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Hey everyone, it’s Caroline again. Sorry if this recap is a bit unclear; I’ve spent the last two days working on a giant project on Excel, which is the Alison DiLaurentis of software.
Emily
The girls have snuck out of class for reasons I don’t entirely understand. Aria keeps telling everyone to keep their voices down so they don’t get caught, because she wants to graduate from high school. Spencer, ever the voice of reason, is like, “Please, none of us are graduating. This isn’t Mystic Falls. And my sister lives there half the time, so I would know.” The whole point of this scene is so Emily can get a text telling her that Mrs. DiLaurentis offered to let her and her mom move in with her. Emily is understandably weirded out, but Hanna’s whole thing this season has basically been exploding at people, so with her typical lack of grace she tells Emily that she’s going to do it, because Alison was close to CeCe and CeCe is this season’s obsession.
Later, Spencer helps Emily move into to Ali’s old room, which has been set up exactly the same way it was when Ali was alive. Emily mentions that her mom won’t even be there until the next day because she’s at a police disciplinary hearing in Harrisburg. Mrs. DiLaurentis comes in and mentions that the furnace is on the fritz. She’s really happy that the girls are there, but she can’t even make herself remove the hangers from Ali’s wardrobe.
Emily’s on her way into the kitchen for some food (or she was on her way to do some snooping) when she sees Mrs. DiLaurentis crying. Mrs. D explains that her husband is divorcing her, and that most of it is because of the different ways they grieved after Alison’s death. Since Emily is a teenager, she relates the crumbling of a 25-year marriage over the death of a child to breaking up with her high school girlfriend because she can’t get a swimming scholarship. She realizes Mrs. D hadn’t heard that she was gay, so she explains and Mrs. D says that she’s proud of Emily and wishes Ali could have loved her back. Em, if you dye your hair blonde and let Mrs. DiLaurentis call you Alison I’m pretty sure I figured out where you can get your college money.
Someone shows up to fix the furnace and he explains that the circuit was blown, and adds that Mrs. DiLaurentis has a problem in the basement. She and Emily go to explore and it looks like someone’s been living in the basement. Mrs. DiLaurentis thinks that someone probably lived there before Jason moved back and imagines that they’re gone now. When she goes upstairs and turns on a light, Emily sees the holes that were drilled into the floor a couple episodes back. I guess it gives Red Coat a great view of everyone’s feet.
Spencer
Spencer’s stuck in the Toby’s Mom plotline this week. The music A left for him last week was something his mom used to play all the time, and there was a note from A telling him to go back to talk to Dr. Palmer. Spencer is obviously near the end of her rope about having to lie to her friends, but Toby’s insistent that A will stop sending clues if they find out. But Toby, no one really cares about this!
When they go see Dr. Palmer he doesn’t really provide any useful information until Spencer starts playing the music. Palmer thinks Spencer is Toby’s mom and tells her that it would mean a lot to Toby to hear her playing music again. I think the implication is that she’s feeling better. Spencer tries to get Dr. Palmer to tell her more about the blonde girl he warned Mrs. Cavanaugh about. She asks if it was CeCe Drake and Dr. Palmer asks someone to show Mrs. DiLaurentis to his office.
Spencer tells Hanna and Emily about Dr. Palmer, making up some lie about it being a clue related to Nigel Wright. Spencer and Hanna both want to ask Mrs. DiLaurentis about it, but Emily snaps at them and leaves for work. Spencer and Hanna run into Mrs. DiLaurentis on the way out and ask her about Dr. Palmer. The name rings a bell and it leads Mrs. D. right into a flashback where Ali is playing the piano and Mrs. D comes in in a rage. She got a phone call from someone at Radley telling her that they had her daughter and that she was a danger to herself, so they were thinking about keeping her there. When she got to Radley, she saw that it was CeCe, dressed in Ali’s clothes. Ali claims that she didn’t even know CeCe was going to do it. Mrs. DiLaurentis says that even Dr. Palmer agreed that the girls’ friendship was toxic and tells Ali that she’s never hanging out with CeCe again. I love how Ali is a terrible person in all of Mrs. DiLaurentis’ stories. It really says something about you if your mom can’t even have a nice flashback. Mrs. DiLaurentis tells the girls that she knew Ali and CeCe’s friendship was wrong from the beginning. They were obsessive about each other and even adopted each other’s personalities. Are you sure they weren’t both just awful people? And why was CeCe obsessed with a 15-year old? I guess Rosewood’s obsession with teenagers isn’t limited to guys.
Hanna
Caleb managed to connect a cable bill with a physical address to the P.O. Box in Philly. Hanna tells Caleb that she wants to go to Radley to see Mona, because she’s the only person CeCe has reached out to and she thinks Mona is on their side now. So yes, the cops did put Mona back in Radley after she told them she escaped multiple times. Caleb wants to go the cops and the girls’ parents because he doesn’t think it can get any more dangerous than it already is. Caleb, the whole premise of this show is that if it makes sense to go to authority figures, you never do it.
Earlier, Wren met with Mona and told her he didn’t believe that she’d killed Wilden, but she stuck with her story. He asked when she was going to be honest with him, because she was before. She said that that was before she knew where his loyalties lied. He counters that he knows she stopped taking her meds. Since she never stopped being A, did she ever take her meds? And even if she did, with Red Coat and another A and possibly someone else around, wouldn’t she want to be at full super villain status?
Hanna runs into Wren at the coffee shop. He tells her he’s a bit fuzzy because he’s been on shift for 72 hours. Sure, he’s probably the only doctor in Rosewood again after everyone figured out that the other doctor couldn’t keep his trap shut. She asks if he can let her in to see Mona, and he says he can’t. She asks if CeCe Drake has contacted him and he says no, but someone told him a blonde girl tried to get in to see Mona and he assumed it was her. He tells her he’ll see what he can do re: Mona, but when Hanna leaves, he calls someone and tells them there’s a problem and that he’ll take care of things on his end if they take care of theirs’.
Hanna’s got on her best snazzy pilgrim ensemble.
Hanna sees Caleb outside of Veronica’s office building. He was going to tell Veronica everything that’s going on because he’s not enough to protect Hanna anymore. Not sure he was ever enough to protect Hanna, but okay. Wren sees this.
Hanna goes to see Emily and the DiLaurentis house is empty, except for a snooping Red Coat. She manages to sneak right behind Hanna without her noticing because Hanna is distracted by something shiny.
Wren turns up at the Hastings house for the most awkward visit with Veronica, ever. She’s about as fond of him as you’d expect her to be, but he tells her that Mona’s going to turn the tables on her and that she hasn’t forgiven the girls. Veronica reminds him that he could lose his license for this, but he says that he feels responsible since he made such a mess of things before.
Veronica goes to see Mona to tell her that she can have her locked away for life if she messes with Veronica’s family or the girls. Mona’s just like “Whatever, probably I could break out of jail.”
Hanna, Caleb and Spencer are at the Hastings’ house discussing CeCe when Veronica comes in and tells Hanna that she should go home to see her mom. Someone called in an anonymous tip that Veronica had bullied Mona into a confession. She’s being charged with obstruction of justice and until it blows over, Ashley doesn’t have a lawyer. Because anonymous complaints are the bedrock of Rosewood’s justice system.
Hanna freaks out and leaves and we cut to Wren on the phone, saying that he was shocked when he learned about the behavior of his almost mother-in-law. He’s coloring in a red coat onto a girl in a picture he was showing Mona earlier. Obviously, he wanted to keep Mona from telling Hanna whatever she knew about him. Is he involved with CeCe? Someone his own AGE? Spencer, go make out with him and get his head back in the game.
Aria
Aria’s going to Philly to watch Jake punch things, so she volunteers to go to the address Caleb found. When she gets there, there’s a girl moving out who was presumably CeCe’s roommate. CeCe told her ALL about Ali and the girls. She mentions that party a few seasons ago where Ali murdered someone and it was never brought up again. CeCe was blamed for it and kicked out of school and she assumed all the girls were in on it and she hated them for it. I’d call bullshit on someone assuming that four random girls went along with their friend to murder someone to get someone else they didn’t know kicked out of school, but CeCe DID know Ali and Ali probably had ‘murder some random’ on her calendar every Saturday.
In Ezra news, he had a paternity test done and found out Malcolm isn’t his. He confronts Maggie, who tells him that when they were fighting she got drunk and went to a party and hooked up with some guy. When she found out she was pregnant, she figured it was Ezra’s because that’s what she wanted to believe. See, Ezra? Teenagers make really stupid mistakes, so perhaps you shouldn’t date them. Ezra’s pissed because now he knows all this stuff about Malcolm that only a dad or a babysitter would know, and he’s mad that Maggie let Ezra fall in love with Malcolm. Which, really? Malcolm must be more winning off-screen, because that kid is a dud. Ezra calls Aria to tell her and probably to say they can totally get back together now, because the fact that he’s her teacher isn’t even a problem for him, but Aria declines the call and decides to watch Jake’s fight instead.
After the match, which Jake won, they’re sitting on a stoop eating burritos and flirting. Jake apologizes for the meal and says he could have at least bought her a steak, but this is one of the episodes where the writers remember Aria’s a vegetarian and she tells him she doesn’t eat meat.
Credits
In the tag, A throws Ashley’s muddy Manolos into the wreckage at Emily’s house. This is why you should really burn evidence.
What’d you guys think? Is Wren working with CeCe? Or possibly Melissa? Is Mrs. DiLaurentis a tragic figure or one step away from a reverse Norman Bates?
About the Contributor:
This post was written by Caroline.
