Hello friends, it’s me! Rosemary! Back for another week of our darling Liars pretending they don’t have real jobs or responsibilities outside of hanging around their old home town, shooting the shit with their high school boyfriends. Let’s do this!
AWARDS
THIS WEEK’S MVP
Liam! My tiny infant angel Liam. He handled getting dumped without being a total dick, and then HE CALLED EZRA A PREDATOR to his face. And then! And then! Liam figured out that Aria had been seduced by her high school English teacher and asked her about it, which is something that not nearly enough people do on this show. Do you hear that? It’s a chorus of angels singing in the distance.
That said, this is one of the few places on the internet where Liam’s winning any fan awards, so we should probably appreciate him while we can. He’ll be headed to PLL Generic White Boy Pergatory to chill with Karate Jake and Tow Truck Travis soon enough.
THIS WEEK’S LVP
Ezra and Aria were completely tied up in each other this week in the most annoying possible way. Aria dumping Liam is enough for me to give her the LVP award, but Ezra being all “I’m just feeling so attacked r/n” after his critique meeting with Liam, and Aria acting like she couldn’t FATHOM why Liam would be angry with Ezra (or her) was all just very eye rolly.
BIGGEST SHOCK/BEST SURPRISE
BIGGEST NO-DUH
I mean, let’s be real here.
MOST UPVOTED NEW COMMENT ON TRIPADVISOR: ROSEWOOD
“Never an empty park bench when you need one. Probably won’t return. Two stars.” – Trisha, Omaha
PREVIOUSLY ON PRETTY LITTLE LIARS
Caleb and Hanna kissed, ugh. Ezra and Aria slept together, UGHHHHH. Lucas offered Hanna a cool mil to start her own fashion line right there in Rosewood, Fashion Capital of The World. A.D. kidnapped Hanna then gave the gang 24 hours to save her, but she ended up saving herself. Emily took Ali’s drugged proclamation of “god forgive me” as a confession to Charlotte’s murder. And through all of this, Elliot Rollins continued to illustrate the further complications of legally binding yourself to a man in Rosewood by poisoning Ali and keeping her locked up in NuRadley.
THIS WEEK
After finding Hanna stripped and bruised on the side of the road, Mary Drake wraps her in a blanket and drives her back into Rosewood proper (her first mistake). She insists on taking Hanna to the police station, or even the hospital, but in true PLL form, Hanna insists on #NoCops and makes Mary take her to Spencer’s. Hanna’s like, “If you’re Alison’s aunt, how come I’ve never heard of you? The DiLaurentises are notably open about their family business.” Mary says that some secrets are actual people, but she isn’t a secret anymore, honey, no, no.
LIARS SUMMIT
Back at Spencer’s, the Scooby crew thinks she should see a doctor, but Hanna doesn’t want to tell lies anymore. “Is she real?” she asks about Mary Drake, because it’s honestly more believable that Mary is a ghost than Jessica’s twin. The gang fills her in on all the intel they gained while she was kidnapped and how they found “evidence” that Alison killed Charlotte. Appropriately, Hanna asks Spencer to spike her coffee.
There’s a knock on the door, and Ezra reappears holding a bouquet of flowers with a note: “Couldn’t have done it without you. Glad we’re on the same team. – A.D.”
HANNA
They take Hanna back to Lucas’s apartment (WHERE IS ASHLEY?), where Caleb and Hanna have a vague conversation that starts out about Lucas’ offer but quickly switches directions to The Kiss. Hanna’s like, “I was scared and you make me feel safe, the end! We went back to the old us, but only for a minute.”
Emily reappears looking for Spencer, who was definitely eavesdropping on Haleb while they talked about kissing. Spencer’s crying about that, but she’s also worried about Hanna. They all are. She seems…broken. She won’t even call Jordan, but then again, that’s nothing new. (SERIOUSLY HAS ANYONE CHECKED THE DILAURENTIS BASEMENT FOR ASHLEY?)
After everyone leaves, Hanna lies on the couch with the paperwork Lucas gave her to start her fashion line, and flashes back to signing similar paperwork for her crappy boss in an NYC bar. She’s got important work documents spread out all over a bar, but still gets mad when the guy next to her puts his drink on her napkin and smudges a phone number she’d written. As if the guy using napkins for drinks instead of work is the weird one.
In case your Rosewood Induced Generic White Boy Face Blindness is flaring up, it’s Jordan, the guy Hanna is engaged to! Remember? Jordan?
To make up for his sweaty glass, he offers to get her something to eat. So they have dinner. And talk, and flirt, and close the restaurant down. And live happily ever after. (JK)
All that flashbacking must’ve given Hanna IDEAS, because back in present day NYC, Jordan walks into his office to find her all red-dressed, red-lipped, and red-soled with her Louboutins propped up on his desk. She’s set for seduction but Jordan’s not falling for it. He basically says, “Rosewood hasn’t been so great to you so quit going there.” And she’s like, “ANYWAY, let’s go back to the bar where we met and flirt!” Jordan agrees, but when they arrive, the bar is no longer there. Hanna cannot deal with this. She yells at Jordan that they needed to start over, she needed to do it right this time, but now they no longer have a beginning. She takes off the engagement ring and hands it back to him, and they stand under some scaffolding looking so sad.
When Hanna gets back to Rosewood, she goes straight to Lucas. She’s changed her mind, and she’s going to sign the papers. Her own fashion line is what she wants more than anything in the world. And judging by the way Lucas looks at her engagement ring-less finger, we all know what he wants more than anything.
ARIA
But hey, here’s some good news, Liam came to town! Hi, Liam! We missed you! Except wait, Liam looks sad! And Aria…Aria is in the middle of dumping Liam. Dammit Aria! Liam takes it like a champ though. He’s clearly sad but he’s not, like, a dick about it. And also, she was so quick to get to the dumping part, she didn’t let him tell her what he came ALL THE WAY TO ROSEWOOD to say, which is that he’s been assigned as the Creative Gatekeeper of the book she wrote with Ezra. Which, by the way, is the most made up job ever, but Liam is an angel and I’d probably make up jobs for him too. Anyway, way to go, Aria! You dumped Liam and now you are forced to work with him. That won’t be awkward.
This news calls for a private meeting with her secret lover on the world’s most public park bench before Ezra’s editorial meeting with Liam. She tells him what happened, and that things are probably going to be super weird with Liam working on the book. Ezra’s like, “Don’t worry babe, it’s always been complicated with us.” Which is just a fancy word for gross. He takes her hand, and because this is a bench right outside where he’s supposed to have his meeting with Liam, right before he’s supposed to meet with Liam, Liam pulls up and gets out of his car and sees Aria and Ezra holding hands. Is it possible that Ezra and Aria are so awful they can turn a good man into a psychopath just by being themselves?
Cue the meeting between Liam and Ezra where Liam tells him Ezra’s character is “predatory” and “rapey” (okay that second word was mine, not his). “We can’t all be Nabokov,” Ezra jokes. “We can’t even be Nicholas Sparks.” Liam says, hey, trash Sparks all ya want, but at least he knows what readers can tolerate and what makes their skin crawl. Ezra makes some excusese that his characters aren’t THAT far apart in age, and Liam says he wants to protect Aria from looking like she got talked into something she didn’t want, and it’s suddenly painfully obvious that no one’s talking about the book anymore. “I’m here to protect you all from avoidable bad choices,” Liam says. WELL, you’re about seven seasons too late for that, buddy.
Ezra goes back to Aria and cries that he feels personally victimized by Liam after that meeting, and he couldn’t even properly work on his book because Liam was so angry. “Anger at what?” Aria asks idiotically. “Why would Liam be mad at you?” Literally the entire world screams into a pillow. So of course, Aria goes back to Liam to find out why he’s so mad. Liam’s like, “Ya know, there were all these little unconnected things about you and Ezra I’d been suspicious of, and then they suddenly clicked together.” Aria’s like “What do those things mean?” (God she is such an idiot this episode) and Liam says, “I think you were seduced by your English teacher when you were in high school.”
Aria doesn’t totally deny it. Instead, she starts talking a lot about buttons? And gives this long speech about how she wouldn’t be who she is today if anything in her life had gone differently. “It all made me me, and I like me.”
SPENCER
After they drop Hanna off at Lucas’ apartment and Spencer overhears Caleb and Hanna talking about The Kiss, Caleb takes Spencer home where he has conveniently switched off his Toxic Masculinity switch after last week. Also, he’s just been rejected by Hanna and needs a place to crash….so, motives. He’s like “Hey babe, let’s go to bed” and makes all these kissy faces and tries to cuddle Spencer at her desk. WE DON’T FORGET SO EASILY CALEB. Nor does Spencer. She shrugs him off and tells him she’ll be there later as a single tear drops down her cheek.
The next day, she’s at Hastings Senate HQ, on the phone with her fancy D.C. boss, promising she’ll be back to work soon enough. Honestly, how long has she been just chilling in Rosewood? Weeks? Months? It’s so hard to tell. Anyway, Mary Drake pops in to check in on Hanna. She feels bad for not taking her to the police or the hospital. “Then why didn’t you?” Spencer asks. “I don’t like places like that,” Mary says, “because I did time in Radley.” She pulls up a chair for story time. When she was 14, Jessica was babysitting 10 month old Teddy Carver (Is Teddy Carver A?) who had a cold and wouldn’t stop crying. She begged Mary to come help her, but when Mary got there, Jessica had put Teddy to bed and was headed out to hang with her boyfriend. Mary stayed with the baby, but when his parents got home, they found Teddy dead in his bed. When asked, Jessica swore the baby was fine when she left, so it was Radley or Prison for Mary.
That night, Spencer’s drinking the hard stuff when Caleb comes in. She got fired. By text. He tries to console her, but she shrugs him off again. Spencer has just enough scotch running through her veins to ask, “Did we make a mistake, you and I?” Caleb says no, they didn’t. “Whatever we did, it wasn’t a mistake. It was real.”
I hope y’all made better teenage decisions than I did, because apparently we all end up back with our high school boyfriends.
The ONLY thing that makes me feel okay about this scene is that I was afraid for most of this episode that Spencer was just going to ALLOW Caleb to ghost on her, which is so not a Spencer thing to do. At least she spoke up for herself. We’ll see what happens.
EMILY
Emily’s entire storyline this episode was to bug people that Alison is In Danger but no one would listen, and while her bugging was borderline annoying, she was actually correct in her assumption. Unfortunately, it fell on deaf ears.
Back at Hanna’s, Emily is mysteriously sleeping on the couch even though her friend was just kidnapped and probably would feel better if they just slept in the same bed? Is that just me, or? Anyway, her phone rings, and she hears a struggling Alison begging her for help before a nurse takes the phone away. Emily goes straight to NuRadley only to find that Elliot has changed Ali’s visitation rules to family only. He pats her shoulder and says, “I’ll call you, okay?” Sorry, Emily, he’s just not that into you. But Emily does not give up. This time, she goes to Spencer to convince her that they should TEAM UP with Mary Drake since she’s family and can get them in. Spencer’s response: “Um, UberA? No.”
Spencer does agree to accompany Emily and Aria to Alison’s house, in an attempt to change Elliot’s mind about Ali’s isolation, but he refuses to budge. “I’m her husband and her doctor,” he says, to which Spencer retorts that, uh, yeah, maybe that’s a bad idea? But Spencer should know by now that “Maybe That’s A Bad Idea” is emblazoned across the ‘Welcome to Rosewood’ sign, just underneath “Population 15,023, two-thirds of which have been committed.” Elliot storms off just in time for the girls to get a group text: “She’s mine now. No takebacks, no do-overs. –A.D.”
I guess Emily just goes to randomly hang at Hotel Radley after that, because Mary creeps in, looking shocked at the shiny new state of her old homestead, and Emily pops up like a Whack-a-Mole. “Hi, hello. I know you! You are Ali’s aunt and currently only family can visit Ali. Feel like a trip to NuRadley?” Mary mutters something about “trying a little tenderness” and trusting Elliot, but ends up taking Emily to see Alison anyway.
At NuRadley, Emily sits on Alison’s bed, and while Ali’s awake, she’s not quite lucid. She calls Mary “mommy” and tries to tell Emily that they were wrong about Elliot, but before she can say more, Elliot shows up, yelling that there are no visitors allowed in a way that isn’t AT ALL VILLAINOUS OR SUSPICIOUS. (Remember, everyone, that Aria still hasn’t thought to share with the group that she and Ezra saw Elliot getting black hoodies out of a locked bench last week.) Alison screams as Emily is dragged from the room. Elliot drags Mary into a side room with frosted glass that only lets Emily hear muffled yelling and fuzzy outlines. It’s enough for her to text the other Liars that something is definitely up with those two. And while Aria and Spencer are maybe finally listening, Hanna has completely checked out.
VAGUE VILLAIN TAG
In Ali’s NuRadley room, someone – Maybe Elliot? Maybe A.D.? TBH, they haven’t been very committed to A.D. so far this season – shoots something into her IV bag and rolls her hospital bed from the room and into The Light. Or maybe she’s dreaming. Probably dreaming.
NEXT WEEK
I think this is really all you need to know about next week:
Kisses bitches,
rosemAry
