Hello everyone! Catie and Rosemary here, old man masks on and emoji keyboards at the ready!
AWARDS
BIGGEST SHOCK/BEST SURPRISE
alt-A has really upgraded the mask game, and as a result s/he can now look like ANYONE. Well, any mute gum-faced uniformed lurker, anyway. We’ll put out an APB.
BIGGEST NO-DUH
Men. Are. Garbage.
MOST UPVOTED NEW COMMENT ON TRIPADVISOR: ROSEWOOD
Luxurious hotel, but when I complained to the bellhop that someone stole my golf clubs, he just gave me a dead-eyed stare and didn’t respond. One star. – Gary K.
THAT’S SO FREEFORM
Twitter is the new Facebook, Snapchat is the new Twitter… but come on, Emily, everyone knows that carrier pigeon is the new Snapchat.
PREVIOUSLY ON PRETTY LITTLE LIARS
SPALEBSPALEBSPALEBSPALEBSPALEBSPALEBSPALEBSPALEB
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SPALEBSPALEBSPALEBSPALEBSPALEBSPALEBSPALEBSPALEB
SPALEBSPALEBSPALEBSPALEBSPALEBSPALEBSPALEBSPALEB
SPALEBSPALEBSPALEBSPALEBSPALEBSPALEBSPALEBSPALEB
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Oh and Ezra maybe killed Charlotte and even if he didn’t, he yelled aggressively at a group of girls with PTSD who are probably being stalked and framed for that murder. So yeah. HE’S GREAT.
THIS WEEK
Everyone’s story was so extremely pointless this week that we’ve decided to knock them out, Liar by Liar.
Post-Spaleb Liars Summit
After a night of what we presume to be lots of sexy hand holding, Spencer awakes lying naked next to Caleb in the Barn Bed. “Have they been doing it since last week?” Rosemary’s husband asks. We hope so! Spencer gets out of bed and makes coffee very sexily with hardly any clothes on and lots of stretching, then checks her phone to about a million freak-out texts from the Liars and one threatening text from Devil Emoji alt-A.
She rushes to Hotel Radley to meet the girls and figure out who this new alt-A could be. Despite the fact that Sara can’t write her own name, they figure she’s probably just forcing Siri to type out her insane texts for her. She did spend two years helping Charlotte, after all, which is enough time to get an Associate’s Degree in Cyber Bullying. Hanna, who lives on the mean streets of the upper east side of Manhattan and has a boss who throws staplers at her, is like “EFF it, what can this new alt-A do to me that hasn’t already been done to me?” so she responds to the text.
WELL DUH PLL BARELY HAS A PARENT BUDGET HOW CAN THEY AFFORD TO INTRODUCE NEW CHARACTERS NOW? Even though they all know Sara Harvey, and this text could just further that theory, they decide maybe it’s Alison? Emily calls her to see if she’s in a place conducive to stalking, but Alison’s with Dr. Rollins at the Rollins Family Farm on a dairy tour, and it’s hard to be a cyber stalker when you’re busy tasting Amish cheeses, so Alison is probably not alt-A.
The girls are interrupted by Lorenzo’s televised press conference, announcing that they’ve narrowed down the list of suspects and even have a murder weapon. The girls are wondering what this could possibly be, when alt-A sends them a convenient simul-text:
“You could kill someone with that thing,” Emily says, as though people haven’t been killed with much less in Rosewood.
EMILY & ARIA
Poor, beautiful, fertile Emily Fields and her tiny skirt have nothing important to do this week, beyond being used as a foil in Aria’s increasingly whackadoodle schemes to prove that Ezra can’t really be THAT bad, CAN HE?? Aria, please call us, we have some very important things to tell and show you. The short answer is: A-YUP.
The other terrible thing about this week is that Aria now has two conniving predatory men back in her life: her dad’s around! She and the Liars first spy him getting onto an elevator at Radley, carrying an overnight bag. They all make raisey-eyebrows at each other while Aria says innocently, “I didn’t know he was seeing anyone…”
Take A Chill Pill (or 400)
It’s good to know that even #FiveYearsForward Aria is still wearing completely ridiculous clothes with bits of animals glued to them. Today two zebras are appliquéd to her sweatshirt, their yarn manes flopping all around. We would wonder if Hanna’s fancy fashion eyes ever go a bit twitchy when Aria is around, but Hanna spent most of the last episode in a mini shoulderpads robe, so she is no longer allowed to pass judgment on others. Only we are allowed to do that!
Anyway, Aria hangs around the General Brewstore, bothering Sabrina like a gnat. “Where’s Ezra? Where did he go? When did he say that? Are you sure that’s where he is? Why didn’t he tell me? I THOUGHT HE LOVED ME DOESN’T HE LOVE ME?” Sabrina is just like, you need to take a literal chill pill, here are 900 weed cookies, please get out of my face. Also, Ezra goes out of town all the time to be sad, and please stop pretending like you still know everything about him. It’s been FIVE YEARS.
Operation Infiltration
But Aria has a mission even beyond Ezra’s terrible book she’s secretly ghostwriting for him: she needs to find out if his golf club set is complete. Because if his 9 iron is missing, at least they’ll know what they’re up against. Which is… a murderer.
Sabrina won’t give Aria the keys to Ezra’s loft, so she bullies Emily into using her beautiful, fertile feminine wiles to distract Sabrina while Aria steals the key. Poor Emily is actually having a really nice conversation with Sabrina (who, for the record, still thinks that Em is maybe dying from a mysterious disease). So it’s especially frustrating when Sabrina later finds out that the conversation was just a front for illegal snooping activities, because Emily can’t make her believe that while the initial premise of their convo may have been false, all that flirting was really real.
Meanwhile, Aria digs through Ezra’s loft and finds his 9 iron sitting right in its golf bag hole, between his 8 iron and his 10 iron. She’s SO relieved, that she immediately decides to listen to Ezra’s answering machine messages, because she has never seen a sitcom in her life and cannot imagine how this could possibly end badly! And badly end, it does: she overhears a message from her father, telling Ezra “I have to talk to you about what you think you saw that night…” Ezra and Byron: two peas in a stupid pod. Put them on a boat and cast them out to sea.
Usual Suspects
Aria’s LiarLogic brain leaps and leaps to conclusions. We see in a flashback that Byron and Ella argued about Charlotte. Ella felt bad for her, went to see her in prison, and learned that her doctors thought she was doing better. Byron, of course, just got all pissy and shouted “Charlotte DiLaurentis will walk the streets of Rosewood over my dead body!” Now, we think this sounds like he will just off himself, but we’re no LiarLogic experts, here. We also think that PLL may have used its whole parent budget on this scene, so they’re probably going to have to kill off another one soon.
Aria drags Emily bodily away from her (very nice!) conversation with Sabrina so they can go home and spy on Byron. While Aria’s running around being frantic, Emily sits in the living room, and SOME CREEPY OLD MAN MAILMAN STANDS OUTSIDE AND WATCHES HER.
Aria calls her dad, but he blows her off saying he’s in a meeting, and hangs up. He then turns to the person next to him in a dark car and says, “I think she knows.” !!
Aria eventually finds her dad’s spare car key (for some reason it was stashed in one of her old purses, among a pile of old purses in her closet, and this is the inexplicable detail that we are having the hardest time reconciling this episode. What possible reason could you have to put a spare key in a pile of old purses, and not dig it out for five years??) and opens his trunk to find his 5 iron, 6 iron, 7 iron, 8 iron… and nothing else. DUM DUM DUUUUUM.
HANNA
::pointy finger emoji:: + ::pig emoji:: = ::sixteen knife emojis:: ::coffin emoji::
Just in case you did not know that Hanna has really leveled up in life, money wise, she spends a lot of this episode talking about private planes and expensive attorneys on retainer and how her boss throws literal staplers at her. Evidently a trust fund cannot yet buy a personal force field, or a nicer boss. But the rest of Hanna’s life just seems to be coming up so many expensive roses, and Emily wonders why—since Hanna seems so happy—she and Jordan haven’t yet set a wedding date. Hanna says that these last few weeks have made her fiiiiiinally feel ready, except for one tiny snag: she lied to him about where she went, that night that she deleted the security footage. And to Hanna, this one lie might be enough to make Jordan break up with her for good. This sounds insane to us, but relationships are weird, we guess!
In typical Hanna fashion, she decides to deal with all of this Right Away (which is, honestly, awesome for her). Jordan, to his credit, is not only very nice about the whole thing, telling her that shew as just looking out for her friends, but he also immediately picks up the phone and gets his “Pappy” (barf) to order up his fancy attorney to protect Hanna. She promises him that she won’t lie to him, ever again.
There’s just one teensy problem with all of this: Hanna has been lying, again, the whole time. She got another alt-A text, just to her, explaining that if she narcs on the new emoji harassment, s/he will ::bomb emoji:: them all up. So she keeps her lips zipped, even when people keep saying “are you SURE you’ve told us EVERYTHING?” She’s sure.
Marin Is As Marin Does
Hanna also stops by her house to come clean to her mom about erasing the tape. Ashely is like, wine give me strength, and drags Hanna into the kitchen for a good old fashioned lecturing-to. She’s so pissed you can almost see a wrinkle pushing through her Botoxed brow. She explains that Hanna didn’t even do a good job of erasing the footage, because it’s all backed up at some remote site called The Farm, and the police could find it any day. “So let’s go erase THAT!” cries Hanna, who never met a problem she couldn’t solve by aggressively tackling it immediately and recklessly. “We can’t,” says Ashley omniously.
So Hanna prepares herself for the worst, but her showdown with Lorenzo at RPD HQ is super anti-climactic: fancy lawyer comes out to tell Hanna that she’s free to go. The police lost the backup drive. HMMM…
At Chez Marin, Ashley’s upgraded to some harder stuff. She pours herself a few fingers of booze and takes a few swallows before opening up the box of spaghetti she’s clutching and drawing out a hard drive, labeled RADLEY HOTEL BACKUP SECURITY SYSTEM.
SPENCER
The Morning After
Things are a little awkward for Hastings and Rivers, Private (Heart) Eyes after their night of passionate hand-holding. When they meet up at the Hastings for Senate HQ the next day, Caleb leans in to ask if Spencer snuck out because…you know, the hand holding…but she assures him last night was perfect. A suit named Gil appears and hands her a thick file on the opposing candidate, Olivia Phillips. Assuming Olivia doesn’t have a pile of dead bodies in her azaleas, we can’t help but wonder how thick Veronica’s file must be over at Phillips for Senate HQ. Spencer flips to the dossier on Olivia’s daughter, Yvonne, and cryptically asks Caleb about her. Is she nice? Pretty? Does she come with a lot of baggage? LIKE MORE BAGGAGE THAN ME? Caleb just shrugs like “Baby, what baggage?” We laugh.
Brohood of Ex-Boyfriends
With Spencer’s okay, Caleb goes to visit Toby, and we realize that Yvonne Phillips is the mystery woman that Toby is building a house for. She appears, greeting Caleb warmly and giving Toby a kiss before bouncing away, and seems lovely if not a little annoying when making inside jokes about retro television. Caleb’s like, “You know you can just take girls on dates, right? You don’t have to build houses for them.” But then Toby asks who Caleb’s building houses for these days. “I connected with someone a few years ago but the timing was wrong. That’s why I’m here, actually.”
Toby’s mouth says “I mean I guess if it’s what you both want it has been five years which is a perfectly acceptable amount of time so you have my blessing,” but his furrowed brow and jutting chin say DEAR GOD NO SOMEONE HOLD ME.
Meanwhile, at Ezra’s Brew-n-Books Mercantile, Spencer sits outside reading the dossier on Yvonne and sees that Toby plans to propose—soon. That’s some damn good intel. Before she can properly freak out about his, she’s blinded by a flash. Someone in a black town car is taking photos of her. With the flash. From inside a car with tinted windows. “That’s not how tinted windows work,” Rosemary’s husband says, and he’s right. The new Big Bad is gonna be real disappointed when he gets those photos developed.
Instead of chasing the car to get a license plate number, Spencer heads over to Radley to prep for the next day’s town hall meeting. She’s trying to go over the deets with Gil Suit but is distracted by Toby pacing by the bar holding a ring box with an engagement ring in it. Hello, Captain Obvious. Just then, she gets another alt-A text. “Guess she is better than you. He’d never put a ::ring emoji:: on your finger.” What a bitch.
Keyboard Caleb
Spencer calls Hanna to tell her about the new A text she got and convince her they should get Caleb in on this action. Hanna’s a bit tense about the Caleb thing, but they ultimately decide to let him do his thing so that Hanna can resume being totally, mostly, sort of honest with Jordan. But before Spencer shows Caleb the A-texts, she gets nervous and deletes the one about Toby putting a ring on it.
Caleb’s on it. He’s got pixelbits of giggleberts out in cyberspace that can spoof an IPA craft beer and blue snarf an encrypted connection, Spencer tells Emily. Hopefully they can narrow the location down to the Radley and zoom in on Sara as their main suspect. She hangs up as she approaches Yvonne and Toby being all in love and shit, Yvonne noticeably not wearing a ring. When Yvonne bounces away to sweet talk her way out of parking ticket, Toby and Spencer have a non-conversation where they just say engagement ring-related phrases to each other.
Spencer changes into a crop top for unknown reasons, and goes to visit Toby as he’s packing for a camping trip. She accuses him of “pulling a Toby” and he basically tells her his life was easier when she wasn’t around. Ouch, baby. Ouch.
What’s Inside The Barrel: The Sequel
Caleb managed to find alt-A’s firewall, but tells Spencer as they drive to the location that it was suspiciously easy to break down, like maybe they were meant to find it. They promise that if it’s a set-up, they’ll go in there and kick ass as a couple. Speaking of our relationship status, Caleb says, why’d you delete the text about Toby? What? She thought he wouldn’t find it? C’mon girl, he’s a “professional hacker.” Spencer admits that Spaleb was new and easy and she didn’t want to complicate things. More sexy handholding ensues.
The trace leads them to a storage unit containing a single trashcan. Inside, alt-A has stuffed black gloves, a hoodie and a cell phone that beeps with a text.
Town Hall Summit: Be the Change You Want to See in Rosewood
Spencer and Yvonne lead a delightful albeit PSA-y town hall meeting about young voters as Aria, Emily and Caleb watch from the bar. Except they aren’t watching, because Aria is on the phone with Hanna, letting her know when it’s safe for her to sneak into her mom’s office so she can figure out which of their suspects is currently booked at the Radley. But neither Ezra nor Byron are on that list, and Sara has had the “Do Not Disturb” sign hung on her door all week. “I’ll take Building a Lair for $300, Alex,” Hanna pans. No one has the heart to tell her ‘Alex’ went to GWB Purgatory after season one.
When Spencer joins them, they realize that the golf club pic that alt-A sent them had a very specific backdrop: The carpet that Ashley had custom-made for the Radley. As this thought occurs to them, the creepy Maytag mailman appears, this time in a bellhop outfit, and leaves the hotel to get into a black town car.
Damn. Credits.
NEXT WEEK
The return of our Holy Mona ::praise hands emoji:: but also dead-eyed Shower Harvey ::sad face emoji::. Plus a little Team Sparia action. And selfie sticks! God, it’s all SO FREEFORM.
Kisses,
cAtie & rosemAry
