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“Pretty Little Liars” recap (4.19): Kiss Me Deadly

Previously on Pretty Little Liars, Spencer went on an Adderall bender that led her to the Heart and the Huntsmen where Ezra Fitz was enjoying a dinner of boysenberry pie and Board Shorts Ale, the bizarre combination of which was a particular favorite of Ali’s older lover/probable murderer. Hanna noticed Spencer was buggin’ so she followed her to Ezra’s apartment, a place Aria Montgomery has visited one hundred bajillion times without noticing the whole joint is rigged with every kind of surveillance equipment. Ezra took a timeout from kidnapping Aria to drug Shana Costumeshop and drive her to the edge of town where the Rosewood population sign instructed her to skedaddle before she ended up working that great big Halloween party story in the sky. And Ali, broke and broken, got on a bus heading who knows where in the middle of the night.

Spencer and Emily and Hanna have sneaked into Rosewood High on a Saturday morning to rifle through Ezra’s shit hoping to find some kind of hard evidence that proves he’s A, like a tube of poisoned sports cream or a stash of masks or a crafting kit full of beads and human teeth. Mr. Fitz has left them a message on the backboard, a quote from Richard Enfield in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: “You start a question, and it’s like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others.” It’s relevant, but I wish he’d written out the whole thing because Enfield finishes by saying that it’s always innocent people who get hurt when you go poking your nose into stuff that’s none of your beeswax, so if it looks like you’re heading toward Queer Street – for real, that’s what he says: “Queer Street” – you’d do well to walk fast in the other direction.

So, you know, Spencer Hastings’ motto in complete reverse.

When they find Ali’s diary in Mr. Fitz’s desk drawer, they move out speedy-quick, but not before peeking back around the corner (which is, as you know, one of my all-time favorite Liar moves, right after reading texts aloud in unison) and see Mona dipping into Fitz’s classroom and leaving with an armload of file folders. Back in Spencer’s kitchen, she’s just snorfling up a storm while freaking out about how she’s finally make a correct accusation. Too bad it’s the most damning one ever, and will ultimately lead to either Aria’s death or broken heart.

Every time Spencer sniffles, Hanna glares at her because of how she knows Spencer is a Ritalin junkie now. There are four clues before them:

1) This diary, which was in A’s Ravenswood lair and then in the Liars’ possession and then at Ezra’s cabin and then in Ezra’s desk at school. Emily thinks they found that thing awfully easy, like maybe it was planted there.

2) Shana is missing. One second she was popping out of phone booths and getting all up in Emily’s nut about late night warehouse meetings and money laundering, and now: nothin’. Hanna would like to know more about her, while Emily would like to know as little as possible, especially the parts where Shana’s parts touched Paige’s parts.

3) The email addys and phone number written on the paper rubber-banded to Ali’s wad of cash. Spencer wants to send out some emails and see if they hear anything back, and figure out who that phone number belongs to. Unfortunately there are no Tippi the Birds around for her to rely on, so she’ll have to use Google to do her research.

4) What the heck was Mona doing in Mr. Fitz’s classroom on a Saturday? Snooping, planting a bomb, destroying evidence, delivering documents to His Royal A-ness? They are shocked, just absolutely shocked, to realize that freezing out Mona after she saved their assses and single-handedly got Ashley Marin released from jail caused her to go back over to The Dark Side.

They leave Spencer alone with her pills, hoping to figure it all out tomorrow. I mean, Aria’s safe at least for tonight, right? She’s definitely in Syracuse with her dad.

LOL, JK. She’s totally on her way home from Ezra’s murder cabin, jib-jabbing about this new short story she’s writing. She legit goes, “Heroes aren’t what they used to be.” And Ezra is like, “Right? What a bore. What we need is more Dexters. But like a Professor Dexters, you know? Serial killers working in classrooms.”

At home, Spence pops some more pills and watches a few minutes of The Narrow Margin, a 1950s noir film about how some cops are good cops and some cops are bad cops and some cops are decoys of people seeking justice so the actual people seeking justice can go about their business without getting shot in the face. She whispers, “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean…” which is a thing Raymond Chandler wrote in an essay one time before he wrote The Big Sleep and then – boom! – she looks at her reflection in the window, and she’s black and white and somehow even more stunning.

This episode is a marvel in so many ways, the main one being: a 45-minute eyeballgasm. The lighting; the textures; the costumes; the set design; the immobility of the camera, causing the actors to dance with one another and with us in a way we haven’t experienced before. I’ll never be able to say enough good things about it, but I will say watching “Shadow Play” reminded me of how I felt when I watched TV when I was a little kid, back when it was magic. So Toby walks into the kitchen and in Spencer’s fever dream he will be playing the role of Spencer’s angry Ravenclaw subconscious wearing a mask of Toby’s beautiful face. The answers he demands from her, every way he derides her for not being perfect, that’s her doing it to herself, see, which means later on she’s also going to make out with herself, which is … correct, actually. If I were Spencer Hastings, I’d scarcely find time to do anything else. Toby is investigating Ali’s murder because Spencer is investigating Ali’s murder. He glances over at her pills on the kitchen counter and hisses, “This started out as a job! It’s something else now, and you know it! You’re spread so thin I can see right through you!”

The next morning, Spencer hits up Rear Window Brew, where coffee is only 15 cents a cup and Ezra Fitzgerald is buying. It’s an apology of sorts, for the way he threatened her academic career and also to chop her up into tiny bits and fertilize the lawn of Hollis College with her remains like he did with Jackie Molina. She plays along, like oh, it was her fault, and she sometimes feels like constructive criticism is a thinly veiled death threat, and don’t even worry about it, mister. He invites her to dinner at the Heart and the Huntsmen so he can murder her while enjoying a delicious slice of pie and when she says agrees, he goes, “Cross your heart? Hope to die? Tell a pretty little lie?”

In the ladies room, Spencer tells Emily and Hanna about how Ezra bought her coffee and left a ten-cent tip, literally just droppin’ dimes. Hanna rolls her eyes and scoffs and says the more she sees of men, the more she wants to get a dog. She goes, “Too bad there’s not an alternative.” And Emily’s all, “Yeah, too bad. Maybe in 60 years, lesbians will be invented. Something to look forward to if we survive the war.” They discuss whether or not Aria is trying it on again with Ezra and since Hanna is president of the Man Hater’s Club, Spencer suggests she tail him and find out. Wonderfully, just absolutely wonderfully, Hanna goes, “I was born for the job.”

Aria busts into the powder room talking about, “Morning troops!” and for some reason I do not understand, black and white makes her eyes even bigger. They accost her about her trip to Syracuse, which Spencer absolutely knows she did not visit when she says she didn’t make it down to the Erie Canal Museum, a place Spencer has herself visited on more than one occasion. They bounce to go wrestle the world to its knees.

Spencer goes home and puts on the most glorious silk nightgown and floats around the house as if on a cloud, calling up the phone number from Ali’s stash of cash and finding out it belongs to the Fitzgerald Arts Foundation, which weirds her out but not as much finding out it belonged to, oh, I don’t know, a deranged old sorcerer living in the walls of a sorority house, doling out fortunes and paddleboard whippings and responding to all her correspondence via parrot. After Spencer hangs up the phone she eats more Adderall (in a dream fueled by Adderall! like some kind of Adderall inception!) and Toby catches her and starts squawking about it. If you’re so smart why do you need drugs? If you’re so smart why don’t you put together the puzzle pieces that are right in front of your face? If you’re so sm-JESUS H. CHRIST, WHEN THAT GET HERE?

That is an amazing painting of Alison DiLaurentis smiling down at them like a living Hogwarts portrait. Spencer goes, “If she stepped out of the frame, do you think she’d kiss me?” And Toby goes, “Yeah, and then she’d laugh right in your face.” (Spencer’s fugue state is the gayest thing I have ever seen in my life. Dream Spencer: I wonder if Ali would make out with me. Dream Spencer wearing Toby’s Face: Yes, but for a price.) Well, but there’s no need to ask what Ali would do if she came to life because she’s not alive; she’s dead, dead, forever dead. Toby doesn’t look convinced. Outside on his balcony, staring down at the mean streets, is Ezra Fitz. Mona sidles up beside him looking like one hundred zillion dollars and hands him a drink. They go inside. She closes the curtains. Down below, Hanna stares up and spits out the word, “Men.” Spencer is lounging around in her night gown reading Ali’s diary. The first story is about Ezra, I think, about how the two of them could be the “power couple of Rosewood, a sole island in a sea of envy … if only he’d let me take him there.” And then this is telling: He’s opening up a side to her she’s always known was there but never knew how to “utilize,” and that side is controlling people through the power of written words, which is a nice challenge since “things are so easy for me, to turn people, to play with them like putty in my hands, molding the situation in my favor” with her actual words coming out of her face hole. She also says she misses Ambrose Pierson.

But that’s nothing on this next entry which is all about Emily:

Look at my mermaid! If she knew how much power she has, she could have whoever she wants, but she’s afraid. I think about what she’d be like if she was as tough as she is beautiful. You can be anything you want to be in this world, but one thing you can’t ever be is weak.
And on that note, a beautiful transition to Rear Window Brew where Paige and Emily are sharing some cocktails and intense closeted conversation.
Paige: Why are you asking me about Shana? That was a million years ago. Emily: Not really, not a million. Paige: You want me to apologize some more? Look, I dunked you, I kissed you, I rode my bike in the rain to tell you how sorry I was, you dated me, you broke up with me to date the neutral third party who was meant to counsel me out of the closet, you dated Maya again, her fake cousin murdered her – an experience I’m at least halfway familiar with, you’ll remember – you went to Haiti to grieve, and I went to swim camp where, yeah, I wanted to blow off a little steam. It was a weird year. It was complicated. Emily: I’m not asking you to apologize. Paige: Are you asking me to tell you I thought of you every time I touched her? Because we both know that’s true. And there, the power is yours, again.
Emily takes Paige’s hand to try to comfort her because there’s no way to calm Paige down with her words because her words would be: “I’m not asking you about Shana in a romantic context; I’m asking you about Shana because she was the childhood best friend of the first girl I ever loved; you know, the one who psychologically tortured you nearly to death. I’m asking because that girl is alive and anything you can tell me about Shana might help me help her come back home.” The barkeep glares at them and their deviant behavior and they break apart. Emily’s like, “I’ll go first this time so people won’t be able to accuse us of being homosexuals because of how you always leave first.” And Paige is like, “No, I’ll go first; watching you walk away from me breaks my fucking heart.”

Out on the street, Mona and Hanna play a little click-clack game of Cat and Mouse in their super high heels on the hard Rosewood streets. Mona walks and Hanna follows and Mona walks and Hanna follows. Mona is balling in a Cruella de Vil-looking fur coat and her face is smug as hell. Even Spencer’s subconscious knows that Mona’s main dream is having Hanna chase her. When Hanna loses track of Mona, she stops in front of this store window that has a hundred mirrors of varying shapes and sizes on display and before you can say “Who’s the fairest of them all?” Mona’s reflection appears in every single one of those things.

Showing a person in a mirror to symbolize his/her duplicitous ego is a famous noir convention, so showing Mona in a million mirrors is just about the most perfect thing I have ever seen. The phone rings in Spencer’s bedroom where she’s just trying to get some sleep (in her waking dream!) and it is of course Mona Vanderwaal. She’s got Spencer’s favorite blonde package in apartment 3B, and Spencer’d better scurry on downtown before she poisons her to death with Ezra’s special juice blend. So Spencer does.

It’s the middle of the night but Mona is wearing a sparkly, strapless evening gown, just wandering around Ezra’s pad, ’cause that’s how she motherfucking rolls so deal with it. Hanna isn’t tied up or in danger or anything; she’s just sitting on the couch looking pissed. Ezra only brought her there so he could bring Spencer there so he could menace her some more about how she’s cracking up. He says she won’t accuse him of being A because she doesn’t know for sure that she’s A because she’s not as smart as she thinks she is. And also, “You can’t kill true love, honey!” Mona snickers at that, not in a sycophantic way, but in like a, “Shit, I’m glad my adrenalized hyperreality wasn’t confined to the ’40s where women were nothing more than the basic bitches of clowns like these.” Hanna takes the carrot from the cocktail Mona offers her as she and Spencer are scootin’ on out the door and Mona flips around like, “Well, we’re all out of chickpeas – again.”

Janel Parish really was born for this job.

On the drive home, Hanna wonders again what the heck is wrong with men. Scientifically speaking, are their brains all whack because hats suck the blood up into their heads? For sure, hats are what cause baldness. Spencer lets her prattle for a second before telling her she found out that the phone number on Ali’s stack of dollar bills is for the Fitzgerald Arts Foundation and she’s wondering if Hanna can use her job as a switchboard operator to trace Ali’s phone number from her call to Ezra[‘s mom].

Aria and Paige are hanging out in the powder room talking about cameras and tomboys, like you do.

Aria: So you roll your film into here and then twist all these buttons and knobs and then focus with this thing and hold it like that and click this button and then take your film to the drug store and it’ll be ready for you in a week. Paige: You ever think one day we might live in a world where our telephones take photos that are developed instantly for the world to see? Aria: What a silly idea! A world like that, I’ll bet coffee costs five dollars a cup! Paige: Anyway, thanks for letting me borrow your camera. Emily and I will take lots of photos on our canoe trip down the Delaware Water Gap. Aria: Huh. I didn’t even know Emily was into water gaps. Paige: Oh, she’s not! She – wait, what? Aria: Lord, the water gaps I used to swim. I was like a little beaver. Paige: You’re not like a little beaver anymore? Aria: No, although I do sometimes kill beavers to make my fashions. Paige: Is this code for something gay? Aria: I think it’s code for Spencer’s latent lesbian curiosity.
Down at the lodge, Ezra tells Toby that people are just no damn good and also that Alison DiLaurentis is still super duper alive, which is true, and in fact she is standing in Spencer’s living room right this second wearing the thing from the portrait, posing just like the portrait, bemoaning the fact that she’ll always be young and hot in the portrait, but not in real life. So Spencer goes, “Reckon I better kill you, then, and you won’t have to worry about what you’ll look like when you’re old.”

Ali laughs about “Immortality, my darling!” I can’t even begin to tell you how amazing Sasha Pieterse is in this episode. She just kills it in every direction. Ali mocks Spencer for not being able to put her diary’s clues together to solve the big mystery; feigns fear like if Spencer can just go black-and-white mental like this standing in her kitchen, who’s to say she didn’t kill Ali in a waking dream and bury her in the backyard; laughs like a woman-child, like if Marilyn Monroe and Shirley Temple‘s giggles were coming out of the same mouth. It’s terrifying and it’s amazing.

Spencer tries to eat some more Adderall, but knocks the whole bottle into the sink and just when you think the garbage disposal is going to chop off her whole hand, Toby grabs her and tells her to snap out of it. Also he arrests her and takes her down to the precinct and talks about her in the third person like she’s not sitting right there, which is so wonderful because it’s like Spencer is Toby talking to Spencer about Spencer.

He slams his hand down on the table and Toby-Spencer says about Spencer to Spencer: “Spencer is the smart one; Spencer doesn’t get confused.” He also says, “Since when does the devil give out free samples?” which is an awesome thing to say, I don’t even care what the context is. I’m going to start saying it all the time. Spencer finally confesses that Ali is alive, but that’s really all she’s got. The only other thing she’s thinking is that A didn’t just materialize from thin air. You gotta feed a beast to make it that strong, that hungry.

The idea she’s dancing around is they’re living in Ali’s version of The Narrow Margin, which, I forgot to say earlier, takes place almost entirely on a train. Spencer’s thinking what if everything that is happening to them isn’t happening because of them, but is happening because Ali is orchestrating it to cause chaos, like they’re running interference for her and they don’t even know it, so she can perpetrate some kind of revenge in broad daylight.

The lady in The Narrow Margin who’s seeking revenge for her husband’s death isn’t really the lady who’s seeking revenge for her husband’s death; she’s an undercover cop pretending to be the lady seeking revenge for her husband’s death so the real lady seeking revenge for her husband’s death can walk through the gunfire unscathed. Spencer’s thinking maybe they’re the noise Ali is making to keep the beast occupied. She’s thinking the real story is “This is a Dark Ride” told from Ali’s point of view. Also, probably she’s thinking she looks really good in drag.

Aria is enjoying a glass of champagne with Ezra down at the lodge talking about how it’s the classiest of all drinks, and he goes, “Speaking of your naivete, I’ll bet you didn’t know that I know that Alison is alive.” This is a cool edit. The camera gets in Aria’s face and her eyes snap open wider than any pair of eyes you’ve ever seen.

Hanna works the switchboard like a champ, reminding Mable of a three-sailor favor she did for her and requesting a callback number for someone named Alison who one time called the Fitzgerald Arts Foundation. I’d watch an entire spin-off of Hanna Marin as a 1940s switchboard operator, I really would. Six full episodes of her just smacking gum and pulling faces. In Emily’s bedroom, Paige stares out at the window and wonders how come a city with only one street and every house in every other house’s backyard can feel so lonely. Emily asks her if she’s afraid of being lonely and Paige goes, “No, but I’m afraid being a lesbian in WWII-era America means I’m going to be alone for the rest of my life. And frankly in present-day America, I’m a little worried you’re about to get into one of your moods where you breakup with me for, like, setting up a meeting with an Olympic swim team coach to help you achieve your dreams.”

Emily hops off of the bed and is practically shivering when she says she won’t let that happen. They agree that the whole world should be jealous of them, and to prove it they smash their mouths into each other’s mouths and the music swells up even bigger than your heart and the curtains blow in the wind and it is the most romantic thing I have ever seen in my life.

They take it to the bed and there’s caressing and gazing and fingers in bra straps and the music is like, “Have you ever seen such a sexy thing?” And I’m like, “No, music! No, I have not!”

I can say with 100 percent confidence that I have seen every gay lady love scene that has ever been shown on any TV series in any country at any time period ever. Partly because that’s my actual job and partly because when I first found out that girls kiss each other, I could not stop watching girls kiss each other. The first time it happened, the first time I saw one girl lean in and kiss another girl right on the lips, I jumped up from the floor where I was sitting and bolted outside like a contraband firecracker, walked around in circles in my backyard for I don’t even know how long. Hours. A lifetime. My fists were clenched and I don’t think I blinked the whole time and I was either breathing as hard as a person who’d run a hundred miles or not breathing at all.

And I was goddamn furious. Furious no one ever told me that’s a thing some girls do, just kiss each other like a normal Wednesday. Furious because I knew without even asking that just looking at something like that was likely to get me cast straight into the pits of (Baptist) hell. But furious mostly because all those half-formed desires I’d been trying to keep from taking shape in my heart and in my body and in my mind had snapped into place. A picture. A moving picture. And gods, how I craved what I had seen.

Recognizing that you’re gay, accepting that you’re gay, acting on the fact that you’re gay, announcing that you’re gay: It comes so easily to some people. Like saying you’ve decided you don’t like pecans in your brownies or that you like caramel syrup instead of chocolate on ice cream sundaes. But that was not my experience, not even a little bit.

Sometimes people get real mad at me because they say I project too much of myself onto Paige McCullers, which is always hilarious in its irony because if you’re that angry that someone else is interpreting a story a different way than you, it’s because you also are projecting some enormous soul-deep something somewhere into the narrative. And obviously there’s no shame in that, right? We are, all of us, as made up of stories as we are of blood and bone. Only blood and bone are here for a moment and stories are immortal. So we: Look up at the stars and instinctively understand that we are connected to those things; we share the same atoms. We line them up with our eyes and our minds and our imaginations. We call them constellations. A zillion unrelated points of light become our anchors, our stories, the way we map out where we’re going and find our way back home again.

Maya Angelou said there’s no greater agony than having untold stories inside of us, and mostly she was talking about writing, but also I think she was talking about the torture of being unable to identify the stars that make up the constellations that make sense of the story of you.

I have watched and written about so much TV over the years that I very rarely lose myself in it anymore. And, like I said, I have legitimately seen every televisual instance of girls kissing other girls in the history of the lands. But this scene, it moved me in a way that kind of shocked me. It made me feel so flushed, I had to shed the hoodie I was wearing. And it made me feel so deeply, overwhelmingly hopeful that I had to pause it to give myself a minute to breathe. The story of Paige McCullers – in color, and in black and white – is one about a girl whose attempt to be true was ripped from her hands by someone who built her fortress out of other people’s lies. It’s the story of a girl who wanted to die but wouldn’t let herself because she didn’t want someone else to win. It’s the story of a girl who stumbled and pummeled and bled her way into an understanding of who she was, and clawed her way out of the closet and into the arms of the sweetest, most beautiful person she’d ever known. This moment, with the curtains and the kissing and the trembling and the fingers under bra straps is a triumph for our Paige McCullers, yes; but also for every gay girl whose insecurities and fears and desires and dreams are warring inside her like the crucible of energy inside an ancient star.

Ever since I was a little kid, since I first saw Back to the Future and read A Wrinkle in Time, I’ve been obsessed with the idea that a bajillion different versions of the exact same story can be taking place on the tesseract, and my most romantic fantasies involve these clutch points where every possible timeline in a person’s life intersects, and that person comes soul-to-soul with another person whose timelines are also intersecting. This hits me right there and you know why. This window. Those two girls. Time and time and time and time, coming together, from every direction, forever.

I know I shouldn’t but I get very, very frustrated with fandom shipping wars. I mean, I know it’s good marketing and everything. God knows Twilight made it into a multi-million dollar art-form. And it’s easy enough to accomplish, what with humanity’s obsession with shaking things down into simple moral binaries. And, you know, Tumblr being what it is. But it just destroys the burning glory of losing yourself in a story. The white spaces between the print. The gaps at the edge of the page. If we brandish our hashtags like swords and charge into books or TV shows or movies determined to slice them up until we’ve proven our point – our basic, basic point – we miss out on their power to transcend and transform us.

It’s coming, and we all know it, the day when Paige McCullers finds out Ali is alive and her world lurches inside-out like food poisoning. Now you can #Paily vs. #Emison it all day, but when you do that, you’re missing: Paige McCullers, the girl Ali shamed into a closet of near self-destruction, but who emerged triumphant and true. And Alison DiLaurentis, the girl who fled to the shadows to save her life, and emerged broken and grasping for hope and for power and for home. And in the middle, Emily Fields, who has loved and been loved by them, both, in very different ways.

You know it’s all about Paige for me. Surely you know by now I’d find it a complete slap in the face for the show to send Paige off into the ether, looking over her shoulder at Alison and Emily cozied up in sapphic bliss on her way to Out of Town. But I don’t think that’s going to happen because that’s not how these writers have ever operated. But you know what else I don’t want? Skim milk storytelling or some lame-o PSA. Most TV writers are still so bamboozled by lesbian TV characters that they kill them, impregnate them, or pretend they don’t exist. These aren’t those writers.

Remember when Ali intercepted that note Paige intended for Emily? That day in that car with Cece Drake, Paige on her bicycle in khakis and braids? For Ali, it was a transaction, right? In which she collected a secret from Paige that she used to control her, and deposited that secret into her vault where it would never devalue the currency of Emily’s affection for Ali herself. Emily said that Ali collected other people’s love, which was both her fight and her flight mechanism working in sync. She crushed who she crushed to keep herself strong, to keep herself from dying. Pretty Little Liars is packaged like your guilty little pleasure, but in reality it’s a layered, beautiful, sometimes deeply dark story written by a group of people who clearly love the art of story. It’s a play on all the best murder and mystery and noir tropes. And it’s an examination of that ugly struggle over who gets to harness and/or wield the power of female sexuality.

But that doesn’t matter right now. Let me shiver for Paige and Emily, and for me; for the timid, closeted, story-less girls we once were and the lumpin’ righteous women we’re growing up to be. This scene makes me feel the exact opposite of that thing I felt all those years ago, storming around in my yard trying to keep myself from going everywhere at once. This scene makes me feel as alive and as free as fire. OK, Hogan, wrap it up. So Spencer goes to the Brew to find Aria and tell her about Ezra, but as soon as she’s finally plucked up the courage to do it, Hanna comes running in to tell them she’s found Ali, who is working in a burlesque club. They run down there as fast as they can, hindered only by the way Spencer keeps halting their progress to correct the spelling on the posters on the wall. Backstage, Aria is like, “Oh, no! We’re too late! These Rockettes have been blown to smithereens!” But it is just a bunch of sultry dancing-lady clothes strewn about.

When Ali finds them back there, she is furious. Bringing A to her doorstep again? Are you effing kidding her? They try to reason with her, like, “I mean, you kind of owe us some explanations about your resurrection and the sexual predator death match you’ve gotten us locked into.”

But Ali won’t hear it! She accuses Spencer of leading A right to her because Spencer wants her dead! Because Spencer doesn’t want to fall back down to second place! Because she’s sure they’re all sick and tired of having Spencer boss them around! Aria and Hanna and Emily all tell her to shut her petulant damn mouth, in way way or another, but she will not be silenced! Ali asks everyone if they have anything to tell Aria, and then she asks Aria if she has anything she’d like to ask everyone, and they all stare at each other awkwardly for a few minutes. Luckily their weird silence is shattered by the sound a of a bullet coming through the window.

They run outside where Ezra is standing at the end of a shadowy ally telling Aria to come out there so he can take care of her and love her better than everyone else. Ali goes, “Still, you guys? You’ve seriously got nothing to say to Aria?” She’s actually right. They’re so afraid of making her uncomfortable that they let her walk a million miles into the shadows, to her probable death.

Fortunately, Spencer-Toby is waiting there and he has cold-clocked Ezra. They all get into his car, except for Ali, who, once again, uses their near-deaths as her smokescreen to make an escape. Inside the car, Aria asks a hundred times what thing they need to tell her while Toby yells, “Look at the pages, not at the book! Look at the pages, not at the book!” He finally swerves into oncoming traffic, which wakes real-world Spencer right the fuck up.

And she has her answer: Ezra changed stuff in Ali’s diary. Not a lot of stuff, just some stuff. The bad news: He knows they know he’s A. The good news: He doesn’t know Spencer has the original pages of Ali’s diary in her phone. So now all they have to do is figure out what he changed and why he changed it and that should keep them occupied well into season five.

Also, they have to tell Aria the truth. But hey, at least she’s not dating Ezra anymore so it won’t be quite as – oh, never mind. They’re fully making out in the middle of the living room at Aria’s house.

The Risen Mitten sent Ali a telegram: Break a leg. Stop. Kisses, A.

Joseph Dougherty, you, sir, are a world-class storyteller, which is the weightiest compliment I could ever give you. I don’t think I have ever enjoyed an episode of television more, in all my life.

Thank you a zillion thank yous to my screencapping partner Maggie (@MargaretRosey) who sent this week’s caps over with a note that said “Bra straps :).” Check out all her caps on Flickr. They’re so beautiful lined up like that together.

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