About:
Rosemary and Alexis here today! Thank goodness the girls were back in joke-ready costumes and sleuth-mode this week, or else it would have been hard to cut through all that bleakness.
AWARDS
THIS WEEK’S MVP
Another week, another group award. If they never stop all being the best and all loving and saving each other, we’ll be happy.
Girls, take your time processing your new understanding of the psychological, friendship-based horror A put you through, but don’t let it convince you your friendship isn’t hard and true as a diamond. UNBREAKABLE FEMALE FRIENDSHIP ALWAYS.
Runner-up: Pam Fields, for being the only parent worth a damn this week.
THIS WEEK’S LVP
Another week, another opportunity for Veronica Hastings and Ken DiLaurentis to prove that they don’t have an empathetic bone in their bodies.
Runners-up: Mona and Caleb, for not bothering to be in town. Don’t you know you’re our favorites???
BIGGEST SHOCK/BEST SURPRISE
ChArles, in Em’s bedroom, with the burner phone and knife.
We legit screamed at each other over gchat.
BIGGEST NO-DUH
All the DiLaurentises have their own, unique hiding places throughout the DiLaurentis home. Like Gretchen Weiners’ hair, Ali’s house is so big because IT’S FULL OF SECRETS.
THAT’S ALI, FOLKS
She knows all her parents’ (many) (crazy) hiding places in that house full of secrets. Well—all but one. And isn’t that just so Ali? Always a hundred steps ahead, but one crucial step behind.
Runner-up: Everything about her new “Am I a Mom or Am I a Girl?” wardrobe, which includes some of the most ill-fitting ensembles she’s ever worn, including this $250 ($99 on sale!) silk shell whose seams can’t even decide if they are prim as afternoon tea or punk distressed.
That may sounds like we are mocking, but while we do think that shell is among the most unflattering pieces ANYONE could choose to wear, we want to high five the wardrobe designers for nailing Ali’s current identity crisis on the silken head.
PREVIOUSLY ON PRETTY LITTLE LIARS
The girls rescued themselves from ChArles’ dollhouse bunker only to find that the world welcoming them back wasn’t actually all that welcoming. Ali rescued herself from police “protective” custody only to find that the protective custody parenting her instead wasn’t actually all that parental. And Sara Harvey ran away from home again, shocking us with two revelations: that there are parents out there more negligent and dismissive than the parents in Rosewood, and that Andrew Campbell sure didn’t look on television like the person who had her trapped underground for two years. A red herring?? On THIS show?!? NO.
THIS WEEK
Liars Summit, Hackable Phone Edish
The girls are finally back to talking to one another! Well, at each other, at least, as it won’t be until the end of the final act that they find a way to look each other in the eye and really, truly talk. But last episode was rough, Team Liars-wise, so for the moment we will take what we can get. And what we get for this week’s Liars Summit is a tight piece of visual storytelling, the conversation about Sara and Andrew and Charles and the police and Ali and returning to school and returning to normal, all volleying from one Liar to the next in a literal game of telephone, no one’s words being completely heard, no one’s intentions being completely understood.
Spencer starts the volley, rehashing Sara’s uncertainty about Andrew with Emily for what must be the thousandth time as she crouches behind her breakfast bar, hiding from the sharp ears and ever-judging gaze of Veronica on the couch. “But in exact percentages,” Spencer whispers feverishly into the receiver, “HOW uncertain is Sara about Andrew??” “Well she saw him on the news,” Em finds herself explaining, again, “and yeah, at first he seemed Hot, then she realized, no, he’s actually just Creepy, but in exact percentages? She’s 90% sure he ISN’T Charles.” And Emily thinks Sara’s uncertainty has some facts to support it, like for example: Andrew was in school with them almost every day (or at least, every day they bothered to go to school) for the two years that Sara was locked up in the dollhouse.
“You can’t exactly ask for a hall pass to go feed your hostage,” Spencer agrees. But Aria, whom Emily volleys the conversation to next, refuses to believe that Andrew’s innocent, mostly because she physically cannot not believe it. Like, she is 100% certain that A = Charles = Andrew. So certain, she’s thinking of appliqueing it on a baby tee to wear with her new kitten-print midi-skirt, but that’s beside the point. “I can’t go back to where we started,” she declares flat out to Hanna, the last Liar to get the conversation volleyed her way. “With no one to blame. It HAS to be Andrew.”
Well, whatever, Aria—Hanna’s going to school. And she’s wearing a fierce dress to prove to everyone that she is A-OKAY and no amount of time in a dollhouse can dull her flare for fashion. And the rest of the Liars are going with her; she’s not going in alone. So GET IT TOGETHER, ARIA. SEE YOU AT SCHOOL. And then Hanna hangs up on a very ambivalent Aria and sits down with last year’s Rosewood High yearbook in her lap, opened to a very young-looking Andrew Campbell’s smiling face. And then she rips Andrew’s whole page out, crumples it up, and throws it away.
As Hanna has decreed, so shall it be: everyone is going to school. Which means, of course, being awake sleuth o’clock early and dressing defensively in Peak Liar fashion. Emily is in a loungey (and pricey) camo jumpsuit, complete with a shoelace drawstring at the waist. Aria is in a peplum raspberry and black lace top that looks like her old hair come to sartorial life. Spencer is in a “don’t notice me” matching chambray dress + button up shirt set, accessorized with her old fake gun holster shoulder belt and a silver shotgun necklace. Hanna, as previously noted, is in the fiercest dress ever sewn out of cornflower blue fabric, along with, of course, 3-inch heels. Good job, girls! Unfortunately, no outfit, no matter how killer, will ever look like more than toxic garbage in the eyes of Rosewood’s citizens. As Andrew has decreed, so shall it be.
Also unfortunate, Emily doesn’t even make it out of her bedroom before Sara—looking particularly rough and sporting some particularly fake, freshly showered blonde hair—puppy dog eyes her into a particularly pitiful chat. “I just can’t go home yet,” Sara says weakly from within her swaddling of terrycloth, “can I hang around your room awhile until you get home from school?” Emily agrees, of course, because hers is the biggest heart ever. Then she has an idea, and pulls open her desk drawer. “Here,” she says, “take this burner phone programmed with just my number on speed dial. No, don’t worry! I’ve got plenty. So many burner phones! My good phone hacker friend has been giving us access to them ever since way back forever ago at the end of season five!”
Sara’s too new to the world aboveground to question Emily’s self-satisfaction, though. What she does want to question is why Emily is taking such pity on her? What does Emily see when she looks in her eyes? Sara’s seen herself on the news—where they’re describing her as feral. “Did you think I looked feral??” she asks as her stringy, limp hair sways in front of her wild eyes like a taaaay inna winnnnd.
“More like a lost puppy in need of some good grooming,” Em says, then tries to CARESS THIS FERAL GIRL, who very ferally shrinks back and starts freaking out about how the world is wrong, she’s wrong, everything is wrong, oh god oh god, did she make Pam mad? She should go! She should go now!
And so Em puts down her bookbag and suggests they go find Pam and make breakfast instead. Who needs school when there is French toast to be eaten (and a feral teen to soothe)? Emily Fields, saving everyone.
Also playing the role of hero this morning is Ezra “I didn’t do it!” Fitz, who (expertly) spies Aria staring blankly at the Brew wall as she nurses the to-go coffee she has patently not taken to go. He brings her a pastry. “Are you going to school? Are you ready for that? How do you feel about questions? Like, lots of them?” Ezra asks. She isn’t ready for school yet, no, so he tells her to play hooky and suggests she hang out in the back room of the Brew and journal her feelings, even though she’s made it abundantly clear that she doesn’t want to do that, Ezra. Okay, okay—then doodle on napkins, or read a book, or alphabetize Talia’s old spices. Do whatever you want!
Alexis can’t believe she is saying this, but despite his insistence on not hearing HER insistence that she doesn’t want to write anything ever again, it feels like he is keeping just the right amount of space from Aria while also offering just the right amount of support. Now all he has to do is keep from ruining it by, we dunno, patronizing Aria for keeping any private thoughts she damn well pleases from him, or helping her commit a felony. But we mean, neither of those things are THAT likely, right?
Spencer, for some reason, starts her morning with a stop at Ali’s house. Veronica must not have woken up before she left, and she needed SOMEONE to argue with before first period. And so we find the two of them in Allison’s room, Spencer at top volume shouting “YOUR FATHER IS LYING TO YOU, YA CRAZY” as they stare at each other in Alison’s vanity mirror (another very clever shot showing the girls talking at, but not to, each other).
Alison however either can’t, or doesn’t want to, buy it (our money is on the latter). “If my father, who has never once failed me or this family in any tangible way, says there is no Charles,” she declares, “then there is no Charles.” A stands for Andrew after all, she says, as though it were all that easy. Like, that is the same logic that tricked the girls into playing MonA’s game in the first two seasons, Alison. Hell, it’s the logic that keeps half the fandom half-convinced that the whole, 7-season nightmare will turn out to be Aria’s game after all. A is for Andrew, is for Alison, is for Aria, is for All the things you thought you knew, you never knew shit. A is also for All Rosewood Adults Lie. You, Alison, know that better than most. So maybe listen when Spencer refuses to listen to any more of your bullsh.
“He practically laid Andrew out on a silver platter for us,” Spencer says, referring to the Charles she thinks is still roaming free. If her dad knew Charles was a real person, Ali argues, he’d be at the police station right now. Why? Because Daddy D’s two favorite hobbies are: 1) yelling at people and 2) suing things, the latter being a fact Jason will independently confirm for Spencer in a couple scenes. Not that Allison approves Spencer talking to him about Charles. “He’s your family!” Spencer shouts. “He’s MY family, for that matter. We’re all in this together!”
But it isn’t a power move Ali is trying to pull: it is that she doesn’t want anyone else hating her. And she breaks down and reveals why she doesn’t want Spencer to be right about Daddy DiLaurentis adding more lies to the DiLaurentis heap: if it is true, it, like every other awful thing in this awful town, will only blow back on her, the blamable teen girl. “I’m under every stone that everyone turns over,” she says movingly. “I make people into people they never were. It always comes down to me; everyone would be better off without me.”
Spencer tries to reassure her that, no, it wasn’t her fault, and no, she doesn’t believe that Ali is the one ultimately to blame, but we’re not sure we totally buy it as sincere. We’re not sure SPENCER buys it as sincere. We’re pretty sure Ali doesn’t buy it as sincere. But WHO KNOWS. As Spencer tells Jason later, “things change.” Even in Rosewood. Even with a DiLaurentis.
And so we finally return to Hanna, who, big surprise, is the only one of the four girls to have actually made it all the way to school. She stands on the sidewalk, waiting impatiently for the other girls to arrive, but the only familiar face she is greeted by is the long lost Dr. Sullivan. That’s right—the therapist who was bought out by A is back and ready to offer any teen at Rosewood High free therapy! That isn’t problematic at all! She suggests Hanna stop by later to talk about her troubles. Hanna gives up on the other girls and goes inside alone, and then quickly gives up on the idea of school at all (lol no kidding) and takes Dr. S up on her offer. It takes less than a minute for it to become clear to us and to Dr. S that what Hanna really needs is some official therapy in her official, totally un-hAckable new office. It takes less than a millisecond after that suggestion for it to become clear to Hanna that what she really REALLY needs is another group session, so they can talk about what happened to them together and open up about what they did to each other, which is the root of their problems. Again—this is a great idea, save for the part where it is literally recreating the conditions under which MonA burned them all in Season 2.
Anyway, if Hanna can get them all to come to her office, Dr. Sullivan promises she’ll see them together. And Hanna is as certain as Aria was about Andrew’s guilt (and for the same reason of necessity) that this? She will make happen.
Ezra’s Lessons In Lies and Felonies
At the Brew, Aria’s killing the day by looking through her hipster photos. She lands on a snapshot of a doll in her bedroom (Like, really, girl? You haven’t burned that yet?) and zooms in on something between its dress and the wall, but then moves on to a patch of school shots.
She finds a couple of legit fun candids of Andrew from his Pre-Creepy days, but before she can study them too long Ezra walks in and Aria slams her laptop shut. “Uh, hey, Aria? If you don’t want people to think you’re hiding something from them, maybe don’t hide stuff from them,” says Ezra, King of Hiding Stuff and Secret Chickpea Hidey-Holes. And that’s like, a verbatim quote. He was legit that patronizing.
Hey Ezra, maybe she’s finally learning her lesson about sharing things with you. MAYBE she realizes some things need to stay hidden so as not to become a chapter in your shitty true crime novel. Maybe she just doesn’t need to share every detail of her life with a person who isn’t her boyfriend! Or even who IS her boyfriend! People—even teenage girls!—are allowed to have private thoughts! But instead of smooshing a chocolate donut in his face, which is what we would’ve done (ugh, what a waste even of that donut tho), she shoots back, “Maybe I wasn’t trying to hide anything!” and opens her laptop and shows Ezra the photos of Andrew. “Who is he really?” she muses aloud. “I trusted him, but all I know about him is what he told me.” Is she talking about Andrew or Ezra? Who knows! Everyone! Every man in her life ever! But LOL like Ezra is going to notice the irony. Of course he isn’t! Especially not when there are felonies he can offer to help her perpetrate to try to learn everything they can about Andrew!
And so Aria and Ezra prank call a doctor’s office pretending to be the Rosewood PD, which is not illegal at all, we’re pretty sure—we mean, it isn’t like they’re in the possession of any shovels or anything. “We’ve got one of your patients under arrest here, and we need to get some details on him. First question, is your refrigerator running?” Ezra asks. HA! HA! Ezra is a laugh riot. They try to get Andrew’s date and place of birth, social security number, prescription medications—whatever information they can obtain in this totally reasonable manner. No-go on the social/medication front, unfortunately, because medical info apparently CAN’T be shared over the phone (Catie pls confirm), but they do learn something about his date and place of birth, which is that they can’t learn anything about his date and place of birth. Because those records are sealed. Because he was adopted.
Lady Ali and Lord-enzo
Alison is sashaying through town in a pair of sensible wedges when she’s attacked by a stray soccer ball from the children practicing sport across the street. “Hey, Lady!” Rosewood PD’s newest deputy Lorenzo calls out, correctly identifying the thing about Ali’s recent style of public presentation that is so incredibly odd. He trots over to fetch the ball, which she expertly kicks directly to him. “Look!” he exclaims. “I’m not like some of the other Rosewood PD! I’m allowed within 500 feet of these children!”
Lorenzo, turns out, is the new coach for the church-sponsored youth soccer league—for the boys’ team, at least. As things currently stand, the girls are being kept from playing (A IS THE PATRIARCHY) because they don’t have a lady coach (oh wait, or that; also, here, have a laugh). And since Alison managed to not get a nosebleed from that stray soccer ball, he suggests that maybe she should coach the girls. “You’ve got the moves,” Lorenzo says while looking this 17-year-old up and down like she’s a little hamburger. “HA,” Ali scoffs, “so I guess you DON’T know about my personal history as a leader of impressionable young girls?”
Lorenzo counters by wisely suggesting that hers would be a well of wisdom that could be positively drawn from; Ali counter-counters by wisely suggesting that she knows Rosewood mothers well enough to know that not a single one of them would be happy with the idea of Alison DiLaurentis leading their girls in anything. C’mon, Ali! Literally for what other reason have you been dressing yourself up as a tony suburban mom these past months, if not to convince everyone in town you are mature and responsible and completely, truly changed? Anyway, Lorenzo makes a lot of sense, and also proves how useful it is to bring in outside opinions whenever attempts to learn and be better are being mired by the weight of the long and complex histories between OG players.
Case in point: Toby, who still distrusts every breath Ali takes, and who is creepily creeping on this Ali-Lorenzo interaction from the window of the Rosewood Grille (Rosemary: WHICH, by the way, is the old Luke’s from the Gilmore Girls set! Am I the only person who didn’t know that?), unable to hear a single word either of the two nascent lovebirds are saying, but imagining the very worst.
Later, as he is comforting Spencer after her fight with Ali that morning, Toby breaks up cuddle time to ask a favor. He needs her to keep Ali away from Lorenzo. The guys just started this new cool scrapbooking group, see (#FreshPerspectives, y’all), and he can’t have Ali Yoko-ing her way in. Also, it’s Ali…she’s a known life-ruiner.
“But people can change!” Spencer insists, again, all day, every day. Ali helped Toby find the girls in the dollhouse, didn’t she? “She was looking out for Ali,” Toby argues. “All Ali ever does is look out for Ali.” She needed to find Mona to clear her name. She has a history of using anyone she can use, including cops and Tobys and ToboCops, but if Spencer can COMPLETELY trust her, he promises to drop the issue. Which, like, no fair. Spencer obviously doesn’t completely trust anyone—including (or especially) herself.
The Em-peror’s New Clothes
Emily and Pam are swapping war stories about Emily’s pre-teen closet, from the good old days before Emily knew what a clothes hanger was (hahahaha, like there ever was such a day!). Sara looks on, as uncomfortable as we are at how damn cute this family is. Casually, Pam asks if Sara’s just going to start all over with a new wardrobe? She has to, Sara shrugs, because her mom gave away all her stuff after she had been missing for a year. “I’m sure it made her terribly sad, to have all those reminders around,” Pam says wisely. “She said she needed the room,” Sara flatly answers. Apparently, Sara’s mom is terrible and her dad, equally terrible probably, has been MIA for years. “You can have all my flannel and camo,” Em offers. “It’s what lesbians wear, so maybe it isn’t exactly your style. But hang around with me long enough and, well, just trust me, you’ll see.”
Em’s phone rings then. Hanna’s back on the scene! Like, literally on the scene. Like, outside Emily’s house right now, here to wrangle the girls for a group session with Dr. Sullivan. Welcome back, Hanna!
Quick, Gang! Into the Mystery (and Therapy) Machine!
“I can’t go to therapy, I’m taking care of Sarah,” Emily (at Peak Emily) says to Hanna when she joins her on the street. Besides, Emily worked out her PTSD at the shooting range, where she worked out that the shooting range just made her more scared, so she’s TOTALLY GOOD TO GO NO MORE THERAPY NEEDED HERE, go see a shrink by yourself, Hanna! Aria pulls up then, just in time. “Finally!” Hanna exclaims, throwing her arms up, “let’s get this therapy party started!” But it wasn’t Hanna’s therapy boondoggle that Aria raced over for—it’s her clues news: “Andrew was adopted! He could be older than us! He could be the other kid from Charles’ creepy home movie.”
Dun dun DUNNNNN!
Meanwhile, Spencer is across town the street dropping in on Jason, intent on proving Ali AND Toby wrong. “Where’s your father?” she asks. “Oh, ya know, down at the precinct yelling at cops and threatening to sue everyone,” Jason responds. Which is both typical and fair.
Spencer sees her opportunity: she explains that when they were in the dollhouse, they found a name. Charles DiLaurentis. Does that ring any bells, Jason? Jason can’t recall any Charles DiLaurentis in his family, and assumes Andrew must have done it to mess with Ali, so Spencer, receiving an SOS text from Hanna and the girls at Dr. Sullivan’s office, heads to go. As she reaches the door though she hears Jason mutter, “Charles…Di…Laurentis?” (Superb acting, Jason!) He does remember! But not a Charles—he remembers a Charlie. And Charlie, well, Charlie doesn’t exist.
Cue manufactured tension with a commercial break, then we’re back with the other Liars as they wait for Spencer in Dr. Sullivan’s waiting room, wondering what they should tell Dr. S. “It’s not about telling her, it’s about telling each other,” Hanna, our precious, says. She is the most wonderful. Spencer barges in then, with her newfound knowledge of Charlie: he really doesn’t exist! He was Jason’s imaginary friend when he was a kid.
Well, we don’t know about Mr. Biscuit (though, we’d like to…#SummerofAnswers) but Jason told Spencer that he had an imaginary friend named Charlie, and one day, Daddy D told Jason that Charlie had to go away, and after that Jason never saw him again. (If any adult really has that sort of power over a child’s imagination, that alone should be cause for concern.) Our girls aren’t idiots like Toddler Jason was, though. They saw the video footage that proved that Charlie was anything BUT imaginary, and they see right through Mr. DiLaurentis’ ruse! So: who was this not-so-imaginary Charlie, then, and what did the DiLaurentis parentals do with him? And why was Daddy DiLaurentis so intent on keeping it a secret from his remaining children? (Probably as part of a Secret Dads Who Keep Secrets cabal he’s in with Papa Hastings, Byron the Worst, and Terrible Tom Marin.)
Before the girls can get back to discussing what they should tell Dr. Sullivan—which includes now not just the torture A put them through in the dollhouse, but also this new mystery of Charles Charlie DiLaurentis—Sara calls Emily with a Face Chat request, but when Emily answers, the video shows Sarah asleep in Em’s bed and black-gloved-and-hooded A with a knife at her back. “MENTION ME AND SOMEONE DIES. YOU HAVE 30 SECONDS TO LEAVE THAT ROOM.”
A countdown begins, so the girls rush back to Emily’s to save Sara, but find the bed stuffed with pillows instead. For a moment the Liars+us fear the worst: that A has taken Sara back to the dollhouse. Then we all breathe a collective sigh of relief when Sara appears so fresh and so clean from her third shower of the day. Maybe we’re monsters, but it was about this point at which our distrust of Sara began to really bloom. Yes, she’s just a traumatized girl, and yes, it’s very mean of us to be suspicious of every new person who’s introduced into the Liars’ lives, and yes, if Sara is untrustworthy, it’s possibly because two years in A’s clutches Stockholmed her what good, but at this point, we’ve put our guard, like, at least half-way up with her.
Not Emily though. Emily hugs her, relieved and once more operating at Peak Emily.
Summit, the Second
The other Liars head downstairs for a quick chat in Pam’s chintz armchairs. If A is Charles and Charles is Andrew and Andrew is in jail, then who made that phone call from Emily’s room? Pam walks in then and announces that SURPRISE! The Rosewood PD is going to release Andrew—they aren’t charging him because there’s no case. He has an alibi for Mona’s kidnapping, and he was having his appendix removed when Sara was taken two years ago. He’ll be out of jail in just a few hours, but he isn’t out yet, which means he couldn’t have made the call. Pam warns the girls to be careful, and tells them to make sure their parents know where they are at all times. Spencer reassures her that they will do precisely that, then instead drives the Liars to Ali’s to tell her about Charlie and somehow let the realization that Ali was wrong and Spencer was right and Daddy DiLaurentis really did lie to her sink in without breaking into a victory dance (j/k, Spencer is really appropriate, and careful, with all of her victories these days).
Anyway, Alison really isn’t all that surprised, and we aren’t surprised that she isn’t surprised. Jason always said something was missing from this family—she thought it was him, since his baby pictures were mostly noticeably absent from the family photo album, but maybe he wasn’t the one that was removed. “Maybe my past really IS filled with secrets and lies that I am not the source of!”
Em wants to know if there might be proof somewhere in the house? No way, the other Liars say, we’ve literally searched this house with a fine-toothed comb. “No,” Ali corrects, “You searched for my hiding spots, not my parents’. If you weren’t on the hunt for their specific monogrammed hiding spots, you probably looked right past them. Follow me.” So the girls split up and search the DiLaurentis house yet again.
“If we don’t find anything here in the porch flower beds we’ll head to the garden and look under the azaleas,” Ali tells Spencer, nonchalantly leaving the gin cubby behind a false panel in the hallway wall open as they move on to the next in the long list of Jessica’s old hidey holes. “Really?” Spencer demands when Ali hands her a spade, somehow shocked, even after all the many bodies that have turned up over the years, at the concept of big, dark secrets being hidden under flowerbeds in their shared backyards. Ali laughs. “Yes. Of course. Why? Where do YOU hide things? Not anywhere as pedestrian and as obvious as under your BED, I’m sure, all these years trying to stay one step ahead of that tech wizard, A. Like, if that was your only hiding place, no wonder you basically died a thousand times while I was gone. I mean, seriously.”
There’s a thoughtful pause as the two girls dig around in the flower beds, then Alison nervously brings up Lorenzo. She knows Toby hates her, even though Spencer promises he doesn’t, and she knows Toby probably wants Ali to stay away from Lorenzo, but Ali thinks he’s…nice. Has Toby mentioned if Lorenzo has, like, said anything about Ali? Our hearts squeeze as these two girls tiptoe around a regular, normal, safe topic that teenage girls should and do talk about at length. These two, however, feel like they aren’t allowed to talk about something as normal as liking a boy, which is fair considering they’re tentatively talking about it while searching Ali’s house for hidden clues of a possibly adopted secret brother who might’ve tortured them in an underground bunker for the last three weeks. Ali ends the conversation she started, insisting that it would never work out anyway, because she is the problem. She’s always the problem.
In Jessica’s old crafting room (the one Ali effected her #GreatEscape from right under the RPD’s collective noses not two weeks ago), Aria finds a collection of Mason jars filled with buttons on a shelf. “Ohhh, arts and crafts!” she murmurs, dumping the buttons out on a desk (okay, in all fairness, she had a legitimately good idea to look in them after a legitimate memory of her own old hiding places when she was a kid). The second one contains a folded up photograph of (drum roll please) Jessica DiLaurentis and the two boys that was taken the same day as the home movie the girls watched in the dollhouse. On the one hand, this could be proof that Charlie/Charles is a really real boy! On the other hand, it could just be proof that the DiLaurentises have always been so committed to their lies that they hired a little blonde boy for a single day to go around acting like Jason’s imaginary friend, just long enough to document the experience for him for all time. What a way to gaslight a kid: make his imaginary friend be real and then burn all the proof and tell him his imaginary friend doesn’t exist and that he can never even think about him again, let alone bring him up in casual conversation. We literally can’t think of a more DiLaurentis/Rosewood thing to do than that.
Anyway, Ali is impressed that Aria thought to look in the button jar. And that statement, alone, proves how much Ali really has Changed after all these years.
LOL Nobody’s Really a Cop
Ali sends the Liars away so she can confront her dad about their family business alone. She will call them when she knows something. On their way home, the girls accidentally run into Andrew as he is being released from jail. Despite her friends’ protestations, Aria decides it’s time for a little confrontation—and at this point, Aria’s been so all over the place (and rightfully so) we aren’t sure if she’s going to yell at him or apologize. She chooses the latter, but Andrew, obviously, doesn’t want to chat. “You want to know where I was?” Andrew yells. “Looking for you. I was going to save you! I was going to be the hero! I had big dreams of getting famous and being the big man on campus who saved some dumb girls from some dumb dollhouse! How dare you rescue yourself instead? How dare you stand in my way!”
The girls are shocked to find that, somehow, Andrew has managed to turn their three-year long story of emotional, psychological and physical torture into a narrative in which he is their victim, but we’re not. THE PATRIARCHY IS A. And despite the fact that there are two uniformed cops now standing protectively behind our girls (Toby and Lorenzo, who Spencer pointedly introduces herself and the other girls to later as “Ali’s friends,” so go suck it, Toby), Andrew looms his entire hulked out bulk over Aria and warns them all to stay out of his way until graduation.
“Your graduation. Doesn’t mean we’ll graduate,” Hanna says, reminding him that while he OPTED to spend the last few weeks looking for them instead of attending classes, they were, you know, being tortured in the middle of nowhere. And that might’ve sorta affected their GPAs. “Oh, you’ll graduate,” Andrew says. “They want you gone so they don’t have to deal with you anymore. You are toxic garbage.” RUDE.
Andrew storms off, and the girls are left under the glare of a street lamp. Spencer does her introduction bit with Lorenzo, then tells the two that the girls will be fine, so Toby and Lorenzo return to work (“work”). Finally alone and all together, Hanna decides it’s time to talk. She hugs her arms to her body. “Charles made me play a game with switches. About hurting people.” Hurting the other girls she means, but can’t quite yet say. “I thought I was the only one!” Aria exclaims. The other girls, too, thought this. And why did they think it? Because none of them were ever shocked. Which means that no one else could have been doing to them what they were doing to everyone else.
Hanna: “…he tricked us.”
Spencer: “Charles wanted us to know there was a point when we would do it. Any of us. ALL of us.”
And GOD it is terrible to see the hurt and brokenness on each of their faces. But girls: being human is being human. And the pain you were forced to inflict, false as it was, came from a scenario in which your friends were going to be “hurt” no matter what you did. As Ella told Aria last week: you are all smart, but you are also wise. Don’t let Charles’ (or the world’s) opinion of what is good and what is evil and what is loyal and what is treacherous blind you from what you know to be true. Each other. You have each other, and you have yourselves. You will always be okay, even when it feels like you are not.
And so the girls go home, each alone, but no longer feeling isolated from the group by the memories of what they thought they alone had each done to each other. Can’t give in/can’t give up/on trying hard/it’s not enough/throw myself into the unknown the soundtrack soars over everything. Aria returns to her waiting camera, aims it at herself in the mirror, the doll in the window. Hanna returns to her skeleton room and pulls a greyscale paint chip off the wall to stare at up close. Emily returns to a pitch black room, and a freshly pixie-cut Sara lurking on her window seat (“Your mom helped me do it!” she exclaims flirtily. Emily sighs. “I told you if you hung out with me long enough…”). And Spencer? Spencer returns to a home that is much less creepy but much more annoying—because, of course, Veronica is there, waiting to tell Spencer everything she already knows (“Don’t worry mom, Toby, my cop boyfriend, gave me a ride home in the back of his cop car,” “Fine but WHAT YOU CAN’T POSSIBLY KNOW is that ANDREW has been released!!!” “…my cop boyfriend gave me a ride home in his cop car which means, oh—nevermind”), and blame her for the unflattering stories everyone else is weaving about her.
So, Veronica doesn’t want Spencer going anywhere without telling her. And while we’ll give her an A for Effort Parenting Badge for that, it’s not nearly as big as Veronica’s LVP badge, which, let’s watch and see how she won that one, shall we?
As Spencer heads to bed, clearly exhausted and at her emotional wits’ end, Veronica stops her to ask in the most Mean Girl “well I’m not going to say it but I’ll definitely imply it” way possible how Spencer’s first day back at school was? “Don’t try to catch me in a lie,” Spencer says, tears in her eyes, “it’s humiliating.” Oh, but Veronica isn’t done yet! She’d ALSO like to imply some choice things about the events orchestrated by a psychotic mastermind with endless wealth that led up to the girls’ kidnapping. Namely, that Andrew told the cops some very interesting things the Liars tricked him into helping them with. “Is that true, Spencer??? How dare you do anything to harm that poor boy who has been a suspect in your kidnapping!”
“It’s made up of facts,” Spencer says [they told Andrew that they were worried about Mike and needed a ride, just not *precisely* what the worry was over, for one example]. “That doesn’t make it true.” But Veronica isn’t finished: if it wasn’t Andrew that kidnapped them, A is still a threat. She just wants to end it! “I don’t think you want to put an end to it so much as you wish it hadn’t happened,” Spencer says, looking tired. “The whole time we were down there, we thought if we could just survive and come home everything would be all right. And now we’re back. We survived. And I don’t see a happy ending coming any time soon.”
Spencer disappears upstairs and finally gives in, taking the anxiety pill she stole from Aria in last week’s episode. She lies down as headlights flash on the wall, but she doesn’t care who is pulling up. She actually doesn’t give AF about anything because mmm…sleeping pills…yesssszzzzz.
A D-bag Tag (DiLaurentis, that is)
Turns out, the headlights belonged to Daddy DiLaurentis. Before he came home, Jason arrived to find Alison in the living room, putting the penny jar photo of Charlie and Jason back in the DiLaurentis family photo album where it belongs.
We don’t get to see their discussion—or maybe they understand each other and the state of their family well enough that they don’t NEED to have a discussion—but we do see their solidly united front when The Almighty Kenneth walks through the door.
“Happy almost Father’s Day you sack of crap! Who is Charlie?” Jason says by way of greeting (actually, he says “We want the truth; no more lies,” basically putting voice to the entire PLL fandom’s last six years.) Daddy D is immediately condescending about how Jason doesn’t have a leg to stand on, “Not after what you’ve put this family through!” NICE TRY GUY, but Ali won’t let him get out of answering by picking a fight. She presents him with the button jar evidence: “Who was the other boy in this photo??” At which point, he takes it, rips it into shreds, stuffs the shreds in his mouth, swallows. “What boy? What photo? Alison, do we need to take you to Radley? Because I will totally sue them back into business if necessary!”
JK, he actually takes it, collapses into a chair under the weight of all his secrets and lies, and starts in on what maybe, we can hope, might be a real explanation. Only we will have to wait until next week to know for sure, because the music picks back up and the camera pulls back out until we are left outside the house looking in, unable to hear what Daddy D actually says. At least we can see him trying to finally make good! And guess who else can?
BLACK HOODIE A.
NEXT WEEK
#SummerofAnswers continues, with the news that Charlie? Is dead. LOL. Uh huh, okay.
Until next time,
KISSES,
A(lexis and Rosemary)
