About:
Catie and Rosemary here, ably aided and abetted by Alexis on Twitter duty. All three of us are still recovering from accidentally watching some literal horror movie that aired in the typical PLL timeslot. *shivers*
AWARDS
THIS WEEK’S MVP
After a nightmare straight from a horror movie, Spencer dropped by an NA meeting, dumped her happy cookie with her old sober coach, and channeled her pent-up [sexual] energy into tearing through every individual file in Radley to find out every detail of Charles’s life. We’re not saying it’s the MOST healthy Spencer has ever been, but at least girl gets shit done.
THIS WEEK’S LVP
Last week, the DiLaurentis patriarch was a font of useful information. This week, he’s rebounded as a humorless stickler who must critique his daughter’s every move! It’s truly terrible.
BIGGEST SHOCK/BEST SURPRISE
A is a girl. Um, didn’t we already establish that A is the patriarchy??
BIGGEST NO-DUH
A is a girl. Men can’t do ANYTHING.
THAT’S ALI, FOLKS
Ali spends most of her time at home this episode, thinking about the horrible men in her life (and one who is mostly NOT horrible).
PREVIOUSLY ON PRETTY LITTLE LIARS
Lesli Stone, Mona’s secret ginger friend, falsely told a jury that the Liars had something to do with Mona’s disappearance. Alison had a secret brother named Charles who was sent to Radley for being basically a DiLaurentis, just a little more psychotic. Emily found a new lesbian puppy friend in Sara Harvey. Generic White Boy (GWB) #45192 a.k.a. Dean was Spencer’s drug abuse counselor for, like, two episodes before Veronica rightly assumed he was probably trying to get with Spencer and threw him out. Aria met a fellow photographer named Clark, GNWB #2. -A- tortured Spencer with blood in the dollhouse, and her flashbacks were so terrible, she convinced Ezra’s new muffin maker to give her weed cookies.
THIS WEEK
Spencer Hastings and the Basement of Terror
The episode opens on Spencer in a dark, drippy basement/hallway/general house of horrors. Is this a dream? A flashback? IS SPENCER HAVING WEED DREAMS? Are weed dreams a thing? (Asking for a friend.)
Down the hallway, there’s a body, oh god it’s like that well scene from The Ring. The body lurches up off the floor and runs OH GOD OH GOD. LIKE SERIOUSLY OH MY GOD WTF. It’s a little girl monster with long, dark, stringy hair in a white, dingy nightgown – like literally, guys, it’s exactly like The Ring only with less wells and more BATHTUBS OF MURDER. Someone’s playing a recorder and she’s doing bendy dances and imprinting these visions of horror on our brains so that we will suddenly think of them every time we come home to an empty dark house. Oh wait, okay cool, Catie explains to Rosemary that apparently it’s Maddie Ziegler from the Sia videos but Rosemary still checks behind her shower curtain for dancing demon girls.
Is this Baby Spencer? Baby Radley Spencer? Spencer’s baby Radley twin? Or is this Spencer’s subconscious, trapped in cement hell and being forced to dance for her audience? (AKA Charles, in the dollhouse, with the switches.) Spencer is, like us, totally freaked. The girl finally disappears, leaving a pair of hospital flip-flops on the floor. As Spencer bends to inspect them—they have C. DiLaurentis written on them—a large hooded shadow appears on the wall behind her. CUE CREDITS.
The next morning, Spencer, in full Beetlejuice regalia, recounts her nightmare to Aria over the phone, wondering if it was just a dream, or if it was, in fact, a flashback. Like maybe she’s seen that girl before? Does Aria remember the room? Aria, however, has no patience for this. She’s actually working really hard to forget everything that happened to them and would appreciate it very much if Spencer would call some other Liar to—”WHAT DID YOU DO WITH THE HAIR DYE? YOU CAN’T JUST THROW AWAY CLUES,” Spencer interrupts her while cramming weed cookies in her mouth. Luckily for Aria, their call is cut short with Veronica’s arrival. Spencer sighs. “My mom just got back from Curves and I’m not having this argument with her after she’s pumped iron.” LOL—as if Veronica goes to Curves and not Cross-Fit For Scary Moms.
All these weed cookies have got Spencer jonesing for some Toby-time, but after Hanna points out that sex can be a drug too, she must start worrying that she’s on the fast-track to her old druggie days. She pops in for a quick NA meeting because FREE BROWNIES. Like seriously, Spencer is so into these brownies that someone on Tumblr is probably already ‘shipping them. Brencer. Sprownies? She’s roused from her munchie fever by the sound of a familiar voice. And oh what do you know, there’s Dean, GWB #45192 and Spencer’s former drug counselor, who finally got the long-awaited callback from GWB purgatory, where all GWBs disappear until their reappearance can rustle up some Rosewood Drama. Before she can steal more brownies and sneak out, she’s caught.
Drew gives her a ride home, and she swears she just went to the meeting for a little reassurance, but he doesn’t buy it. “Listen, if a few bites of pot brownie get me through the day and help me escape a constant state of anxiety and fear and paranoia and live a somewhat normal life for the first time in years, then LET ME EAT MY FREAKING WEED COOKIES, BRO.” But it doesn’t work that way, he says. He mansplains that she is strong and doesn’t need drugs to overcome her fears, then reminds her that he gave her his number and she never called him ::pouty emoji:: “Next time you can’t sleep, call me.” Then Spencer gives Dane her cookie—J/K Toby’s forever—she gives him her POT cookies. RIP amazing horny pothead Spencer, you will be missed.
As she gets out of the car, she sees Mona putting a Sorry-I-Got-You-Imprisoned-For-Murder card in Ali’s mailbox. The following conversation goes something like this:
Spencer: You look a lot better than when I last saw you.
Mona: When we were strapped to hospital gurneys after being tortured in an underground bunker for three weeks?
Spencer: Yeah cool cool hey remember that room? The creepy one? With tiles?
Mona: No…
Spencer: You know, the one from my dream? What about the creepy little girl? The one that danced? WHY DON’T YOU REMEMBER?
Mona: …
Spencer claims the little girl looks like a young Alison (though, your recapper team agreed the little girl actually looked like a young Spencer but ok whatevs) in like a scary room with bathtubs of murder? Spencer could almost swear she’s seen it before…”Maybe it lives in your head,” Mona says, then backs away slowly.
Hanna Marin Is A Bag Of Hair
Hanna walks into her kitchen and is startled at the sight of Mona (YASSS QUEEN), sipping coffee at the kitchen counter in a pair of Jenna shades. “Got back from the spa last night,” she says. “Is there really a cop here 24/7?” Yup, Hanna says, here and school! Welcome back! Have fun peeing! But Mona wishes she’d never come back. She’s the reason Ali was in jail for months, and she’s pretty sure Ali is now plotting revenge on her. “Um, hello, you should be afraid of A, not Alison,” Hanna verbally thumps her on the forehead. Yes, Mona is also afraid of A, so she’s gotta go to the cops and turn herself in. After all, the fact that the Rosewood P.D. suck at their jobs and spent tons of money on an investigation that was ultimately solved by a group of high school kids could be Mona’s fault. “They’re looking for A, not you!” Hanna thumps her again. But that’s even more reason for Alison to hurt her, Mona argues. It is here that we realize this entire episode is written in LiarLogic™. Hold onto your butts.
Hanna gives Mona a ride to the precinct, but drags her into Ezra’s RareBrew’N’Books Emporiumpalooza for a latte first, where they run into the one and only Lesli Stone. Mona makes the mistake of asking what’s brought Lesli to Rosewood and Lesli unleashes a tidal wave of teenage fury on her. Lesli was summoned by the Rosewood P.D. because she is an accomplice in a crime. “ONE TIME I tell a stranger I like their Dolce and Gabbana stretch pants and now my life is in question because I LIED IN COURT AND IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT YOU CONNIVING LITTLE BITCH.” Mona recoils, “Do NOT bring my Dolce and Gabbana stretch pants into this.” Hanna recoils, “Check your attitude at the Rosewood city limits, you nutjob.” Then Lesli calls Hanna a bag of hair and it’s kind of amazing.
At school, Hanna fills Spencer in on her encounter with Lesli, completely flummoxed that this girl could possibly blame them for what happened to her when SHE was the one that committed perjury, but Spencer is too busy with her phone to listen. “Unless you’re texting me the answer, you’re rude,” Hanna says. Spencer apologizes. Toby’s gone until Monday and that’s a long time to wait. “For what?” Hanna asks. FOR SEX, Spencer responds with her eyes.
“Cool slash gross,” Hanna responds. “Caleb treats me like a cracked egg that fell out of Tippi’s nest, which is not a thing you can have sex with, so while your cup runneth over, mine’s bone dry.” This delightful convo is interrupted when Hanna’s phone dings with a text from Mona. Spencer tells Hanna to stay out of the Lesli/Mona thing, but Hanna knows they need Mona in top Queen Mona form so they can break into Radley.
Hanna goes for a bite of Spencer’s cookie and gets her hand slapped. “First you’re sexting Toby then you’re gumming that cookie like my grandma. Are you buzzed? You look like that girl in my government class who makes chokers out of paperclips. Remember, Spencer, Dr. Oz says sex is a drug too.” <–LEGIT ALL REAL THINGS HANNA SAID.
Hanna tries calling Lesli so they can meet up and chat it out, but Lesli turns up in the flesh so they can work out their problems bag’o’hair to bag’o’hair. Lesli apologizes, owning that the Liars suffered much more than she did because of Mona’s actions, and they’ve forgiven her, so Lesli should too. Mona’s complicated, Hanna says, but she isn’t the monster. Lesli can’t help but wonder if Radley helped or hurt Mona. This is less of a conversation and more like two girls just taking turns saying random phrases. Then Lesli warns Hanna to let the police take care of everything, because she clearly isn’t from Rosewood.
But Lesli doesn’t know our Liars, so she doesn’t know that duh, Hanna and Spencer will certainly go to Radley that night sans Mona, whose mother is the only parent in town who is uneasy about letting her recently kidnapped daughter poke around abandoned asylums at night. They find an open door and Spencer realizes she knows the room—it’s the bathtubs of murder! DUH, she HAS been here before! They go through files until they find C. DiLaurentis, and yes, he is Definitely Capital D Dead. A courier transported his organs, so unless A is an organ recipient walking around with all of Charles’ parts held together with duct tape and a porcelain mask (not that far-fetched tbh), Charles ain’t playing Boggle in the Radley rec room. Hanna knocks some files into a tub filled with murky water AND ALSO MAYBE A PERSON: A vague body part rises to the surface, and feeling the residual effects of her pot cookies apparently, Spencer tells Hanna not to touch it.
Spencer finds a nearby pole of sorts and because she is probably high and fears literally nothing, begins to FISH THE BODY out of the bathtub of murder, only to find that it’s actually a Resusci Annie, those creepy dolls they use to teach CPR with. TBH, it’s actually kind of amazing that the writers haven’t scared us with one of those before on this show.
Hanna’s like “NOPE. LEAVING NOW.” But Spencer is being Spencer and has to gather all the clues. A loud noise startles her back into the present. She rips a door open and Mona’s hiding behind it, clutching a file: Lesli’s file, which she was trying to steal. Because OF COURSE Lesli was in Radley, and OF COURSE she met Mona there, and OF COURSE she was there at the same time as Charles. We mean this is Rosewood, after all. Anyone who ever complained of a headache in that town did time in Radley.
Alison DiLaurentis Gets Mansplained, A Lot
Ali’s reclining in her darkened living room when she overhears the voices of some fine, upstanding Rosewood PD officers/embodiments of the Male Gaze outside gossiping about how she’s a “little skank” and a danger to the community. When her dad gets home, she complains to him about Rosewood’s “finest” (lol, 4 real), but he snaps back that she has to let it go and grow thicker skin. “Bad behavior has a way of catching up to you,” he says, and um, excuse us, but WHOSE bad behavior is the problem right now??
Luckily, Fresh Perspective Lorenzo is on Ali’s side. He’s still trying to get her to lead some church youth activity, and assures her that everyone at the church is at least vaguely supportive of the idea. Ali smiles, and looks positively radiant, so what do we need here but Ken DiLaurentis to come and violently extinguish her small joy with some very mean snarking about Lorenzo! He accuses Ali of faking her earlier complaint about the cop as an excuse to hang out with Lorenzo some more, and then kicks the dude right out of the house. Ken, we think maybe you have caught a case of the LiarLogic™. It’s incurable.
Lorenzo stops by later, though, to pick up Ali’s whatever form for the church thingy. She’s sorry about how much her dad totally sucks, but he mansplains to her that Ken isn’t really angry with him, or her—he’s angry with himself. Ah. He failed to protect his family (ed note: yeah, like A LOT) and feels bad, so he’s taking it out on them. Ali thinks he should just buck up and—what was it?—grow thicker skin. Admit his wrongs. But these days, Lorenzo says, Ali might be a lot more of an adult than her own father.
Lorenzo tells Ali that he got the asshole cop reassigned, and replaced with a nice lady cop. Hopefully not the one who managed to lose Ali from her own locked wine closet, but it doesn’t matter: they’re kissing. We’re just going to assume that Lorenzo pulled a Toby and dropped out of high school to go to cop day camp and he’s only like 18 or 19, and IF SO this is kind of sweet. At least until Ken pulls up to ruin everyone’s fun. AS USUAL.
Emily Fields and Sara Harvey Take A Stand
Sara Harvey is still having a semi-permanent sleepover with Emily at the Fields house. We see Sara there, arguing with her on the phone, saying that she won’t talk while her mom is drunk. Emily overhears the end of this conversation and is like, let’s go to the movies, and also you should get legally emancipated. Sara is skeptical, but Emily drags her over to Caleb’s house because he’s an old pro at emancipation. He tells her all about the process HE had to take (job, income, etc.) (Um, how much do you get paid for hacking and Hanna-admiring, and where can we get that job??) and starts trying to help her beef up her resume. Side note: Do you really have to apply for emancipation like you’re applying for a shitty summer job? At the mention of these requirements, Sara is basically bolting for the door, but Emily’s fervor CANNOT BE TAMED and she starts shouting about “EVERY MOMENT IS PRECIOUS.” Calm down, Em.
See, Sara has never had a job or a way to support herself, unless you count keeping that tally of the four thousand days A kept her locked in a horror dollhouse, which frankly should be enough to get her excused from any sort of paperwork or even actual work, ever. And she can’t just lie on this emancipation resume—we guess it’s NOT just like applying for a shitty summer job!—so Caleb “hires her” to “work” at his “web design firm.” Hold on, what? Do ghosts even have social security numbers?
In what must be the absolute shortest idea-to-results social services bureaucracy process ever recorded, about five minutes later Sara’s dropped off her paperwork which apparently gives her permission to remain with the Fields until the official judgment is handed down. Emily wants to celebrate, so Sara points across the street to an alleyway that contains the seedy underbelly of Rosewood and a neon TATTOO sign.
Sara gets an image of Tippi fleeing a cage of terrors inked across her entire back, and then she cajoles Emily into getting one as well. Uh-oh, Emily, step AWAY from those Japanese characters… Well. At least the tattoo girl talks her out of getting the symbol for “courage” on her neck, instead opting for something “a little closer to the good china”, which is… her vagina? Is the tattoo artist just trying to get into Emily’s pants? We don’t blame her.
While Emily is getting her fancy dishes downstairs parts inked, Sara sees a text from Aria on Em’s phone—and gets upset that the girls have been searching for A without telling her. “He had a knife to your beautiful throat!” Emily explains, but Sara is more upset because she’s SEEN this black-hoodie-with-boobs before, following her around Rosewood. They pause to argue about it, and are somehow on the most hilariously generic Mean Streets USA, surrounded by many SHOUTS and GRUNTS and TUMBLING TRASHCANS when eventually a MENACING SHADOW sends them fleeing.
Aria Montgomery’s Darkroom Secret
Aria is studying at her dad’s office when her photostalker Clark shows up, complaining that his portfolio is becoming super cliché so he wants to do something hip and edgy to mix it up. Like going to a junkyard and taking photos of junk, which has definitely never been done in the history of every intro photo class ever. Anyway, Chuck asks Aria to accompany him to the junkyard, and tells her that she should apply to a photography contest with the grand prize of an internship at a magazine in LA. Aria’s ears perk up: validation for her art AND an escape from Rosewood? When’s the next plane to LAX?
At the “junkyard”, which is really more of a cluttered flea market, Aria starts arranging dolls and Chase starts taking pictures of her, which she DOES NOT LIKE. Chris, you are quickly sliding along the Hot<—>Creepy continuum, and look how well that worked out for Andrew. He asks her out, but she says that she’s not exactly into dating just now, and he confesses that he recognized her from the news but didn’t want to make things weird. We guess it actually ISN’T possible for Aria to meet a guy who doesn’t already secretly know everything there is to know about her! Then (surprisingly), Clayton says he’s sorry, and actually leaves her alone.
For five minutes. Aria keeps taking pictures of dolls until she’s spooked by her own reflection in a funhouse mirror and runs away… to another part of the junkyard, where a bookcase narrowly misses falling on her head. Curtis SPRINTS to her aid, and the lighting is very weird, and what exactly is happening here. We’re not sure, but it won’t be the first time this show has confused us.
The two return to the darkroom to process their film, and Aria realizes that Chad might have actually gotten A on film. She calls Emily, and the two collude on a very elaborate and almost definitely unnecessary plan for Aria to distract Clint and steal the negatives so she can get a better look. When she gets them on a fancy negative enlarger, she can definitely see a black-hoodied figure lurking in the background. And EVEN MORE IMPORTANTLY: hoodie has boobs.
Liars’ Summit
The girls gather at Hanna’s to all stare at the photographic evidence of probably-female, maybe-A. “Those are Lesli’s boobs,” says Hanna, boob whisperer. They discuss Lesli and her damage: she shared a room at Bradley with Bethany Young(!!), so she must think that they helped Ali kill Bethany that night and then dump her body in that pit. Melissa did that, Emily says, but Spencer reminds us that no, she “just buried her alive!” Just. Whatta show! Anyway, the LiarLogic-ing continues with great force, as the girls determine that maybe Lesli was just as close to Charles in Radley as she was to Bethany, and thus assumed Charles’s name for her evildoings. Kidnapping Sara was “a rehearsal” for Lesli-A, and Mona was stealing Lesli’s file to repair their friendship. So what should they do now? Catch Lesli in the act!
Later that night, Mona calls Lesli to break the news: the Liars know she was in Radley. She tried to keep it secret from them, but they found out. Lesli. Loses. Her. Shit. In a pretty ominous way, blaming Mona for always ruining everything for her.
A Tag
As it would happen, Aria DID lose the hair dye clue, because the episode ends with our gloved foe dying little bits of hair pink, burning the ends and affixing them to a tennis ball that is standing in for Aria’s head. Then she combs it. She combs the tiny hairs. You take A’s dolls, A makes more.
What’s that? Oh just the far-off cry of your recappers desperately trying to figure out what anything meant in this episode! What act are they trying to catch Lesli IN?? If anyone is willing and able to serve as LiarLogic™ translator for us, please get in touch. Until next week, which is actually in TWO weeks!
Kisses,
CAtie & RosemAry
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.
