About:
Well, we are officially numb balls of tears over here. Pretty Little Liars has always set the bar for quality high, but this week (the first of a two-part outing from writer Joseph Dougherty and director Norman Buckley) brought things to a whole new level. We can’t possibly do justice to the performances all four main Liars gave, or to the stark art of the directing, lighting, and costuming, but we will do our best. It just might not be very funny.
What a show.
(Housekeeping note: the three of us will be rotating pairs for the rest of the season, with the odd girl out taking over @popticstv to livetweet during the episode itself. Catie and Alexis are here this week; Alexis and Rosemary will be on board next week.)
AWARDS
THIS WEEK’S MVP
Our girls. All the girls. Emily, Hanna, Spencer, and Aria, for emerging from the dollhouse and continuing to assert their strength and live their lives. Alison, for following her heart, even though it won’t make her popular. Mona, although we don’t see her this week, for being unbreakable. Sara, for surviving two years in the dollhouse and still being tough enough to stand up for herself once she’s back home. All the girls, for their fire and their anger and their kindness and their love.
THIS WEEK’S LVP
Veronica Hastings, for punishing Spencer three seconds after bringing her home (really, even BEFORE bringing her home) for her inability to live up to the Hastings Standard of Perfection.
BIGGEST SHOCK
Last week we thought that not being shown any specifics of what the girls went through behind their respective “bedroom” doors was much more satisfying and terrifying than getting all the details. But we take it back: turns out it is much more horrifying to see just a lightning-fast, terror-edged flash of what ChArles put the girls through than nothing at all.
As a man wiser than us noted, first A put the girls in the dollhouse; now A has put the dollhouse inside the Liars. And it is chilling.
BIGGEST NO-DUH
The Fields Family Attic is organized with military precision, not one speck of dust anywhere to be seen.
THAT’S ALI, FOLKS
Always looking at angles of angles, seeing her own life through the eyes of everyone watching her as she watches them.
PREVIOUSLY ON PRETTY LITTLE LIARS
The girls escaped the Dollhouse where they’d been trapped for almost a month; Sara Harvey escaped the Dollhouse where she’d been trapped for over two years. The RPD thinks Andrew Campbell is responsible; the girls think it’s Charles DiLaurentis. Are they one and the same?
THIS WEEK
Liars’ Summit
We see the girls first in soft focus, behind a set of hospital blinds. They’re gathered together, in and around Spencer’s bed, knees drawn up, heads resting on shoulders. Hushed voices, soft robes. Processing. Surviving. They’re out. They’re (minus Mona) together.
They catch each other up on the investigation: the working theory is that Andrew Campbell is Charles DiLaurentis is A is their torture-kidnapper. This makes perfect sense to Aria (or at least, it makes LiarLogic™ sense, and satisfies Aria’s violent need for closure): of course it was Andrew. Creepy Andrew, always hanging creepily around, trying to control her life.
“Is that really what we’re saying?” Emily asks, understandably tentative at the prospect of yet another Solution. Hanna is silent. “It’s REALITY,” Aria declares vehemently. “Reality’s been through a lot,” Spencer responds weakly. “And so have we.” She’s had the fight worn out of her by the dollhouse, and trusts the police to find the right answer. As in, trusts them to figure out that Charles exists in the first place, because they will know Andrew is Charles if/when they find him. “So we don’t tell the cops about Charles…at all?” Emily asks, disbelieving.
No, a Spencer we have never met before confirms. They don’t.
Sigh… Toby’s a Cop
A Rosewood cop. As in, a cop who makes bad and illegal decisions in pursuit of his lawly duties, specifically in pursuit of Andrew Charles Campbell DiLaurentis in the heart of darkness the Pennsylvania forests. “GIVE ME FIVE MINUTES,” Toby shrieks at the second cop racing over the ridge to help him after he tackles Andrew to the ground. “WALK AWAY!!!!!!!!”
The second cop, who we will later learn is Toby’s new partner (RIP, Lt. Tanner’s Rosewood career?), is clearly also new to town, as his only reaction to Toby’s madman demands is “DO YOUR JOB.” Ah, Fresh Meat. May you forever stay lawful, not awful.
And we guess all Toby needed was a reminder of what good, non-Rosewoodian cops should do, because despite his rage he manages to pull himself together to read a sweaty, fuming, grown-ass-man Andrew his rights.
“…and finding him in the middle of the forest, wearing Ezra’s red herring blue hAt, carrying a hundred passwords to the thousands of computers and spy cams and EMPs and bluesnarfers and burner cells we found in literally every corner of the old Campbell farm, right next to your abandoned stolen prison transport van, that was just covered in literally dozens of handwritten journals about how much he hated Ali and hated Mona and saw the four of you other girls as the physical manifestation of the feminization of society [Ed. note: omg you guys, is Andrew an MRA?? Is Hot/Creepy Andrew the ultimate (notso) NICE GUY??] and how he just wanted to torture all of you forever and ever amen, well all that just PROVES that ANDREW is A, babe! We got him! We got him good!” Toby explains as he perches on the edge of Spencer’s bed the next day.
Spencer recognizes that level of fevered certainty in his eyes, and so do we. And since, unlike us, she doesn’t have an online space where she can irreverently recap the events of her own life from the safety of a home with precisely zero spy cameras in it (uh, probably??), she is left with no choice but silence. “You know,” Toby says fervently when she continues to say nothing, “We never gave up. Never.”
And then they embrace. Because what else is left?
Summit of Liars
It’s another hug fest over at the DiLaurentis house, where Daddy DiLaurentis is just over the moon with relief over his daughter’s safety. Lolololololololol jk. What’s really happening at the DiLaurentises’ is that Ali is in trouble with her dad for evading her incompetent police protection and running off to be bait for A as part of some “scheme” to “save” her “friends,” while Jason remains, as always, completely absent.
Daddy D should be proud of Ali, honestly, but instead we find him towering over her, railing about how she had “no obligation” to help save the four girls who’d risked their lives every day of the past MANY years to do the exact same thing for her. Let’s just say: he’s wrong. And she’s right, and by being right she sheds a little more of the Queen Bee Ali of Before-A, the one who held secrets as currency and pitted her friends against each other. Maybe they are stronger together. (Unless this is just another part of her grand plan! Is Ali Charles?)
GIFs from spencexhastings
Daddy DiLaurentis tells Ali he’s glad she’s safe, but then maybe rethinks this position a little bit when she starts grilling him about Charles DiLaurentis. “Do we have a Charles in our family?” Ali asks, “like, anywhere? Ever? At all? In all of the DiLaurentis family history?” To which her dad is like, “I’m sorry—Curls? you said? Churs? Chuzz?” “Charles, dad,” Ali says, barely holding her irritation at his utter incompetence at lying at bay. Someone (Emily) mentioned his name to her, and she hadn’t recognized it. “I HAVE NEVER HEARD THE NAME CHARLES IN MY LIFE GOOD DAY,” Daddy D responds. “Ahem, now if you’ll excuse me I just need to set fire to several boxes in the attic…”
Mr. D: please find some chill. Also, stop lying! Spencer didn’t solve that anagram for nothing!
The Other Girl
Back at the hospital, Emily—of course Emily—wanders into Sara Harvey’s room, where she stares at Sara like she’s an alien creature, terrifying and fascinating. After two years in the dollhouse, Sara is the broken shell of a girl that all four of the Liars (plus Mona) might too have become, if not for Ali, Caleb and (ugh) Ezra.
Sara opens her eyes from her feigned sleep. Until Emily arrived, she’d been alone in the room, with no family or friends anywhere near (döppelLiars! how could you!). Emily—staring straight into the fire, touching the open wound—wants to know what happened that got Sara from her home a city over, to the desolation of ChArles’ dollhouse. Sara explains that she ran away from home, got hit in the head in a parking lot near Rosewood, and woke up in the bunker. Emily tries to ask more questions, but Sara’s too tired for Answers. Oh, Sara—haven’t you heard it’s the Summer of Answers? You might as well talk now. It’ll all come out soon enough.
Coming Home, Not Homecoming
Eventually the girls find their way out of the hospital and into the waiting embraces (and/or the shock of learning that your prescribed anxiety medicine didn’t come home with you and verbal reprimands about the price of perfection, in the case of the Hastingses) of their loved ones. Emily has the most Emily Fields exit possible, reassuring her dad on the phone in Texas that she is fine, and that she understands that the Army isn’t 9-to-5; reassuring her mom that everything is over now and things will be fine; and alone among the Liars thinking of Sara and wanting to say goodbye. Sara, however, was already picked up by her mother, Pam says—shocking Emily and us.
If the girls thought that by leaving the hospital they would be returning to safety and comfort, however, they were wrong. One by one, we see the exact moment that the uncanny resemblance between their own bedrooms and the dollhouse’s shoves each girl back psychologically to the place they’d been held captive for the past month. Hanna’s smile at being back in her room lasts a millisecond before she’s startled by a jarring, screeching, off-kilter flashback to the dollhouse room that wasn’t quite her own, and the psychological torture A put them through while they were down there.
Aria, too, lurches into her trauma when she opens her window to find fresh air and trees and gardens, and not the cement wall that greeted her that first night they woke up trapped. Spencer, having had the only good sleep she’s had in over a month wrenched from her by her mother’s belief that she knows how to handle Spencer’s history of pill abuse better than a medical doctor, faces a whole night of panic-flashbacks once “back” in her “own” bed.
And it is through her eyes that we get our first glimpse of the specifics of what ChArles put the girls through for the past many weeks. And it is horrifying. We see Spencer, shaking and bedraggled, in a stark, unforgiving cement room, secured to a table fitted with three switches. A voice overhead is ordering to make a choice, flip a switch. And she makes a choice. And in the distance, one of her best friends screams.
There are no words. It’s brutal.
Free, Not Freedom
The first thing all four girls do after they come face to psychological-face with the cruel reality that their homes are no longer places of safety, of course, is do their damnedest to assert their autonomy over their surroundings. Unfortunately for Spencer, her one gambit at independence was those anxiety meds that A REAL NON-WREN (PROBABLY) DOCTOR PRESCRIBED, so any illusion of control over her own life and sleep is quickly thrown aside. All that’s left, she guesses, is picnics in the park with Toby. And so she dresses herself in black-and-white preppy prison stripes and heads into the sunshine.
At the Marin house, Hanna wastes no time ripping apart her room. “It’s ruined,” she declares, first to Caleb, then to Ashley. She can’t be there. And for some reason, even though presumably her mother and Caleb know a little bit about what happened to the girls down in the dollhouse, they still can’t understand why she possibly wouldn’t want to sleep in an exact replica of her torture chamber. “Why are you being so impulsive?” Caleb asks. “Can’t you change it tomorrow?” her mom asks as Hanna and Caleb haul her mattress down to the landing at like, 11 pm. “STOP LOOKING AT EACH OTHER, LOOK AT ME, WHY ARE YOU LOOKING AT EACH OTHER,” Hanna explodes. Why can’t you understand!! We yell, at them.
GIF from dailylittleliars
Hanna: “I don’t know… the floor!”
GIF from dailylittleliars
Across the block at the Fields house, Emily is also trying to take charge of her newfound freedom, in her own, Emily Fields way. In the attic—which, as we mentioned earlier, is such a Fields attic, everything organized by size and color and stored in dust-proof bags and labeled boxes exactly three centimeters or whatever apart—she finds her dad’s old army jacket and wraps it around herself. Inspired, she guesses the combo to her dad’s gun safe, takes out a handgun, and goes to the gun range to shoot out her own rage.
Unfortunately, the gun range owner calls Emily’s mom to express his joy at seeing Emily return to practice after so many years (sounds right), and Mrs. Fields follows Veronica Hastings’ example and cracks down on her daughter. “Dad taught me the right way to do things,” Emily protests. “He’d be happy I was there!” But Pam tells her that using her father’s gun is not just against her rules, it’s illegal, and also, does Emily maybe need to talk? But Emily doesn’t want to talk, even to Paige (whom Em told to stay in California when she called earlier to check in). She just wants to do something violent and angry—but safe! she’s still Emily!—to express what she’s feeling inside.
“Nope. Not on my life,” says Pam. “Good luck guessing the NEW combination.”
Aria was already well on her way to demanding control and closure before the girls even left the hospital, and her willingness to burn Andrew Campbell to the ground flares brighter still after she gets home. She learns from Ella that Byron has been taking care of paperwork with police, and that eventually they will want all the girls to come in and give statements. “I’LL GO NOW,” Aria declares before Ella can even get out her last word. “Tomorrow,” Ella says, leaving Aria alone with her medicine and spinning thoughts.
Later, Ezra finds Aria (in a killer sweater that is both freeing in its decadence, and confining in the gold chains that run up the length of both sleeves) playing with her old camera at the Brew. He asks very tentatively and appropriately after her well being, jokes very lightly and appropriately about thank you etiquette, and then (duh) he ruins everything by mansplaining to her that she’s lucky—at least she’ll be able to write through the trauma. But NO, SHUT YOUR MOUTH, Aria said she isn’t having any of that shit: she wants a clean break. No record of what happened down there, even in her own journal or brain or thoughts. No memorializing her trauma. She wants to Eternally Sunshine her mind and her diary to spotless. So thank you very much, but eff off, Mr. Fitz. Leave me alone with my camera.
Even more than a clean break, Aria wants Andrew Campbell to be prosecuted for what she’s very sure he did. And so the next morning she and Ella do go to the police station so that she can testify to Detective Not-Tanner and put Andrew away once and for all. Only, after Aria confirms that not once did they see their captor without his mask, and it becomes clear that there really ISN’T any evidence anyone can provide beyond the circumstantial, Aria backpedals. She lies and says that she was wrong before, she DID see A without the mask on, and it was definitely Andrew, how could she have forgotten? And if she just solves this problem, won’t everything go back to the way it was before?
At which point Detective Not-Tanner and Ella share the same knowing looks that Ashley and Caleb did over Hanna’s head earlier, and Detective Not-Tanner closes her files and thanks the Montgomeries for their time.
Ali’s Fresh Perspective
After not spending any quality time at all with her father, Ali meets up with Spencer to share a cup of OJ and let her know that her dad has resolutely denied being parent or peer of any Charles DiLaurentis. “Do you think goblins switched babies or something, Spence?” she jokes, but Spencer reminds her there are more conventional ways of ending up with more than one set of parents, thank you very much extramarital affair that gave them both the same brother. “But for real,” Spencer says, when Ali can’t figure out what to say to that comment, “thank you, for everything to risked to rescue us from that place.” Ali blinks, then says it is no different than what Spencer and the girls would have done for her, in a tone that is half a shrug, half a threatening declaration Queen Bee Ali might have made. And then it is Spencer’s turn to be lost for a response, just staring Ali down with a look that is half acknowledgement, half guilty disagreement.
Later, Ali runs into Toby and New Cop. Toby introduces the New Cop as Lorenzo, a transplant to Rosewood, here as part of the RPD’s maddeningly indecipherable “fresh perspective” program (is it racist?? is it tacit acknowledgement that every cop trained within the borders of Pennsylvania is corrupt and/or severely under-taught??). Toby and Ali have a really bizarre glare-off wherein they say a lot of things at each other that sound both like the things that they are, and the thing that they aren’t (much like the bedroom simulacra that that Liars have been facing all episode). Toby says that Spencer seems okay; she went through a lot. “WE ALL DID,” Ali tells him, perhaps forgetting that she was FAKE KIDNAPPED and not ACTUAL KIDNAPPED. Maybe going to regular jail is just as bad as being locked in an underground psychological torture megastore for three weeks? Who knows. Anyway, everyone is glad it’s over, and Ali and Toby stare weirdly at each other for awhile while New Cop Lorenzo looks on.
The next day, which must be a Sunday, but really, who knows when people do things in Rosewood Time, who should show up at (presumably not Pastor Ted’s) church than Alison DiLaurentis! And also, New Cop Lorenzo! We guess they’re setting him up as her new love interest, even though he is also DEMONSTRABLY AN ADULT, but at this point, whatever, time isn’t real, age is just a hieroglyphic carved into the Kissing Rock, life is just the lonely coo of Tippi the parrot. Lorenzo New Cop follows Ali out of the church after the service, and they make awkward, uncomfortable conversation. “I’m still pretty new,” Lorenzo explains. “Me too…” Ali says. “…To church.” Okay. Anyway, she evidently didn’t want anyone to know she was there, even though she lives in a town of eighteen people and her best friend’s mom was maybe engaged to the pastor of *a* church, but the point is that Lorenzo intuited this and says he won’t tell anyone.
Ali runs into him at the Brew later—because reminder: they live in a very small town—and apologizes for being rude at the church. “I’m not just there for show, and also I didn’t go crazy in jail,” she makes clear. But he’s cool with whatever brings her wherever she goes. “I like the music,” he says. “Yeah, me too.” she says. “I just know what people will think that I think that they think that I think when I go there and know they are watching me watch them watch me. But I’m not CRAZY.”
And really? The thing is? She isn’t. That, in the context of her life, makes perfect sense. Then they share tiny hamburgers and contemplate their futures.
Reality Isn’t Black and White
Over the course of the episode, the girls have all slowly winnowed their wardrobe choices down to blacks and whites (the opposite of Kimmy Schmidt’s technicolor response to her own escape from trauma). Spencer’s even got prison stripes on. Silk, probably, but prison stripes all the same. They are struggling with reality—what is real at home, what is real with their parents, what is real with Charles, what is real between them. From each we get slivers of what specific torture A put them through, and while we don’t get much, what we do get makes it clear that their torture wasn’t individual, but pivoted acutely on their friendship with and love for one another. And now they can’t look each other in the eye, and can’t let themselves see the nuances and shades of gray (and pink, and blue, and yellow, and green) that exists in the free world they’ve been returned to. And as they have retreated deeper and deeper into the black and white simulations of reality that allow them to not have to feel every inch of the pain they went through in the dollhouse, the people who love them best follow them in, breaking the illusion of black and white binaries and offering their own shoulders’ to share the girls’ burdens.
Toby is the first to try to break down Spencer’s self-imposed prison cell, interrupting their sunny picnic with Spencer-like musings that for being such a genius, Andrew sure was dumb to hide ALL that evidence so close to where he was hiding, in a location that could so easily be traced back to him. “Well, A is for arrogance,” Spencer says, trying to brush his sleuthing off as quickly as she did Aria’s certainty about reality in the hospital. “It just doesn’t add up,” Toby says as Spencer starts packing up the truck. Then, “you know, you never told me what happened to you down there.” He SAW it, but she’s never talked about it. Why is that?
Spencer can’t talk about it yet, but we get our answer soon enough as the shot smash cuts to Emily, back at the firing range, rage in her eyes. We see her own flashbacks to the switch room, fleshing out the glimpse we got through Spencer’s eyes earlier: “Choose one or all will suffer!” the voice over the PA says cheerfully, as Emily stares at hostage Polaroids of her best friends attached to electric switches and cries. It’s clear that A is having each girl choose who to shock, and who to leave alone. Back at the range, Emily’s shots get closer and closer to the bullseye, until she runs out of rounds and gently sets the gun on the ledge in front of her. She is shaking and crying, and then there is Pam’s hand on her elbow, watching her daughter with tears in her eyes. And then there are all three of your recappers, breaking into our own tears.
At the Marins’, Hanna’s ripped everything off her walls and ditched all her furniture. Her room is a blank canvas, or a skeleton, or both, and she’s wearing an oversized black tee with a giant picture of the full, white moon across the front. Ashley comes in to find Hanna inert in the middle of the floor, still as the dead white rock on her shirt, and makes a big show of confirming the wisdom of starting over from scratch. She also makes a point of saying again how she is there to help Hanna process her trauma. “Or if you don’t want to talk with me, we can find someone else. Or maybe you want to call your friends?” But NO. Hanna doesn’t want to see her friends. Doesn’t want to talk about the torture bunker. Just wants to reclaim her own room.
Having been propelled into forward motion by Toby, Spencer goes over to Aria’s to debrief Aria’s huge lie to the police. Aria (dressed in her most frenetic black and white ensemble yet) says she feels so stupid for listening to the part of her that wanted to lie just so that everything could be over, but Spencer reassures her: “The stupid brain is small, but it’s wily.” Aria agrees, then after a beat, tries to bridge the chasm between them that we know the cause of with a tentative, “I’m sorry.” “Sorry for what?” Spencer asks.
Before Aria can decide how honest to be, she is called away by Ella, and Spencer’s own stupid-brain takes over, prompting her to steal one of Aria’s anti-anxiety pills while the opportunity is ripe.
Let the Hurt (and Love) In
At the Fieldses’ we find out that Pam didn’t respond to Emily’s hurt by bringing her to the shooting range, after all—Emily instead went back and rented a gun. “Semantics,” she shrugs at a shudderingly upset Pam. “I haven’t been best friends with a Hastings all these years for nothing.” It isn’t semantics that has upset Pam, though—it is that Emily would go to the shooting range angry. She wants to know what’s behind all this—besides the obvious?—and Emily spills that she’s been thinking about Sara. Emily and her friends were only (“only”) in the bunker for a little over 3 weeks, but Sara was there for two years. And even after three weeks, Em says, “it felt like… after a while, there wasn’t any time anymore.” She can’t imagine how it would feel after two years, and she saw in Sara’s eyes the destruction that it caused in her.
“Andrew’s in jail,” Pam reassures her, but Emily is still fearful and furious. “So what? There are no more bad people out there? No one else will ever get hurt?”
It’s so like Emily, the biggest beating heart of the group, to feel her own pain and then take on more on behalf of everyone else who suffers in the world. And it’s also like Emily, the fiercest pragmatist of the group, to try her darndest to do something about it. But the gun range, she realizes, made it worse. “It makes you the same as what you’re afraid of.” And then she and Pam are hugging fiercely, and you can see some of the color leaking back into Emily’s world.
At the Marins’, Ashley has returned to Hanna’s side. Again, carefully, she asks what happened down there in the bunker, and Hanna finally opens up. “He played games with us. Truth or dare. Who do you love more, me or her? Who deserves water today, you or somebody else?” Although her mom doesn’t quite know how to handle this, she actually does the most important thing. She gives Hanna her autonomy back: “This is your room. You can have anything you want in it. Bean bag chairs? Danish modern? Whatever you want, it is yours.”
Later, Caleb blows up an air mattress, the first piece of newness in Hanna’s new room. He tells her she’s the bravest person he’s ever met, and that she’ll get through this. “That’s what people do. They mend. You taught me that.” And with that small ray of light, Hanna’s ready to reclaim some parts of what was ruined for her: she wants her nightstand back. And then, finally, she is ready to sleep. And Caleb and Ashley watch over her late into the night. And the next day? Pink.
At the Montgomeries’, Ella tries to talk to her daughter as Aria takes photo after photo, her new way of processing things. “I’m just going to stick to the visuals from now on,” she says as explanation for her unwillingness to talk. Ella knows that Aria lied to the police, and reminds her that they all want the person responsible caught and punished. “Aria, you’re very smart,” she tells her. “But please remember you’re also very wise.”
And finally, at Spencer’s, it is just a girl and her pill, alone. Spencer stares at the little tablet in her hand, but stashes it away when her mom comes upstairs. And, apparently, even Veronica is ready to repair some of the damage that she did earlier: when Spencer tells her that she still hasn’t been sleeping, Veronica grabs a few pillows and leads Spencer downstairs. “We’ll sit up together, and watch a movie, until we both fall asleep.” Spencer, teary-eyed, nods and follows.
The Other Girl, Part 2
A modicum of catharsis achieved, Emily is alone in her room, staring out the window into the night. A great song about revenge plays, and she puts on her dad’s army jacket and bolsters her courage and goes to stand outside, alone and free, in the cool night air. But, because this is Rosewood, her quiet solitude is interrupted by a lurking lurker who lurks, lurking in the bushes across the street. Surprise! It is Sara Harvey, run away again.
“I saw your address at the hospital,” she says, proving some future sleuthing mettle. “I didn’t know where else to go.” Emily is stunned, but of course invites her inside for a hot drink. It turns out that as far as Sara could tell, her mother was much happier with her gone—she had gotten so much sympathy those two years, but now that she was home? She just ruined everything.
We can’t imagine that a parent whose missing child turned out to have been kidnapped and tortured would receive less sympathy than when the child was just missing, but we totally buy Sara not having a firm enough hold on reality anymore to be able to discern that. And maybe her mom is a real Jessica DiLaurentis, if you’ll pardon our language. She could actually BE so selfish and awful. In any case, Pam welcomes her to stay the night on the couch, but does caution that she will have to call her mom in the morning. Man, we talk a lot of shit about Rosewood parents, but in the end at least they’re usually, nominally, there. Poor Sara.
When Pam leaves to make up the sofa, Sara asks Emily about Andrew. “The guy they caught,” she says…
“I saw him on TV. Are you sure it’s him??” And something in her tone keeps Emily from answering either way.
And whatever Sara says next, or doesn’t say, it finally breaks down the barriers that have been keeping all the Liars apart all this time. Emily calls Spencer, who cuts short Veronica’s movie plans to answer. Aria, now dressed amazingly in a tee with a giant pink BARF scrawled across it, picks up next. Finally, Hanna joins in. And they talk and talk and talk, and the song playing over the top of them croons where do we belong/where did we go wrong/if there’s nothing here/why are we still here? and finally, we see Andrew through the two-way glass of an interrogation room, silently shouting and protesting.
A [DiLaurentis] Tag
Back home after her tiny hamburger date, Ali pulls out some of Jessica’s old scrapbooks, turning, somehow, immediately to the page of Jason as a youngster, upon which fully half of the slots are visibly emptied.
Jessica! We expected so much better from your scrapbooking skills!
NEXT WEEK
The DiLaurentis family secret is OUT.
Until next time, Liars…
Kisses,
A(lexis and Catie)
A final housekeeping note! Alexis and I are starting a Tiny Letter newsletter about friendships in pop culture. We haven’t decided on an exact date when our first one is going out, but if you want to make sure not to miss any of the action, you can subscribe here.
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.
