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“Pretty Little Liars” recap (4.18): The Pie and the Beer

Previously on Pretty Little Liars, Tippi the Bird rose from the ashes a triumphant phoenix, gnawing on a turkey leg and crowing an endless sonata of phone numbers. Emily refused to talk to Spencer after she biffed up her midnight warehouse meeting with Ali, but ultimately relented when the school came to life and tried to murder her and her dad. Hanna learned to read and became an immediate super spy, which was fun and all, until A drugged her and drilled a warning message into her teeth. And Spencer went on an Adderall bender culminating in the discovery that Ezra Fitzgerald drinks the exact same beer and eats the exact same pie as Board Shorts. Because he’s Board Shorts. Which Ali named him because of the beer he drinks. Which also is called Board Shorts.

Alison DiLaurentis is living in a phone booth now, which would be weird for any other teenager in 2014, but not for Ali who has demonstrated multiple times that she has the ability to warp through time and space at her leisure. She calls up Shana Costumeshop in present day Rosewood and tells her to get the goods from you know who if she knows what’s good for her. The phone booth at the Brew is positively vibrating with psychotic lesbian energy when the Liars walk in, and that’s how come Emily knows Shana was talking to Ali when she emerges from it. Shana tells her to buckle down and hush her gorgeous mouth and Ali will contact her when she’s ready.

Also vibrating is Spencer, who has not slept in three days, it looks like. She’s not going Radley levels of nuts; her hair is shrinking instead of growing-but she’s looking pretty scozzled. Hanna notices how her body is pulsating mania, so she takes away her coffee. The debrief today is: Emily’s dad is going to be fine. He just needs some rest and for A to stop poisoning him. Hanna has decided that A menacing one of them inside their mouths means it’s time to stop digging for answers about Ali, period. Also, Spencer wants to know if any one has any ideas about who could have attacked Emily at school? Aria, any ideas? Aria, do you think you could ask Ezra if he knows who might have done it? Aria, do you know where Ezra was when it was happening? Aria has no idea where Ezra was! And by “Ezra,” she assumes you mean “Mr. Fitz” because he is nothing more than her English teacher now! Spencer’s face is twitching so bad by the time they’re finished downloading the daily intel.

She heads home and goes on another all night sleuthing spree in one of the most slickly edited scenes of this whole show (which is full of slick editing that you never even notice because good editors are invisible). Spencer’s montages, even the ones where she’s sobbing her soul out, always have the most apt lyrics. Remember that one that when she was crying about Toby being A and the song was like, “Love, come out, come out, wherever you are!” when we know exactly how Spencer feels about hide and seek? Anyway, this AWOLNATION song is about sailing into the dark and deciding not to cry for help, which you can go ahead and blame on her ADD, baby. All this while she’s tripping balls on Ritalin. She pulls back the blinds and is shocked to find it’s morning so she texts Andrew to ask for some more drugs and he tells her he’s all tapped out.

At Rosewood High, Ezra kicks up his creep factor even higher. He reported the break-in at his cabin and the cops said it was definitely either vagrants or teenagers looking to party, both of which are half-true, really, when you think about it. But it’s safe now. There’s still no 4G or WiFi out there. And he’d really like for Aria to come spend the whole weekend with him so he doesn’t have to Cousin Nate her. Aria feels a little weird about leaving town because Mona is going to murder Mike any day now and her mom is still living large at Donut Castle in Austria and Bryon is god knows where. Back with Meredith probably. Ezra goes, “Listen, now. I don’t know what this new deal is with you not devoting your every waking thought to our relationship, but I need to reprogram you, so you’re coming to my cabin in the woods.” She agrees it’s a good idea.

Now that everyone knows it was Cece Drake and not Ashley Marin who offed Officer Wilden, Hanna can have her mom and her shoes back. Officer Holbrook makes quite a show of giving them to her and even offers her some new book recommendations. But she’s got her hands full with the murder mystery that is her life, so thanks but no thanks. Holbrook is all, “Speaking of which, Cece Drake has gone full Carmen Sandiego. You wouldn’t happen to have seen her or any mannequin legs lying around?” Hanna can’t hear him over the sound of her own squealing because if she can’t have the arms of the boy she loves wrapped around her body, at least she can have the leather of a pair of thousand-dollar Blahniks wrapped around her feet.

Emily is waiting on Shana in front of the school and when she pulls up, Emily accosts her. She wants them to team up and combine their hotness to petition the lesbian goddesses who rule this town to make it safe for Ali to come home. But Shana Costumeshop will not be deterred from the directive issued to her by Alison herself. Emily had her chance! She ruined it! She broke the first rule of Secret Meetings Club (don’t tell Spencer about Secret Meetings Club)! Now, if she wants to meet up later and start some kind of after school homosexy fanfiction club, that is negotiable. But she’s not putting Emily back in touch with Alison.

I think Aria blows off Hanna’s plan to spy on Spencer to see what she’s spying on, but I can’t be sure because Aria is wearing a full size golden pigeon around her neck that has a look of shock and horror on its sad birdie face which makes me know she bronzed that thing alive. They lie to each other about their grown-ass adult male boyfriends, is really the only thing I know about this scene. And that bird.

Spencer lurks around the courtyard, staring down the potential valedictorian table to see who’s popping pills. The first person she spies is a girl named Brenda whom we’ve never met before but I love her immediately. Spencer tries a line about how her prescription for Adderall is in her dad’s briefcase but he’ll be back from Out of Town in a few days –no, really, Brenda, stop laughing, they love me now, they live at my house with me – so if she could just borrow two, maybe five pills, that’d be great. Brenda hands them over and asks for $50 and Spencer gets indignant like, “What is this, some kind of hoagie shop?” (No, girl, I do take Adderrall, legitimately with an actual prescription, but the only thing you’ll find at my shop is unconditional love for you that is absolutely free. Now, put on some pants, we need to talk about Boo Radley.) Anyway, Brenda is like, “I am so sure your horse-owning ass can’t afford fifty bucks.” Spencer forks it over.

Things go from weird to weirder when Ezra jumps her in the hall and asks why she copied half of her last essay from Wackopedia. In the interest of her GPA and not because he wants to chop her up into pieces/keep her from investigating him any further, he suggests three hours of personal tutoring every afternoon and she suggests he suck her dick. It’s wonderful. It’s so wonderful. He’s taking the student/teacher power dynamic to a place he knows will hit her hardest and she’s like, “Fuck you, I’ll take the grade.” His face can’t believe what his ears are hearing, but Spencer resolved herself a long time ago to the fact that she was going to end up living off Toby’s construction worker millions, so whatever, man.

She goes home and seals herself inside her room again, researching Ezra in every possible way she can think of until Hanna calls to interrupt her, asking for help organizing her closet. What she is really doing is sitting outside with Emily using binoculars to peek in on Spencer’s Scooby doings. Spence lies and says she’s at the library, lies and says she’s gotta rework Fitz’s essay, lies lies lies her pretty little face off. It’s dead end after dead end for her investigating until she changes “Fitz” to “Fitzgerald” in her internet searches and lands on hundreds of incriminating website pages.

Outside, Emily feels extra bored with the stakeout until she and Hanna spot Shana creeping out of the DiLaurentis place. I still have no sense of how this town is laid out except that literally every house is in every other house’s backyard, so it’s a wonder there’s ever any room for anyone to park with all the cars spying on all the houses all the time. It takes about six seconds for Emily to work herself up into a paranoid frenzy about how Shana and Mrs. D are in Georgia cahoots with each other, so much so that she wants Hanna to follow Shana. But Hanna is not following anyone! She doesn’t care about Shana and frankly she made her peace with Ali’s ghost in an empty chair in Dr. Annabeth Gish‘s office a long time ago, so she doesn’t care about her either! What she cares about is Emily, and how Emily’s teeth are going to get ripped out of her head if she keeps this shit up!

You mark my words: This new Rosewood High counselor is absolutely an undercover cop. He spends half an hour to try to get Aria to open up about her relationship with her boyfriend that her friends just don’t approve of while she convinces herself that pulling away from her friends and getting closer to her boyfriend and keeping completely silent about her relationship is definitely the way to go. And then this guy, this Jesse Lindall, he busts into the permanent records room while Ezra is stealing Spencer’s academic file, all, “Whoops, thought this was the teacher’s lounge.” What’s amazing is Ian Harding as a villain. There’s a big push to take Ezra back to cream puff, I know, but I think it would completely devalue pretty much everything at this point to do that, and also watching him be a creep is so shockingly satisfying and it makes things so narratively taut that I don’t know how the show would recover. Jesse is like, “Whoo boy, do teenage girls ever love to tell everything they know!” And Ezra is like, “ORLY?”

Emily’s doorbell rings in the middle of the night, which she takes as a friendly sign since it is not an automobile smashing its way through the living room wall, so she answers in a shirt that says “I’m allergic to mornings,” like what Garfield would wear if Garfield was a lesbian goddess with legs as long as lines at Disneyland and a face as gentle as the midnight snow.

It’s Shana, of course, and she invites herself in to rifle through Emily’s possessions like a regular old Alison DiLaurentis and explain her backstory, which means that she’s absolutely going to be dead by sunrise. Number one, she met Paige at swim camp and hooked up with her because she’s the greatest swimmer in America and also looks like Paige McCullers. Shana knew she was from Rosewood, which was a bonus, but it was a surprise jackpot when the “Emily” whose name she mumbled when they were making out tuned out t be the Emily that Ali had been telling her about. Number two, she was just looking for some extra cash when she started shipping boxes for Ian on the sly. Maybe it was bombs. Maybe it was eyeball transplant kits. Maybe it was notes from Radley. He just didn’t want students at Rosewood to know what he was doing. She messes with Emily’s snow globe from Ali, probably secretly stashing a key inside there that leads to a storage locker that leads to a lunch box that leads to a magical portal to another land.

The main thing is she needs Emily to retrieve a stash of cash from a poster of some weirdo French twins in Ali’s bedroom because girl is flat broke. In this economy a dollar doesn’t mean what it used to. Jet fuel and flux capacitors and clothes and manicures and salon appointments and talking birds and fees for elderly clairvoyants, it takes a toll on the ol’ pocketbook. Thanks a lot, Obama! Emily agrees to help.

After pulling another all-nighter, Spencer has finally gotten a lead on the lair Ezra rented in Ravenswood, so she calls Aria and leaves a message about, “Hey, I need to tell you something you don’t want to hear and I know you probably think it’s another one of my lectures about how environmentally unfriendly all of your jewelry is, but it’s actually less about that and more about sometimes, even though we don’t realize it, we end up dating A. I mean, it happens to the best of us, right? Me and Toby, Hanna and Mona, you and … well, I don’t want to break your heart or anything, but can you just call me back?” Then she pulls the real estate listing in Ravenswood off the printer, grabs her car keys, and hops on out of there. (Honey, you should not be operating heaving machinery right now.)

Up at the EzriAn Love ShAck, Aria is waiting for Ezra to wake up so she can request a ride back to Rosewood where all the people who love her openly and legally live. And oh, the way he does Jedi mind tricks on her brain, waving his hands in front of her face talking about, “These are not the companions you are looking for.” He is so awful! It’s incredible! He convinces her that it’s perfectly normal, preferable in fact, for a teenage girl to shun the companionship of young women her own age and spend all her energy and time and love on her teacher. By the time he’s finished talking, she’s like, “Why is my packed suitcase in this living room and why have I written the word ‘RUN’ on my palm with a Sharpie? Let’s go back to bed.” And they do.

Hanna runs into Spencer skittering up the street mumbling to herself about boysenberries and wastes no time confronting her about her twitchiness. She knows she was lying about not being home yesterday, knows she’s lying about how she’s not investigating, knows she’s lying about having a headache, knows she’s lying about how she’s slept any hours at all in the last week. Remember when Spencer shrieked at Mrs. D in The Brew that day? It’s like that but worse when she roars, “GET OFF MY NUTS, HANNA” and zooms on down the road. Holbrook witnesses this because he is following Hanna around town like a Lucas. He tries to talk to her about it but she tells him to bugger off.

On Shana’s orders from Ali’s orders, Emily drops by the DiLuarentis’ to root around in Ali’s room. “Luckily” for her, she spent many a week sleeping in this bedroom that was twice occupied by girls she loved, so Jessica D is happy to let her in. She pretends to have lost an earring or something, and Mrs. D is like, “Sweetheart, I clean this room three, maybe four times a day; if there was any random jewelry in here, I would have found it.” She swops out in a gloriously bonaners puff of smoke to go check downstairs while Emily rips the French twins poster off the wall and locates the thousands of dollars in cash Ali hid inside-which she promptly takes to work and deposits into a sack of coffee because no noodle boxes are handy. Shana calls and says she’ll come by and pick up the money after her swim meet because she does not know that she is going to get murdered by Paige McCullers by nightfall.

Murder cAbin. Aria returns home from taking photos to find Ezra cooking vegetable tagine (which of COURSE he would) and Aria calls it “A Night in Tunisa” (which of COURSE she would) but the problem is that Ezra wants to substitute chickpeas for lamb but he’s out of chickpeas. Aria says she’ll run out for some, even though it’ll take a damn hour, and Ezra thanks her so sweetly and sends her on her way and opens up the cabinet to reveal … chickpeas. I don’t want to oversell this, but it’s the greatest television sequence involving canned vegetables in the history of ever. The camera is like, “Chickpeas! Can you believe this motherfucker!” And the music is like, “Well, look who’s a little satan.” Ezra carries that can of chickpeas down into his lair under the floorboards where he studies every move the Liars have made in the last 24 hours due to the CCTV he has installed on Rosewood’s one street and/or the PI he has hired to follow their every move. (Wherein PI = Tippi the Bird wingcam, obviously.)

He takes off and carjacks Shana Costumeshop-who has one glorious moment of swagging down the street right into the wind before her death, at least-and change clothes a hundred times and drink some Board Shorts Ale and eat some pie and sit in his car and stare at Aria on his cAbin cAm. He also gets an alert that someone is hanging out in the hallway in front of his apartment, and that is correct, and it is Spencer. And Hanna. Who found followed her in from the street and is about to lose her mind because she doesn’t want them to lose their teeth so stop it, Hastings. Spencer says OK, OK, sure, she’ll stop. No problem. She’s been doping, is all. Academic doping. There’s nothing to see here, nothing at friendly Mr. Fitz’s apartment. They should just shut their mouths and walk home as absolutely fast as possible.

As soon as they get there, they call Emily and Spencer explains that a camera outside Ezra’s apartment was watching their every move, like every other camera all over the world that has been watching their every move, and who do they know that has absolute control of all cameras and satellites and GPSes and also the ocean tides? It’s A.

Aria wakes up to find Ezra missing, but that cat has changed his clothes again to pajamas, and he says he was just locking the back door.

Ali returns to her phone booth to call Shana, who is mercifully alive, but has been drugged and driven to the edge of town where the Rosewood population sign informs her that she should leave now and never come back. That’s just what she tells Ali she’s going to do. Damn, man. I was really, really starting to be into that girl. Come back for Halloween, lady. There’s always a place for you at the costume shop. Out of cash and out of time, Ali hops her super sad self onto a midnight bus that I think is finally taking her back to Rosewood for good. She is so alone and so sad and so scared and so vulnerable and such a child. I hope she rips out someone’s spleen on that bus so the world will tilt back to it’s original position.

The Risen Mitten is watching Dark Passage, a noir film about how Humphrey Bogart gets a head transplant so he can escape from the authorities who think he murdered his wife, but this Mona prototype who was totally in love with his wife keeps dogging his steps, so he has to leave everything and flee to Peru, but that turns out OK for him because Lauren Bacall follows him there and everything is 100 percent better with Lauren Bacall. Anyway, The Mitten opens up a package and drops it on his desk and it’s definitely prescription pads from Dr. Wren Kingston. Hashtag poisoned sports cream. Hashtag poisoned Ritalin. Hashtag poisoned heart pills. Hashtag the black and white TV event of the century.

The best of all thank yous to my screencapping partner Maggie (@MargaretRosey) who never fails to capture Spencer’s messy ponytails at their most glorious moments.

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