Archive

“Pretty Little Liars” recap (3.02) — Bitch Can See!

Previously on Pretty Little Liars, Emily cycled through the five stages of grief and discovered a sixth way to deal with loss: ecstasy-fueled grave-robbing. Spencer emptied out her savings account and purchased The Lost Woods Resort so her obsession with re-creating A’s lair could consume her without interference from Norman Bates. Hanna visited Mona Vanbetterthanyou at Radley Sanitorium and read her some magazines and wondered out loud which thing, exactly, made her BFF gun down her ass with an automobile. And Aria got new hair and makeup and started dressing like a human being. It was the weirdest thing this show has ever done.

Having studied The Great Gatsby and To Kill a Mockingbird with the meticulousness of American Literature PhD candidates, the senior English class of Rosewood High School has moved on to Hedda Gabler, which is a really intense play for a group of 17-year-olds to deconstruct, but a most perfect allegory for the Monas and Jennas of this show. See, because no one can ever decide if Hedda Gabler is a villain or a victim, a manipulative sociopath who gets bored and dicks around with everyone’s minds and lives for giggles or a premodern feminist who challenges rigid societal/gender roles with her feminine wiles and also with blackmail. Basically, Hedda Gabler is just Henrik Ibsen asking: “What if you wrapped Alison DiLaurentis up in a petticoat and dropped her off in Norway in the 19th century with a gun?”

Hedda, Act II: “For once in my life I want to feel that I control a human destiny.”

Løvborg, Act III: Yes, Hedda, and when I made my confessions to you-told you about myself, things that at that time no one else knew! There I would sit and tell you of my escapades-my days and nights of devilment. Oh, Hedda-what was the power in you that forced me to confess these things?

Hedda, Act IV: “Everything I touch seems destined to turn into something mean and farcical.”

You are forgiven if you didn’t spend any time at all meditating on the Hedda Gabler thing due to the fact that Emily opens up her bag and instead of finding a pencil, her hand grasps a necklace made of human teeth talking about “Dead Girls Can’t Smile.” She gasps, I gasp, the camera goes full-blown Hitchcock/Vertigo Effect like the world is collapsing in on top of her. Any other person would have bolted from the room or passed right the hell out, but Emily is Canadian-caliber polite even during her most nuclear meltdowns. She goes, “May I be excused, please, Ms. Montgomery?” And then she runs screaming from the classroom.

The Liars meet up with her in the Ladies Room of Regrets and Recriminations and spend an inordinate amount of time trying to decide if the teeth have, in fact, been extracted from the skull of a human being. And, I mean, you don’t need to know that, dummies. Look at Aria’s face right now. Look at it. Is she holding an accessory that is too busted even for her? Yes? Then you’re in trouble. They cram into a stall and scuffle over the necklace while expositing everything they’ve learned about “this A.” (Roofies, kidnapping, grave burgling, etc.) Emily breathes into a paper bag and says she can take the fall for everything if they want to dime her out to the Rosewood PD now that A has upped her game to zombie dentistry, but the Liars won’t hear it.

Hanna and Aria get so caught up in slapping each other they lose control of the necklace, which results in: a) More masterful framing from Norman Buckley, and b) More clumsy disposal of felony evidence with the Liars fingerprints all over it.

Also, I’m just going to shout out Pretty Little Liars editor Robert Lattanzio right here. My girlfriend is a film editor and it is a thankless job a lot of the time, but editing shapes everything about a show, and whether they’re doing comedy or suspense or action or dialogue/reaction shots to dialogue (all very different skill sets!), these PLL never misses a beat, literally. This scene right here is a perfect example. The pacing gets more and more frantic as the Liars bicker faster and faster, all individual shots of their individual opinions about how to stop getting murdered, and it’s intense and it’s hilarious and it’s solo, solo, solo and then the Dead Girl Tooth Jewelry is getting flushed right down the toilet and then – boom! – caged in, together again.

I’m sorry, I’m getting carried away, but this is a visually stunning episode, and as some of you noticed when you tried on The Secret Life of the American Teenager to check out Molly Ringwald‘s coming out last week, PLL ain’t no average teenage soap (story- or picture-wise).

ANYWAY.

In the courtyard, the Liars run through the usual list of suspects while Jenna walks around waving her arms in front of her, knocking over garbage bins and punching people in the head and falling down, all, “Pardon me, excuse me, so sorry; I’m blind, you know.” Spencer has, of course, been tracking Jenna’s summer migration patterns, and she finds it wildly suspicious that Jenna didn’t arrive home from “music camp” until the day school started. Aria’s like, “Probably she took a side-trip to hell, where she … went even blind-er?” It’s all lip gloss and popsicles until Spencer drops the hammer and says she’ll go back to prison to interrogate Garrett this afternoon if Hanna will do the same to Mona. The fact that Spencer doesn’t understand the distinction between those two scenarios makes Hanna so mad she storms away …

… to the computer lab where Caleb is installing administration-approved hot spots on all the school laptops. She’s like, “Mind if I stand you up again to do some shady dealings?” He kind of does, but if you’re going to date a lady on this show, you gotta take the Lies with the Pretties, Precious.

It turns out Emily missed a full month of school after Maya died and now she’s got to take five makeup exams or risk repeating the 11th grade. Usually, this would be the time I would go, “Not on Spencer Hastings’ watch!” But Aria comes out of nowhere this episode with swagger and opinions and solutions and sizzling one-liners and, again, relatively normal attire. She suggests Emily call Ezra up for some tutoring, but Emily’s not feeling it now that she’s searched(?) Ezra’s underwear drawer(??). Aria’s like, “Come on, it’ll be fun. You can have a lesbian-off to see who’s gayer.” Challenge: accepted.

Having arranged one awkward meet-up for the afternoon, Aria’s long dormant goth senses start a-tinglin’. She sniffs the air and perceives someone nearby that she can make feel weird. And she’s correct! Adultering Meredith, last seen making out with the most horrible man on earth, is at Rosewood High applying for a teaching job. Aria marches right over and snaps, “Hey, Mer! Listen, you ever heard of Jackie Molina? No, you have not – because I fed her dead body through a woodchipper and erased her website page from the internet and now she never existed and neither will you if you don’t step off.” Goddamn, Aria. What has gotten into you? It’s magnificent.

Byron still isn’t on board with Aria and Ezra and he’s not going to get on board with Aria and Ezra no matter how many marriages and parent/child relationships he has to destroy. Every time Aria mentions that Byron doesn’t support her relationship with Ezra, she says they’re “moving backwards” as if they’ve ever moved “forward” with Byron to the place where he’s isn’t sneaking virginity elixir into Aria’s orange juice. Ezra correctly tells Aria it’s her mom whose approval really matters because she is infinitely better that Byron in every way. Like magical Marry Poppins vs. Bloody Mary in the bathroom mirror.

Spencer shimmies on down to the jailhouse where Garrett is more insane than Mona, and three thousand percent less hot. He starts saying words: “Medical records!” “Exhumation!” “Innocence!” “Heabus Corups!” “Coram Non Judice!” “Mens Rea!” And Spencer just – it’s like, sometimes my cat escapes out the front door and hides in the bushes and refuses to come back inside. I can hop around in the shrubbery and poke and prod her with a broom, but she just hisses and scoots to another hiding place. But if I dangle a string down in the bushes and pull it along toward the porch, she cannot help herself from chasing after it. Doesn’t matter how many thousands of times I do it, she’s always fooled. Nala Jane Hogan, meet Spencer Hastings.

Spencer ends up beating on the glass wailing, “Evidence, give it to me!” while Garrett smirks and returns to his cell.

Hanna is back at Radley’s Home for Criminally Insane Masterminds trying everywhichway to get Mona to talk to her. Once she’s taken all the Cosmo and Glamour quizzes, offered up every piece of teenagerly gossip, begged and pleaded and cried and wallowed, she invokes the name of Noel Kahn, and when Mona doesn’t respond to that dastardly summoning, Hanna knows things are doomed. So she picks up a chair and hurls it across the room. Everyone is bringing it with category five insanity today and it is so good. Dr. Wren comes barrelling into the room and ushers Hanna out with typical British grace: “Tea? Biscuits? MDMA?”

Rosewood’s new coffee shop is called Rear Window Brew, so let us assume one of the Liars will witness a citizen of Rosewood hacking someone to bits from a windowside seat before this season is over. It is here that Ezra and Emily meet for a high noon-type showdown of lesbianism, only instead of pistols, they’re packing Feelings. The first fisticuffs category, of course, is tragedy, and Emily’s got a doozy: “My most recent girlfriend was murdered by the ghost of my first girlfriend who was murdered by everyone.” But Ezra, himself, is no stranger to calamity. “My girlfriend’s father,” he says, “is Byron Montgomery.”

It’s a tie of sapphic woe.

Back and forth they go, vying for the spot of Rosewood’s Next Top Homopants. Ezra tells of the time he once wore a flannel shirt to IKEA where he bought a couch for a cat he adopted with a girl he’d only known ten minutes. Emily knows everything about her star sign and pre-processes her horoscopes years in advance. Ezra took every women’s studies class offered at his college while wearing Birkenstocks and writing his term papers to the tunes of the Indigo Girls. Emily is friends with all of her exes (who are still alive) and sometimes she even engages in DIY projects with them on weekends. Ezra likes acoustic guitars. Emily likes fleece. Ezra orders beer samplers every chance he gets. Emily only wears chapstick. “I like to stay in and watch TV with my girlfriend and feel superior to every lesbian who’s still out there in the scene!” Ezra shouts. “I’m a collegiate-caliber athlete!” Emily shouts back.

After several hours of poetry sharing and The L Word trivia, Ezra and Emily agree that they have both out-gayed themselves on this day and agree to be the best of friends.

Radley Sanatorium. Dr. Wren is interested in pressing his face against Hanna’s face and also maybe other parts of their bodies also. Hanna, however, is interested in her new hobby: vocabulary. Hoping a five-syllable phrase will at least get him to first base, Dr. Wren explains “ambiguous loss.” If anybody gets unresolved grief, it’s Hanna. Emily’s got bodies to grieve, at least. Hanna’s only got people – Mona, her dad – who used to hug her and now stare blankly at the wall and refuse to acknowledge her existence.

Spencer is wearing a t-shirt of the softest gray and a ponytail of the most purposeful tangles and reading a book and basically ruining my life with her perfection. I almost can’t even bear to talk about this scene because hands under t-shirts gets me every time and when Spencer finally stops asking dumb questions about “music camp,” that’s exactly where Toby goes. This scene is Buckley beautiful too, soft longing backlit shots with Lianne La Havas crooning along with a solo piano.

Mrs. Hastings Ravenclaw-blocks the whole damn thing, though; she comes clomping into the house screeching about who knows what. Melissa, I think. Some commenters last week said they think Melissa miscarried, but I must have missed that part. I stopped paying attention to Melissa when she wasn’t A.

At school the next day, Aria finds an envelope in her locker and inside is an earring that causes her to flash back to this one time when she and Ali trashed Byron’s office because they found those proof-of-adulerty earrings in his couch. The way Ali goaded Aria into losing her mind was terrifying and awesome in a white hot Hedda Gabler kind of way. (Hedda: [A step nearer him.] Eilert Løvborg-listen to me.-Will you not try to-to do it beautifully?) Aria nearly burns that motherfucker down, red spray paint and smashing glass and slicing tapestries and ripping books. When she’s finished flashingback, the Liars are like, “… wow, even for you.” But it gets even nuttier because apparnetly each of the Liars put a little momento in Ali’s casket and Aria’s momento was … the earring of the grad student who slept with Aria’s dad and ruined Aria’s family.

What a sweet gesture, Montgomery. Anyway, the point is Ali’s grave-robber robbed the body and the trinkets. And God, can you even imagine the number of moving trucks you’d need to unearth all of Alison DiLaurentis’ knickknacks?

Now that they’ve worked out their best friendship, Ezbian and Emily are doing some studying. When you are 20 minutes into an episode and Shay Mitchell has not smiled a single time, it is a sad, sad state of affairs. Ezra tells Emily the key to passing her makeup exams – and, by extension, 11th grade – is to listen to her iPod before the test. Remind me again why his beautiful face cannot hold down a teaching job.

At school, Jenna invites Aria to come over to sit on her front porch and play death marches on their flutes. She’s like, “Maybe we could work out some harmonies and then toot away down the lane while some rats follow us into a river!” Aria, still operating under the delusion that Jenna’s eyeballs are broken, goes, “Er, there are some … starving orphans … on fire … across the street. I’ve got to go rescue them!” Jenna pulls down her shades as Aria sprints away. She clucks her tongue and rolls her eyes because there are no flaming children across the street! Aria, you fibbing minx!

Aria runs home and stares at her reflection in the window and thinks her new blow-out really does look fabulous, but then A ruins the moment by texting to say if she doesn’t confess to trashing Byron’s office, she’s going to give Meredith’s other earring to the police. Which is the dumbest threat A has ever made in her whole zombie life. “Aria Montgomery, you’re under arrest for vandalism. It was an open and shut case once an anonymous source dropped off a tiny piece of costume jewelry at the police station with no ties to you or vandalism.” But then, Aria has never been targeted by A before so you can’t really blame her for freaking out.

Caleb is trying to enjoy a nice dinner with Hanna, but she keeps looking at the clock and her watch and her phone and for some reason this paranoia is more troublesome than the usual brand of paranoia every Liar exhibits at all times, so Caleb sighs and goes, “Is there something you’d rather be doing?” She says, rather bravely actually, that she’d rather be tending to her ambiguous loss. Hanna is quickly becoming my favorite character on this show because of how she’s finding the courage to fight the battle to be the most authentic version of herself. You gotta fight your own head and heart demons when you make that decision. And you’ve gotta fight the people in your life a lot of times too, sometimes even the people who love you most. But Caleb loves the truth of her, so even if he doesn’t understand it, he co-signs her shenanigans.

I almost cannot bear to tell you what happens next because it is so gross that time and space cannot contain it. This grossness reaches the edges of every known universe on every Tesseract sprawling in impossible directions everywhere and everytime at once – and yet, even infinity cannot contain this horribleness. I shall transcribe it for you.

Aria: Dad, do you remember when you were destroying our family by betraying the incomparable Ella Montgomery and boning a graduate student of yours? Byron: Yes, those were good times back when I didn’t have to worry that you were in a consensual relationship with a man who respects you in every way, back when you didn’t realize your sexual power was yours to wield however you choose. Aria: Right. Well, back then I tore up a lot of shit in your office and made it look like it was Meredith. Because I was a teenager whose heart was broken by her philandering father. Byron: HOW DARE YOU, YOU ASSHOLE. I really hurt Meredith’s – my mistress, you remember, whom I was sticking it to at all hours of the day and night on my desk and on my office couch and on your bed while your mom waited up to keep my dinner warm and Mike engaged in petty theft and your hair looked like Jem and the Holograms – feelings when that happened. Just made that girl so sad. And now you will apologize to her because you suck. Aria: OK. I love you. Byron: Die in a fire. What you’ve done is unforgivable.
Good talk, Byron.

At school, Emily is killing her English makeup exam until she spots the girl in front of her putting in a hair clip which triggers her PTSD which causes her to flashback to the night she was roofied and kidnapped and deposited at the empty grave of Alison DiLaurentis. Emily’s like, “Fuzzy hair clip, fuzzy steering wheel, fuzzy robot eyeballs – ROBOT EYEBALLS! JENNA CAN SEE!” She leaves Ella’s class again without so much as a please or thank you this time because hot damn!

Caleb drops off Hanna at Radley and waits patiently while she gives Mona a full makeover because of how Mona one time gave her a full makeover after crushing her spleen with her Land Rover. Mona’s just intrigued enough to ask Hanna if A is texting them again, but then visiting hours are over. Hanna’s like, “Goddammit, I still love you and I’m going to keep coming back until you realize you still love me too, you mental basket!” While he’s waiting for Hanna, Caleb has a chat with Dr. Wren, who, of course, spills the crumpets about how he and Hanna have been buddying up to try to heal Mona. But they both fall down on their healing duties tonight because Hanna leaves some tweezers behind and Mona uses them to bore a hole in her finger.

Aria apologizes to Meredith for reasons I will never understand. Meredith, like Byron, is still convinced that Aria is the villain of their tragic little love affair. But she does have one good tidbit of information: Those earrings Aria found weren’t hers, which means they were a plant from Ali. (Hedda: Oh, it was a little episode with Miss Tesman this morning. She had laid down her bonnet on the chair there-[Looks at him and smiles.]-and I pretended to think it was the servant’s.)

The moms are up to no good right now also. Ella went ahead and finished up Emily’s makeup test for her and Veronica went ahead and agreed to defend Garrett in his murder trial.

Rosewood High Water Closet. The Liars have made this restroom their own personal clubhouse, huh? They’ve gone fully ADHD over the earring revelation and the Jenna revelation. When the bell rings, they try to rush off to class, but when Jenna comes click-clacking with her blind stick down the hallway, they realize this is their chance. They plant the earring on the bathroom sink and hide out in the stalls and wait with bated breath to see if Jenna uses her eyeballs. She fills up her water bottle, rinses out her water bottle, pockets her water bottle – then lowers her sunglasses and picks up the earring and examines it. The Liars own eyeballs go ca-razy (more great editing!) and then Jenna click-clacks back out into the hallway.

Spencer says they’ve got her now. And the Liars agree they’ve got her now. And what has ever gone wrong when they’ve been so sure of victory? Oh, you know – everything.

Risen Mitten II buys a new pair of leather gloves because, well:

Hedda: Do you think it quite incomprehensible that a young girl-when it can be done-without any one knowing- Løvborg: Well? Hedda: -should be glad to have a peep, now and then, into a world which-? Løvborg: Which-? Hedda: -which she is forbidden to know anything about?
No, my dear, I don’t think it’s incomprehensible at all. Have a peep and a hoodie and we’ll see you seeing us real soon.

Lesbian Apparel and Accessories Gay All Day sweatshirt -- AE exclusive

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Back to top button