Previously on Pretty Little Liars, Shana Costumeshop leapt from rooftop to rooftop to ambulance top in an attempt to exact lesbian vengeance on Alison DiLaurentis and her merry little gang of firecracking bitches, all of whom blinded Jenna Marshall to make her stop molesting her brother. (This was back before everyone killed Alison that one night that one Labor Day.) Fortunately for the Liars, Shana had been stricken with Rosewood Black People Blues, and so a four-foot fall from a stage killed her right to death. In heaven, Shana took the manager position at the Halloween shop, due to her earthly vocational experience, and there she met Maya St. Germain, purveyor of the tattoo parlor situated just down the street. Maya wondered why the store didn’t stock any Alison DiLaurentis masks; they’d been so popular back home. Shana said, “Oh, you can get masks of Alison’s face. You just have to buy them in hell.”
The bus from New York to Rosewood is the opposite of the bus from Rosewood to Ravenswood. On the way to Ravenswood what you do is love a human girl who’s going to become a ghost; on the way to Rosewood what you do is love a ghost who’s going to become a human girl. After arriving back In Town, the Liars tell Ali she can stay now because A is dead and everything is going to be OK and they’re all going to live long enough to graduate high school and nobody is going to get murdered by her own shower or hit by a sedan driving through her living room. Nobody’s going to bury a gun in the backyard of a sorority house using a pint glass as a shovel. Nobody’s boyfriend is going to lie about canned beans. Ali says it would be nice to go home and see her family for a while, but Emily helpfully reminds her “Your mom buried you alive!”* so they go to the police station instead.
(*One of my favorite things this show does is repeat out loud with words the insane things we saw on screen. It just makes it all so much better somehow. Ex: “You may have heard I killed a guy” is even awesomer than watching Emily stab her ex-girlfriend’s fake cousin. “She was living in a perpetual state of hyper reality” is even more amazing than just watching Mona be an omniscient psycho.)
Like the Beatles, the Liars go to the police station, swaggering across the block like Abbey Road, and I guess in their own way they are kind of of rockstars to the RWPD.
It goes exactly as you expect. Detective Holbrook is like, “… fuck me. You look exactly like Cece Drake but are, instead, the zombified form of Alison DiLaurentis, correct?” She says that she is actually the fully alive human form of Alison DiLaurentis, home from being kidnapped and held hostage against her will for two years, and after she escaped (’round about Halloween), the Liars hid her to keep her safe. Behind her all four of the Liars’ faces are like here we go.
I will confess to you that last season’s finale had me a little worried about Alison DiLaurentis because it seemed a little bit like the show was whitewashing all of the stuff that makes her so mesmerizing. Like how she understands the currency of sex and the all out war you have to silently engage in as a woman who has awoken to the truth that men don’t have the right to decide what happens to your body. And she gets the power of controlling other people’s secrets and the danger of storing your own mysteries together in the same place. And she was cruel but that didn’t mean she didn’t love you. And she was manipulative but if you did what she said, she’d find a way to protect you both. She was scared, too, and vulnerable. She was mean. She could hypnotize you and she could break you into a hundred pieces.
So I loved in this episode when she lied about being kidnapped because what it did was tangle up the Liars in another one of her dangerous stories, a thing that puts them all at risk for lots of bad stuff, but she did it because she thought it was the best way to keep all five of them safe. So we get to see her machinations but the actual motivations behind them, and we get to see how it borks up the Liars’ lives, even though her intentions weren’t psychotically selfish.
It’s very smart. Sasha Pieterse is a remarkably talented actor. She took my actual breath away in that noir episode.
Veronica Hastings is saddled with the task of confronting Spencer about hiding Ali’s resurrection and also with explaining to us where all the adults have got off to. It never stops delighting me the way the writers explain Out of Town, like we’re even worried about it. Peter and Melissa have gone to get Spencer’s impounded car. Bryon is “downstairs.” Pam Fields is actually in Rosewood, although she was supposed to be gone, but her flight to Out of Town got cancelled and so Emily can just stay with the Hastingses like planned, if she’ll just call and check in. I mean. We believe Alison was pulled from her grave by a witch who was tipped off by a parrot. We believe Alison flies airplanes around and rescues people from burning buildings. We believe in working ski lifts on flat land in the middle of autumn and dolls hijacking cars and eyeball transplants and texting with thick leather gloves on. We believe all that without question, but the writers still explain the intricate details of every parents’ whereabouts every week, just so we don’t get weird and start asking questions. It’s sweet.
ANYWAY. Veronica’s main thing, just like Ashley Marin’s main thing and Pam Fields’ main thing and Mike Montgomery’s main thing is, “Why are y’all acting so lackadaisical about this whole thing?”
Obviously, Spencer is anything but lackadaisical and immediately drags Emily out to do some midnight recon on Jason, who is detailing his car in the dark and throwing away shopping sacks from New York and acting generally squirrely. Spence clomps around in the yard hollering about how they’re back on Alison’s “Whirly Girly Ride” while Emily tries to remember if that’s some kind of lesbian sex euphemism. Every attack Spencer hurls into night the night air about Ali, Emily bats down with a protective fury Paige McCullers would have chopped off her own arm to receive from her girlfriend.
Spencer frog marches Emily over to Ali’s window and she’s like, “Sorry, I lied; I did it to protect Aria. Also, here is my phone wrapped in toilet paper. You will notice the threatening text from someone who knows we were in New York, making my felonious fabrication ineffective.” Ali shuts her window and backs away into the shadows and Spencer’s whole body is vibrating with rage. Like, no shit, your lie was ineffective! Your lies always put is in more danger! No one locks it in their pocket anymore, Ali! No one takes it to the grave!
Emily just keeps staring up at the window thinking about how pretty Ali’s hair is.
Also, it was nice of her parents to keep her on the family plan even though she was dead. Not so nice: Ali’s dad tucks Ali into bed, all, “I missed you when you were kidnapped and tied up and blindfolded in some psycho’s basement these last two years. By the way, your alcoholic mother and I are getting a divorce, sweet dreams!” Alison takes comfort in her sinister dolls and drops into an uneasy sleep that is, of course, interrupted by Jason creeping in to stare at her. (Remember when Jason took all those telescopic photos of like the inside of Aria’s ears and whatever? Remember when he was like, “I loved when your hair was pink and your body was more childlike.”)
Spencer gets it in her head that Jason is some kind of serial killer and must be stopped at all costs – until Veronica Hastings produces Toby Cavanaugh, straight from Haircut: SVU and Spencer decides to spend the rest of the episode boning him. A couple of seasons ago, I’d have been like, “Don’t ditch your friends in peril for naked times with your boyfriend, jerk” but now I know you gotta hit it while you can when you live in Rosewood. Your murder is inevitable and there’s at least a 40 percent chance your body is going to end up in the mass grave in the DiLaurentis’ backyard. One thing Spencer does find out, in a post-coital chat about her sister, which is obviously her most predictable post-coital jam, is that Toby never even saw Melissa in London, like she claimed. She ditched Wren and came on home without provocation from him.
Aria spends most of the day losing her goddamn mind. She has all these flashbacks about how awesome Shana was and keeps on seeing herself smash Shana in the face with a rifle. That song Shana played on her fiddle that night Ezra(?) smashed up Connor’s(?) car outside of Rear Window Brew keeps shuffling onto Aria’s iPod, and then she just keeps on hearing it in her brain even when she’s not wearing headphones. In between her psychotic breaks, she calls the hospital a hundred times to check on Mr. Fitz, but she can’t get any information about him because she is a student in his literature class and it is none of her business.
As if that wasn’t enough to get her two giant steps forward toward Radley, she is also confronted with the knowledge that Mike and Mona are back to hooking up. When she finds them cozied up in the living room, her eyes get moon-sized and she hair starts crackling and she demands to know what the actual heck Mona knows. Mona smiles, says, “What I know, just from my hyperreal explorations of the last 24 hours, will be more than you know in a lifetime. However, you shouldn’t let that keep you from accepting my gift of this rape whistle. It doubles as a bird call, in the off-chance you are buried alive and need the assistance of any oracles or anything.” Mona is dressed like Spencer in ninth grade. It’s perfect. She’s perfect.
Aria finally finds a smidgen of comfort in the warm embrace and gentle voice of seasoned killer, Emily Fields, who explains that sometimes you’ve got to make a split second choice between bashing a person’s brains in or allowing an unhinged stalker of lesbians to kill you and the people you love most. Aria goes, “That’s … exactly what I did, actually. How do you understand?” Emily says, “Because Cousin Nate.” Aria says, “Who?” Emily smiles, hugs her, remembers she only started being on the same show as her just a couple of episodes ago. She’s probably still going to go to the police and confess everything, but not until the moment when it will cause the maximum amount of damage for everyone, so for now she dials it down and practices her mind-calming kung fu exercises that good ol’ bloodyfoot Jake taught to her.
While Spencer is trying to sex Toby into a deep sleep so she can take some scissors to his hair like her Nana paid her to do to her dad’s sideburns that one time, Hanna and Emily take it upon themselves to tail Jason, who has donned a hexed beanie that makes his face get creepy as shit. For one thing, he’s real mad that Mr. DiLaurentis asks Ashley to hack into Jessica’s email to discover her whereabouts. (Most important finding: an email to “undisclosed recipient” talking about “I can’t protect you anymore.”) For another thing, he’s real mad that Spencer and Emily went digging through his trash. For a third thing, he’s real mad that his dad suddenly exists. And finally, he feels like Alison owning a dog is a very bad idea and that pisses him off also. I am of two minds about Ali’s dog. 1) It is mostly white and appears to be straight, so probably the worst that will happen is that it will be forced into cannibalism. 2) Emily looked at the dog affectionately and her love is a curse that can only end in misery, so probably the dog should make a break for it.
When Jason sneaks out for a late-night rendezvous in Philly, Hanna and Emily follow him and find themselves face-to-face with a hobo (not that one) who tells them to scram or he will chop them into bits, so they skedaddle on back down the road. After reorganizing her dolls and feeling skeeved out by her brother, Ali decides she should take some flowers to her grave because there’s a dead blonde teenager in there who has been dug up, reburied, dug up again, carted around, had her teeth made into a necklace, chilled on ice on a nightmare train ride, etc. which is the opposite of Resting In Peace. You know who’s just hanging around Ali’s grave is Mona Vanderwaal, talking about, “I’m just going to start signing my name to my menacing text messages because you might not really be dead but you really are a bitch and I really am an evil genius, so.” She snatches the flower from Ali’s hand and sniffs it and tucks it behind her ear and skips away humming.
Everyone ends up back at Alison’s house, Aria screeching the whole time about how there’s a fiddler on her roof, but she is interrupted by the sound of Pepe barking in the backyard because he has unearthed Jessica DiLaurentis and is properly freaked out by how manicured her dead hand still is. Emily feels like she is never coming into this yard again. Spencer feels like at least now she won’t have to keep trying to trick Jessica into answering questions about Toby’s mom. Aria feels relieved that she didn’t kill this latest dead person, at least. Hanna feels hungry from some nachos. And Alison feels alone and exposed and vulnerable and said and probably a little bit relieved because, as Emily pointed out, he mother did one time bury her alive. Next week:
