knife to her throat not two days ago.
But what Emily means is that she knows what Sara went through so she can help. What she also means is that she has a hero complex, and a soft spot for broken girls. What Pam means, though, is that no matter what horrors Em went through those three weeks she was in that awful place, Sara was in there for two years. “We have no way of knowing what she went through, and no way of giving her what she might possibly need now that she is out.” All of which Sara overhears from the hallway, of course. And the next day she is out the window (literally the window).
Where did she go? Home, according to the explanation she gives Emily at the Brew when Em tracks her down later. She had hoped that maybe her mom had actually changed for the better, now that she was rescued. “Had she?” Em asks. “No.”
Sara recognizes that she probably does need therapy, but she also knows that talking to a complete stranger in a small room is not something she can handle at the moment. What can she handle? Emily wants to know. Oh, you know, all the summer romance song classics: walking on the beach, watching the stars, holding hands, seeing the outside world. And so Emily brings her night swimming, and they laugh and smile and compete in holding their breaths under water, Sara egging Emily on in a way that could be either extremely flirty or extremely suspicious. Alexis, for one, finds it unlikely that in all that time alone, basically buried alive underground, Sara Harvey didn’t once practice something as extreme and obvious as holding her breath.
And just in case Emily starts having her suspicions, too, Sara goes quiet and swims to the side of the pool. “What’s wrong?” Em asks, following her. “I just forgot what it feels like to feel weightless,” she says, “to feel free. YOU gave me that. No one has ever looked out for me like that. Not ever.”
And like that, the baby duck imprinting is complete. And Emily does NOT looked pleased by it.
Aria In Development
The Liar most invested in pursuing/driving into the ground the search for Charles/answers/external closure these days is Aria, who returns home from the DiLaurentis Summary Summit and immediately after donning some statement Eye of the Tiger/Hear me Roar costume jewelry hops onto the world wide internet to do some web sleuthing. She starts with googling “charles dilaurentis death record,” which of course turns up nothing, not even a YouTube video of Charles burning Radley to the ground while staring at Aria straight through the screen. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Charles isn’t actually dead. It could mean that Radley keeps awful records, for one example! Or that there are not actually enough lawyers in Rosewood to file paperwork as boring as death certificates, for another! We mean, who even really ever dies in Rosewood, right? What it could also mean is that Aria is terrible at website page searches. Like, does she even have the internet turned on? Who knows!
Byron comes in then to remind us/Aria that he exists and cares about her. Where were you when Ezra was rescuing her from a hell house in the middle of the forest, then, hmmmmm?? Oh, that’s right—you were orchestrating her every trauma. JERK. (Loved that ep, though, Mr. Lowe.)
But for real, Byron wants to check in on Aria and let her know that while Tanner did call (how does she still have a job) and does want to sit down with the girls sometime soon (how does she think that will ever happen), Byron understands if Aria isn’t ready for that quite yet. “You don’t have to talk to a professional,” he says, “but I am always here to listen. Or even, I dunno, play putt putt?” That Byron, there to listen, just like always!
Aria doesn’t need anyone to listen, though. She just needs to move forward with her life, specifically by going to Hollis to use their darkroom to develop her most recent rolls of therapy film (“I just wanted to spend some time not focusing on myself,” she explains, wisely and amazingly, to her father). And so Byron lets Aria walk out of the house alone, where she immediately proceeds to…meet up with the other Liars and devise a scheme to steal highly confidential files from a highly secure facility, right in broad daylight.
“I looked for you at Hollis and you weren’t there!” Byron exclaims after Aria comes home later that night. “That’s it, no more car privileges for you. See if you get yourself into any kind of A-trouble NOW.”
So of course, the next day Aria gets driven to Hollis and forced to actually use the darkroom instead of joining the others on their trek to dead Aunt Carol’s house, all while having the building watched over by her very caring and observant father, and proceeds to get into a billion kinds of A-trouble. You’re MY doll, bitch, A reminds her old-school style with a post-it adhered to an applicator bottle of neon pink hair dye hidden behind bottles of development fluid on the shelf in the darkroom. The sight of the bottle triggers flashbacks to Aria’s time in the dollhouse, when A cut off all her hair while she slept after she initially refused to be a doll and change her appearance at A’s whim.
GIFs from iansgoose and takeanempanada
Justifiably terrified of finding herself again in a windowless room, Aria races to the darkroom door to escape. But it’s locked! Locked SO HARD. “Someone wedged this little wooden doorstop under the door,” New Love Interest Clark tells Aria after he frees her and before he tells her to just relax, dude. “Did you see who was in here before me???” Aria asks frantically, eyes tearing the photography department apart. “Nope! Just chill! It’s all good!” Clark laughs.
Later, when Aria is collecting her dried pictures, she gets a look at Clark’s work spread out across the underlit photo table. “These are so cool!” she exclaims, taking in the really boring “everything is dead and black & white so ART” vibe he’s got going on. “No, THAT is cool,” he says, catching sight of one of her off-center close-ups of the haunted doll from her windowsill. “I’unno why I even took that,” Aria mutters, snatching it away from him. “You know, you should show people your work sometime, let them give feedback. It can really help,” Clark advises, not caring one whit about WHY (for therapy) or FOR WHOM (herself) Aria might take pictures. THANKS, CLARK. LITERALLY NO ONE ASKED YOU.
But Aria does take his advice, sort of. After she spend some time flipping through her photos back in the safety of her own home, she finally decides she is ready to open up to Byron about some of what she went through in the dollhouse. “I remember that room,” she says, pointing to a shot of her own bedroom while using language like it is an alien place. “It was exactly like my room, but there was nothing outside the windows.”
And her eyes are doing that thing they do where they grow a hundred times bigger than the anime size they are normally, and single tears are coursing down her cheeks, and she and Byron are hugging and good job, Aria. You are doing everything right, on your own schedule.
High, Schooled
Spencer, of course, is much better than Aria at website-page-sleuthing. She finds an old article about that time Declodyne (DECLODYNE!) bought Radley, including the phone number of the Department of Mental Health. Putting on her best Veronica Mars, she calls up the department pretending to be a mother whose daughter had been at Radley and learns that the medical records from our favorite haunted crazy house have been taken to a data center, where they’re all bound (literally; in sealed boxes) for destruction.
Ezra, who just can’t let a Liar in the door of the Lil’ Rear Brew Shop of Horrors and Coffee without snooping all into what they’re up to, comes over to bother Spencer then, leading with the super normal and not at all terrifying opening line, “Are you alone?” After confirming that Spencer is, in fact, sitting there by herself and not accompanied by, we dunno, the invisible specter of another surprise DiLaurentis sibling, he asks her how she’s doing. Before Spencer can throw a can of chickpeas at his dumb face, they’re interrupted by the Brew’s new baker, Sabrina, tripping all over herself as she tells Ezra that she used up all the blueberries and can he order more? and also hope no one wanted this iced coffee! Because in her hippie haste she knocks the cup over with her muffins.
Ezra is like, “Damn, that girl’s so high on medical marijuana that she uses for medical, medicinal reasons for her very real and legitimate migraines. Trippy.” But Spencer’s busy staring at the puddle of coffee as it expands across the floor and triggers a nightmare flashback. Ugh, caffeine!!
In the flashback, she’s waking up in her dollhouse room in a GIANT POOL OF BLOOD. There’s blood on her hands, on her stomach, spreading across the floor. Where is the blood coming from??? She follows the trail of blood across the room, where it collects and pools under the door. What has she done?
Back in Real Life, Ezra looks at her, all “WTF are you doing having a nervous breakdown in my place of business. Do I need to send you to the Patronizing Therapy Table in the back room, too? Where, full disclosure, you will have to actually share those website page searches you’ve been doing out here with me and anyone else who walks through the office. House rules for sleuthing teen girls.”
Spencer’s real deal, of course, is that she took that anti-anxiety pill she stole from Aria and she’s hardcore jonesing for another hit—for some relief, and more sleep. Her friends notice that she’s jittery, but she says she’s just on edge from the whole being kidnapped thing. Aria is like, “Oh yeah, that sucked,” and Spencer uses the opportunity to casually ask if she still has those pills sitting around and where exactly they are and what’s the quantity and dosage and also can I have them. Aria says they gave her a headache, so she threw them out, and Spencer basically drops everything she is holding and sprints over to the Montgomery house so she can start digging through their literal trash like an addict raccoon.
Oh Spence. This is not great.
Also PSA from Alexis’ pharmacist bff: always mix your meds with water and coffee grounds and cat litter and junk and seal it up in a water bottle when you trash it, so people can’t find it and use it, and so it doesn’t poison the ground.
(Side note: there is no way the Montgomeries do not compost.)
(Side-side note: did Detective Office Barry get demoted after failing to keep Ali #trapped in her own home when trying to bust Andrew/Charles???? Oh, Barry. We’re sorry, man.)
With her literal garbage-foraging coming up empty, Spencer turns to the next best thing: medical marijuana. She goes back to the BrewBooksBoutique and awkwardly asks Sabrina for some magic brownies (“…pot?”). Sabrina’s like, “I can’t sell you that! …But I’d love to GIVE you some. Come back here tonight.” When she does, Sabrina has a box of cookies waiting for her. Ezra, once again, has to butt into her life and patronizingly remind her that “when the cookies are gone, your life will still be this terrible hellhole of post-traumatic anxiety.” THANKS EZRA, LITERALLY NO ONE ASKED YOU. Spencer glares at him and after poignantly expressing that all she needs is SLEEP and the NOISE IN MY HEAD TO STOP, scurries away into the dark, cannabis cookies clutched tight.
We don’t condone Spencer’s actions here, exactly, especially given her history of addiction. But girl needs some help that somebody’s not giving her, and no amount of her mother keeping every medication in the house under lock and key is going to help her feel better about what happened. In lieu of a competent therapist and/or an end to her waking nightmare, we understand why she’s chasing that chemical relief.
This is especially true given what she tells Hanna later after another flashback at Aunt Carol’s—that A made damn sure that she could never sleep well in the dollhouse, so huge swaths of what happened to her there are now fuzzy or blank. And the one night that A didn’t turn on her sleep-interrupting buzzer and she actually managed to get a few winks, she woke up in the scene we’ve been seeing in her nightmare flashbacks: pool of blood, signs of a body that was dragged from the room. A convinced her that she’d hurt someone, mortally—and since she can’t remember how she got there, she’s still not fully convinced that she didn’t. Someone please give this girl a hug. Several hundred hugs, actually.
Shredder Cheese
In between Spencer’s drug-seeking, the four girls head out to try to rescue Charles’s Radley file from the giant shredder in the sky. When they get to the warehouse, they sneak easily by a few men loading file boxes into a truck impossibly slowly and find a giant room stacked with thousands of boxes that are basically labeled “PRIVATE INFORMATION DON’T LOOK.”
It only takes them a few minutes to find the Radley boxes, and Aria (impressively quickly) discovers Charles’s file, which only covers from ages 13 to 16, and has no mention of his alleged suicide (or, we should note, his first few years of residence–he’s not twelve years older than Ali, after all). Interestingly, his visitors are listed as Jessica DiLaurentis, and a woman named Carol that they (okay, Emily) remember is Ali’s aunt. And unfortunately, she died when they were in 10th grade, so she won’t be any help. The file ends with the doctor suggesting an increase in his Xylitrol dosage, which Spencer says is for severe depression but sure sounds like that artificial sugar you’re not supposed to feed to dogs. Potato, potahto.
Calebopticon
The girls are startled by a noise and sneak back outside, where Caleb is standing like a disapproving parent. Hanna’s annoyed that he’s there, and also curious at how he found them; turns out he’d installed a tracker on her car. And earlier in the episode, he sat up all night keeping a careful record of the police watch assigned to Hanna’s house, marking down its lapses. Caleb! We know you love Hanna and are just trying to protect her, but can you see what you are doing here? WHO ELSE IN HANNA’S LIFE MAY DO THINGS LIKE STAY UP ALL NIGHT SPYING ON HER AND TRACK HER EVERY MOVE AND SHOW UP PLACES UNEXPECTED??? HUH??? That’s right, Caleb. You’re being a real A right now, don’t pardon our language.
Under such scrutiny, Hanna feels like she’s still in the dollhouse, and that’s really not what she needs right now. We really don’t want Caleb to be the next thing that she rips to pieces as she redecorates, so we’re glad he listens when she says she just needs some space. It’s breaking our hearts a little, but if Raven5wood and becoming a literal ghost couldn’t break up these two for good, we think they can survive this as well.
Digging for Secrets
Someone brings Charles’s Radley file to Alison, and she shows it to Jason. He’s super pissed about this whole business, and says he can’t believe no one else knew. But someone did, says Ali, noting that Aunt Carol had visited Charles, too. “Aunt Carol…” says Jason, as the name prompts a memory of that one time he fell down an elevator shaft and evidently escaped with, like, a sprained wrist and a single bruise. He ran away from the hospital and to the Dragonfly Inn from Gilmore Girls, which is looking a little worse for wear since Aunt Carol took it over. Jessica surprised him by coming out the front door, claiming she was just “making the place look nice” after Aunt Carol’s death, but Jason thinks someone else is there. “IT’S THE WIND OPENING THOSE DOORS AND MAKING THOSE FOOTSTEPS” says Jessica. “AND NO YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED INSIDE, YOU FAILURE OF A SON. GO HOME.” And then he went to like, Montana or something? For drug rehab? We can’t remember. Oh well!
(yes, we made this exact joke last week but FOR AN ACTUAL SQUAD and as FANS not paid shills)
Back in the present, Jason, Ali, Hanna and Spencer head back to The Dragonfly Inn to scope it out. It does seem empty, but Ali finds a gravestone marked “CHARLES DILAURENTIS—BELOVED SON” out back. Hanna, Chief Skeptic, believes it MUST be fake, picks up a shovel, and… starts digging. Hanna! Remember what happened last time you all touched a shovel/frat party beer stein?! Ali and Jason are like STOP, ARE YOU SERIOUS, THAT IS OUR BROTHER MAYBE.
What follows is a truly spectacular round of LiarLogic. Let’s examine:
WHEREAS: These roots, they have been growing for one hundred years.
RESOLVED: The grave is real.
WHEREAS: The grave has Charles’s name on it.
RESOLVED: Charles must really be dead and buried here.
THEREFORE: A must have assumed Charles’s identity, so A must be someone Charles knew at Radley.
Somehow, no one gets to the idea that “just because the headstone has been there for a long time, doesn’t mean there is anything buried underneath,” but that would probably be too ActualLogical. (We’d also like to note that they ALSO didn’t say “Maybe Charles was named after another dead family member and this is HIS gravestone,” just for posterity). It would be so very Jessica DiLaurentis, though, to have an old headstone AND an empty grave, just designed to throw people (husbands, sons, daughters, terrorized former best friends of daughters’ ghosts, ghost boyfriends of terrorized former best friends of daughters’ ghosts, the Illuminati…really, anyone BUT the cops) off the very same trail that you’ve already constructed a cremation story to throw them off of. Double-crossed red herrings: the DiLaurentis family crest.
Everyone walks away from “Charles'” “grave” with different ideas. Spencer is convinced that whoever A is must have known Charles in Radley, to both know and care so much about him and his legacy. Hanna is still convinced that Charles is running around the world somewhere. Ali and Jason? They are just convinced that each other is all they have left in the world. And that is both sad, and strangely heartwarming.
We Need To Talk About Charles
Back home, Ali confronts her dad, and he finally gives her one more #Answer. “You want to know why we put Charles in Radley?” “Yes, that is literally exactly what I have been asking.”
Okay, Ali! You asked for it! So here’s the horror story: when Ali was 11 months old, Charles tried to drown her in a bathtub of scalding hot water. While we desperately wanted the end of the story to be “Charles killed Ali’s twin sister” (STILL HOLDING OUT HOPE 4 TWINS)… it’s completely scary. And since the only real parents in this town are older siblings who don’t yet have the cash and/or driving privileges to allow them to regularly go Out of Town for long stretches of time, we can sort of see Kenneth’s point that keeping Charles around a toddler wasn’t tenable.
A-tag
Meanwhile, A-who-may-or-may-not-be-Charles is in his/her new lair, watching the Liars’ tracker jacker icons flash on a digital map of Rosewood (#1 Hanna: home; #2 Spencer: home; #3 Aria: home; #4 Emily: …at the city pool) while he/she daintily picks saltwater taffy from a bowl at his/her elbow. Okay: butterscotches, toffees, now taffy? That’s a lot of old lady candy, friends. Maybe A is really Great Aunt Carol!!!
NEXT WEEK
Is Sia’s new music video. Catie’s actual dream!
Until then, Kisses,
A(lexis and Catie)
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.
