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“Pretty Little Liars” recap (4.08): Come to Vanderjesus

One more short-ish recap and I’m back to writing a million words a week about this show. Bear with me, Boo Radlies.

Previously on Pretty Little Liars, Mona Vanderwaal had a glamping party in the woods, which is a thing where you go into the forest and get a makeover like if you were a first generation Sicilian immigrant in an ’80s flashback on the television. During which party she ran over Hanna with her car. After which party she visited Hanna in the hospital and did her makeup. It became a cycle. Mona would do the most amazing thing you could ever think of – wearing some glasses and being a dancing church mouse, or being fluent in eleven languages, or exploding substitute history teachers at charity 5Ks, or lots of stuff with computers and dolls and like boats – and Hanna would almost die at Mona’s hands and then Mona would patch Hanna right up. For some reason, only Caleb recognized that Mona was writing Hanna the most fantastic/terrifying love letter ever, so he was like, “Stay away from her, darling!” And Hanna was like, “Sure thing, sweetheart!” But Hanna never could follow through, because when a deity from the heavens comes to this earth to woo you, how long can you keep saying no?

OK, so all of the Liars are going in different directions this week, trying to accomplish various things to keep themselves and their families from being homeless and/or federal prisoners for the rest of time. None of them are successful at all, so it’s a good thing Mona comes ’round, because by now it is clear that she is the only one who can accomplish anything of real value in this town.

Let’s do Emily first. (Heh. You wish.) Emily and Pam are living in a motel because of how A crashed a car right the hell into their living room last week. Pam wishes with all her heart that she was back Out of Town or on some military base doing army wife things because showing back up in Rosewood with the intention of parenting her daughter has been nothing but clusterfuck after clusterfuck. Child Protective Services. Suspensions from work. Exploding houses. And she’s got no idea why Emily keeps skiving off her shark piss healing serum shoulder injection appointments to do Scooby-Doo shenanigans with That Girl From Radley, That Girl With the Homicidal Mom, and That Girl With the Feathers in Her Ears. She begs Emily to concentrate on her future so she can go away to college so she, herself, can leave this place again.

Emily, of course, is both determined to salvage and destroy her puffy drape future with every breath she takes, so she has a meeting with Mr. Fitz to decide if there’s a thing she can do to accomplish both of her goals at once. And yes! Such a course of action does exist! Mr Fitz: “You’re not just a swimmer, Emily. You are all the ethnicities bundled together in an unspeakably gorgeous package wrapped with a queer bow. Plus one time you managed to wriggle your way out from under the thumb of your omniscient zombie stalker to go to a less developed country and build houses for poors. Is there any chance you turned everyone in Haiti into lesbians and one of them would write you a reference letter?”

Yes, duh. In fact, there’s one specific lesbian who still has photos of Emily all over her phone and is willing to “stop by” Rosewood on her way to Wherever to have a cup of coffee and reminisce of Habitat-y days gone by. The lesbian is Rumer Willis. And she is willing to give Emily a glowing review, no matter what, but while she’s here, she’s also got a pamphlet about the work she’ll be doing next summer in Nicaragua. Now, let me tell you something about Rumer Willis and about Emily Fields. They are both playing a tricksy little lesbian game right here. Rumer says the words “Maya St. Germain” to see how Emily will respond to hearing the name of her (second) murdered girlfriend spoken aloud. If she doesn’t flinch, there’s a chance she’s over it and Rumer can get into her toolbox. And Emily does not say the words “Paige McCullers” because she inherently knows, like she knew with What’s His Name From Cicero, that she can pretty much get whatever she wants by letting a person think an invitation to her pants party is forthcoming.

Some might call that “duplicitous.” Some might call it “mad game.” Either way, it’s a trick Spencer and Mona would both kill to have in their repertoire. (This is weird to think about, but JennaBot is the only other person who can do this flirty withholding thing convincingly. Maybe she transferred the skill to Emily the night they eye-banged at Noel Kahn’s Halloween party.)

Anyway, Pam shows up in the middle of their little lezzer reunion, but she’s less concerned with Emily’s daily homosexual hijinks and more concerned about how she needs to drop off some stuff at the police department because of the car that smashed into their house, but she’s too embarrassed to go over there because Emily’s still hiding Wilden’s apartment key so she’s still suspended. (Why doesn’t Emily just put back the key? She spends six hours a day creeping around the police department!) Emily says she’ll take care of the car crash paperwork, says she’ll go with Rumer to Nicaragua next summer because surely Paige will be dead by then and she’ll to do something to take her mind off of it, and then she goes back home to the motel and holds Pam while she ugly-cries like nothing you have ever seen on this show. It’s awful. I can’t even screencap it, is how sad it is. Even Emily is like, “Jeeesus.

If Pam Fields had a time machine, I’ll bet she’d go back to that night she almost poisoned Maya at Emily’s first lesbian dinner and corner herself in the pantry and be like, “You think this shit is scary? Wait’ll a car drives through your wall. Wait’ll Ashley Marin goes to prison for murder. Wait’ll Ella Montgomery’s fucking BEE incident!”

The most exciting thing about Aria’s deal this week is that she spends half the time in a dress made out of comic books, which, while crazy as usual, is also the most awesome thing we have ever seen her wear, and I would like to procure just such an outfit for weddings and funerals. But like in pants. The gay lady version of that outfit. Ella is still at Donut Castle and Byron is at a Professor Convention in Boston or something, so Aria takes it upon herself to parent Mikey. She puts food and water under the DiLaurentis’ front porch and washes and irons his clothes and puts them in a waterproof sack and leaves them on the stoop.

At school, Mikey hints to Aria that his teammates are bullying him because of Connor’s car, but he doesn’t want her to worry because he has signed up for self-defense classes at Karate Jake’s dojo and he’s going to bro-out at a lacrosse party tonight, so everything should be chill and if it’s not, now he knows five ways to kill a person with his hands. Don’t panic, is his main thing.

Aria panics. She rushes over to Kung Fu Jake’s studio to make sure he’s teaching her brother all the proper hobbit defense techniques. He’s like, “Yes, duh, it is my job. Can you not tell by the way that I am only ever wearing a tank top that I am very serious about Tang Soo Do? It’s written right there on the bags I give out to new students: Tang Soo Do, Srlsy.” It’s my whole thing.

Aria goes home to sit in front of her living room window and await the inevitable car that will come crashing through the wall. The car never comes, of course, because she is Aria. But some screeching tires outside the window lead her to the conclusion that Mikey either has been murdered or is about to be murdered by his teammates. She calls his phone but a bro answers and says that Mikey is bro-ing, so chill out, slut who boned Mr. Fitz, and stop harshing their bro vibe. She understands that as code for “the lacrosse team has bludgeoned your brother with sports sticks,” so she calls up Kung Fu Jake and asks him to help her karate her way to saving her Mikey. Jake comes over just in time for Aria to receive a call from Mike saying he’s OK, but since Jake’s there anyway, she invites him to stay and watch television.

Kung Fu Jake: So, what do you want to watch? And don’t say some kind of lesbian free-trade vegetarian black-and-white art wanker bullshit. Aria: Ah, that’s right. The only thing you and I have in common is we both like your deltoids. Kung Fu Jake: Would you like to watch a commercial for the upcoming American supernatural horror flick, Insidious 2? It is a movie directed by James Wan. Aria: Sure? Kung Fu Jake: In the film, Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne reprise their roles as Josh and Renai Lambert, a husband and wife team who seek to uncover a secret that has left them dangerously connected to the spirit world. Aria: Cool, that doesn’t sound like my actual life at all. Kung Fu Jake: Perhaps we could see the film together on Sep 13, 2013, when it opens in wide release. Aria: Did you seriously come to my house to do product placement for half an hour? Ezria shippers are going to have a field day with this. Kung Fu Jake: What’s an “Ezria”? Aria: Lesbian free-trade vegetarian black-and-white art wanker bullshit.

The main thing you need to know about Spencer this week is that she is wearing a full-blown Gryffindor uniform. The tie, the jacket, the skirt. The whole thing. I have this theory that every Slytherin secretly wants the glory of the Gryffindor name and every Gryffindor secretly wishes they could get away with Slytherin stuff, so it’s a nice touch to have the girl who opened the Chamber of Lesbian Ghost Waltz Secrets trying to pull off a Hermione Granger.

When Veronica breaks the news that she’s not going to be able to get Ashley out on bail, Spencer puts on her S.P.E.W. suit and books it on over to Radley. Her mom got a new intern onto whom she places the Imperius curse with exactly zero trouble. Once he is off doing her bidding, she steals some files from the Wilden case, and one of those files is Eddie Lamb’s police record! Having learned a thing or two about revisiting Radley in style from Mona, Spencer marches up into that joint with a cookie tin talking about, “Paying it forward in the name of mental health!” And then she opens her cookie box to reveal E. Lamb’s testimony in the case of Toby’s mom’s suicide.

He doesn’t really want to talk to her about it, but she coaxes him into confessing what she already knows: That either Ms. Cavenaugh was tossed from her window by a blonde ghost in a red coat and a human face mask, or Ms. Cavenaugh could fly. That’s what Eddie told Wilden, actually, when he came to do the police report. But that’s not what that bitch wrote down. No, Wilden wrote that Ms. Cavenaugh jumped. Case closed.

Spencer takes the news to her mom, hoping that if they can collect enough testimony from enough Rosewood citizens to prove Wilden was dirty, they can convince a jury that either: a) everyone wanted him dead, so Ashely’s only one in a 7,987 suspects, or b) the world is better off without him anyway, so let’s throw Ashley the ticker-tape parade that she deserves.

Veronica Hastings is like, “You never change, do you?” And Spencer is all, “What? You mean out of this Hogwarts uniform? If it’s up to the lesbians, no. I will never change.”

But the most important thing – in fact one of the greatest things of all time ever – is that Hanna spends one full day allowing Mona to hypnotize her into thinking she killed Wilden. It’s fucking fantastic on a number of levels. Like, number one, it’s very sweet what the Hardy Boys are trying to do and everything, but Toby has spent months thinking the Zippo lighter he found at the Thornhill Lodge was dropped there by a pirate from one of the great oceans northwest of Pennsylvania. (“Engraved with a compass and the initials N.W.? What else could it possible mean?”) And now he has taken off to New York to just go knocking on random doors and asking if Tippi the Bird is home. (“No? Tippi’s not in? Well, let me ask you this. Are there any red coat-wearing teenage pilots living here?”) And Caleb’s pretty much tapped out his hot spot magic. So Hanna let’s them do what they’re doing, but she knows she needs someone who can actually get shit done, and that skill is singularly possessed by Mona Vanderwaal.

Hanna’s reason behind wanting to confess to killing Wilden, I think, is that her mom is not going to plead out and all the evidence is pointing toward a conviction, so we’re talking 20 years in jail minimum, but life or the electric chair most likely. But if Hanna confesses to it and convinces the cops that it was self defense, she’s looking at a relatively short stay in kid jail.

Mona is pleased as punch to help Hanna because she is in big gay love with her, first of all, and also, no one has ever asked her to display her superpowers before. And I mean, that’s exactly what Mona does. She is so potently adrenalized that simply speaking her hyperreality aloud to another person changes the fabric of space and time. Over and over she walks Hanna through this scenario about how she killed Wilden, prodding at the edges of her memory and stitching up the holes in her imagination until Hanna is standing in the past shooting Wilden with conviction. It’s surprisingly satisfying watching her gun that bastard down. Finally, when Mona’s work is complete, she just goes, “Tell the truth.” Because she created a new truth. Because she is god.

Caleb walks in on them when their minds and souls are joined together by the golden thread of Mona Mania and calls the whole thing off, mostly because of jealousy. A little bit because kid prison is still prison.

So get a load of this. Mona goes to RPD HQ, just sashays right up in there looking like actual sex, and asks to speak to a detective about a murder. There’s this one part of you that thinks she’s been recording Hanna saying she killed Wilden all afternoon and is going to sell her out to the coppers, but no! No! That flawless bitch confesses to the murder herself! The Liars come running because what in the hell, right? And just as they descend upon the police station, Mona locks eyes with Hanna from inside the detective’s office, and smirks. Smirks. And the cops close the blinds on her perfect face.

On the one hand, true love. On the other hand, she’s got to be pulling the strings on a couple of long-game schemes. Goddamn, I love that girl.

The Risen Mitten drills some holes in a floor underneath a kitchen table. It seems pretty tame until you think about the last time the Risen Mitten did just a little bit of construction work, Toby plummeted off some scaffolding and nearly died, after which he was quickly converted to the A-Team. Frankly, though, since I couldn’t find any fault with her presence in the episode, I blame this act of sabotage on Rumer Willis.

Next week: All the lesbians are back. All of them. God willing, someone will even by be-bopping around in a Maya mask.

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