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“Pretty Little Liars” recap (3.10) — Crushed scones, bruised hearts

Previously on Pretty Little Liars, the University of Pennsylvania held an admissions party at Noel Kahn’s cabin in the woods where prospective students partook in games such as: Truth or Truth, and Pin the Murder on the Blind Girl. Emily spent a full day with Maya’s website page, crying over love’s thickening plot. Aria met Ezra’s brother, young Master Wesbian, who let slip in the most organic way that Ezra fathered a child who is probably toddling his way up and down the eastern seaboard, reciting Keats and buying vests and being goddamn adorable.

Ashley and Hanna are redecorating their back porch. Or, well, Ashley is pushing against this potted oak tree that won’t budge while Hanna files her fingernails and practices her vocab. When Ashley steps inside for a Gatorade, Hanna discovers a note that has been placed under the plant by someone with apparent superhuman strength.

Hanna invites the other Liars over and Emily quickly discerns that the note was written by Maya. Clues: 1) It is written in Maya’s handwriting. 2) It is written on the back of a torn off piece of the Declaration of Independence, and who but a Time Lord would have access to such a thing? 3) It was penned frantically on the date of Maya’s death. Saith the letter:

Emily, I’m so sorry for everything. I know we’ve had a disconnect lately. I hope you give me a chance to explain. I have to show you something. Don’t call my cell. Someone stole it. Meet me at …

And wouldn’t you know it, the meeting place has been obscured by a rip or a tear or water damage or something. The Liars each find a way to shout accusations about how this letter proves Garrett’s guilt, and then Spencer Hastings (of all people!) goes, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let’s just slow down here and use our noggins. No need to make any rash accusations or rush out to any of this county’s ten thousand abandoned barns/antique shops.” They do use their noggins, but to no effect whatsoever. None of them crack the code on the meeting place.

Ezra’s Chipmunk Palace. Aria is buttering bagels with all the enthusiasm of a seasick crocodile. She absently hands one to Ezra – who sniffs it to check for poisons, just like Spencer taught him – and then muses: “How much money, exactly, could one expect to earn by jumping off the edge of the earth at your mother’s behest?” Ezra, hilariously: “Are we talking about …?” He leaves the end of the sentence hanging out there like maybe there’s a whole flock of girls out there that he impregnated and then sold to his mother. He’s not really feeling Aria’s outrage, what with “Pretty Little Liar” being a phrase that is actually printed on her birth certificate, so he skulks off to the shower while she toasts the shit out of some jalapeno bagels.

At the Rear Window Brew, Hanna is perusing Maya’s website page like a ghost porn addict. Emily says she’s cutting Hanna off after one more video, but she’s spared the trouble by Dr. Wren, who is working this week at nearby Dill Harris Veterinary Clinic. He sidles up to Hanna, smiles Britishly, says, “Hey, I was just wondering if you want to grab a cuppa later. Maybe head over to Radley to visit your insane friend. Then … shagging?” Hanna shoots him down, and he shows an alarming familiarity with the lives of local high school students. He name-checks both Toby and Caleb, attaching them to Spencer and Hanna, respectively, and then wanders off to see if maybe Emily will butter his muffin.

At school, Emily is reading and rereading Maya’s note for the billionth time. Like sniffing food for poison, this is another lesson in Spencering. Spencer wants to go back up to Emily and Maya’s makeout lake house, but Emily explains that she’s saving that place for that inevitable future moment when Nate murders her, and also, what are they looking for anyway? Scrap pieces of the United States Constitution with grocery lists scribbled on the back? Paige wanders up wearing the butchiest thing we’ve seen her in yet – honestly, this thing they’re doing with Paige with the feminine face/hair/head jewelry and the more masculine pants/shirts/body jewelry is … well, it makes my heart race, is what I am saying – and Spencer bolts without even a hello. Emily tucks away the note, because how many times can Paige find her casing Maya’s old stuff without getting some kind of complex, and asks what’s the what with her favorite swimmer-girl this morning.

What’s the what is that Coachprah has called a meeting with Paige, which she hopes this means she’s getting the anchor spot on the relay team. Emily’s like, “Duh, you’re the best besides me, and who even knows if I’m still on the team after that HGH scare from last season.” Paige touches her shoulder all sweetly and as soon as she has walked spitting distance away, Emily pulls out the letter again.

Coffee shop Zach is having breakfast on the school grounds with his lady love, Ella Montgomery, who is practically perfect in every way in this episode, and not just because she and Aria have very nearly eclipsed Lorelai and Rory Gilmore in my esteem. He explains that he’s a cheese farmer and a tomato farmer in addition to being a small business owner and an all-around hot piece of ass. I can practically feel the heat radiating off of Ella just watching her watch him. Aria can feel it too, so she rushes in to make sure the classroom isn’t on fire and it takes her three full throat-clears to get their attention.

I don’t know if Lucy Hale and Holly Marie Combs are just picking up mannerisms and facial expressions from each other from hanging out, or if they’re doing this on purpose, but the way they have a full conversation with their wide eyes and head tilts is amazing. They’re delivering lines the same sometimes now, too. Ella kind of shoves Zach out the door and then shoos Aria out behind him, promising a conversation about how they’re dating men who are the same age, a little later this afternoon.

Hanna and Emily meet up after school so they can – good Lord, Hanna, what did you do? Oh, of course. She printed out every photo on Maya’s website page and is scouring them with a magnifying glass looking for clues. Emily is like, “I mean, you weren’t dating her too, right?” And Hanna goes, “No, and I don’t mean to imply that my commitment to this case is based on anything more than affection for you, but if we don’t solve this thing soon, I’m going to fuck Wren.” Emily picks up a couple of the photos – a pair of Maya in pajamas – and despite the fact that Maya is dead, Emily’s eyebrow cocks itself of its own volition, like dayuuum. They agree she was hot, but shelve the sentiment when they realize Maya took the photo at Noel Kahn’s cabin. You can tell by the way that there’s a sign in the background of the photos that says “Noel Kahn’s Cabin.”

They call Spencer so she can update her clue registry, and as soon as she’s logged the photos into her DiLaurentis Sims Matrix, she accosts Noel Kahn at his locker: “Well, and so Emily just found a photo of Maya in some lingerie just lounging around at your cabin in the middle of the day. What do you have to say about that?” His smile smiles and he explains that he was Maya’s weed dealer and that he gets his rocks off thinking about Spencer thinking about him murdering people. Actually, he and Jenna probably both do that. Their idea of dirty talk is like, “Mmm. Tell me how bad you want Spencer Hastings to find you with a loaded gun in your hand.” “Like a gun and a broken hockey stick. I can just see her face, and she’d be like, ‘Evidence! Evidence! Evidence!'” “Yeah, just like that. Just like that. Evidence.”

Out in the woods where they keep finding shovels, the Liars are running full-throttle away from exploding trees. A couple of teenage girls fall like cannon fodder, like it’s a Monday. Dead girls everywhere, and one of the Liars has a bow and arro- oh, wait a second. This is a commercial for The Hunger Games. Never mind. 

At Rear Window Brew, Nate leans across the coffee counter toward Emily and says Maya’s favorite band is coming to town and does she want to go. Emily is like, “The Gallifreyans? Sounds great. I hope they do ‘Forest of the Dead.’ Maya loved that one.” Nate’s mirth is crushed when he spots Jenna and Noel in the corner canoodling. He says that she’s looking through him like she’s still blind, which is weird, because did anyone ever tell him Jenna was blind? Anyway, he marches over there after Noel leaves and menaces her like a world-class nutter: “I have a present for you, a present I bought at a boutique the day we were supposed to go on our first date, but you blew me off and I did not give you the present, so you’d better tell me where to meet you tomorrow to give you your present or I am going tie that scented candle to your dead corpse and float it down the river!” Jenna gets in his face real good and tells him to check himself before she wrecks his wang. He storms out of the coffee shop. Man, Christmas at the St. Germain house seems like it would have been a real fun time. “SIT YOUR ASS DOWN IN THAT CHAIR AND ACCEPT THIS GODDAMN GIFT, NANA.”

Emily has the foresight to text Spencer to let her know Noel is on her way to practice if she wants to creep on him. She does.

Aria is packing it in for the day when Ella drops by her locker for some girltalk. Aria wants to know how serious it is with Zach, but Ella’s not feeling the monogamy thing right now. She’s got a William, a Brad, a Jason, a Neil, a Jordan, three Johns, and a Bruce lined up just outside waiting for a chance to woo her. She also hints that while she’s into Zach, for real, he’s probably not into her like that, so she’s just going to play it cool, like the opposite of an Aria. But Aria’s really sweet, she’s like, “You’ve seen you, right? Get in there, girl.”

Paige flops down outside of Rear Window Brew and laments the fact that Rosewood High is making her take trigonometry instead of wood shop. At James K. Polk Middle School, she was an outstanding wood shop student (and a science one too), but math just is not her thing. A recent C pulled down her GPA to below a B and now Coachprah won’t let her swim in the county meet. Emily suggests that making out and a re-re-re-watch of Rudy are just the things she needs to take her mind off of school and swimming, and to prove her point she kisses Paige about thirty times. They agree to meet at 8:00 at Emily’s. Emily will bring the swerve, Paige will bring the Chinese food.

Spencer breaks into the boys’ locker room to go through Noel’s shit, but she moves around the place like it’s Jenna’s snow globe factory, too afraid to touch anything, tiptoeing around, pointing at random lockers, mumbling under her breath. Of course she’s got a lockpick in her pocket, and when she finds Noel Kahn’s locker, she just pops that thing right open. Her investigation is interrupted by many athletes running in and undressing. She hides – OK, what I mean when I say “hides” is that kind of freezes and squeezes her eyes shut and looks the other direction. This is not the first time we’ve seen Spencer try to disappear like when your cat sticks its head under the bed but leaves it’s whole body in the middle of the room, operating under the assumption that if it  can’t see you, you can’t see it. She’s managed to get her hands on Noel’s cellphone, but a quick search for “Maya” in his email contacts yields zero results. He catches her, of course, wearing a football uniform, pads and everything, but she scurries away before he can figure out what the actual hell is happening.

Emily and Hanna drive up to Kahn Kabin to look for DNA evidence of Maya’s abduction. In their fine-tooth combing of the scene, they do not notice the giant video camera filming their every move. But I guess they can be forgiven because they’re swimming in beer cans and stale nacho chips. Emily is so grossed out, she goes, “There is no effing way Maya wanted to meet me here, OK? We had our own cabin with floating paper boats and purified elements. This place is a literal dump.”

At the Brew, Ezra goads Aria into talking to her mom’s new boyfriend. He’s cute, really cute, cute in that way where he probably leads river trips for at risk youth and so he’s got a practiced breeziness to his insight. Basically, he tells Aria he’s a child of divorce too, but that he’s fully aware that Ella is as rare as a magical unicorn and he’s already all in. I mean, when you’re able to command the adorable energy in same room with Ezra Fitz, that’s saying something. And Zach does it. Aria is like, “OK, you’re neater than I thought, but I will crush your scones – literally and figuratively; if you don’t believe me, ask my boyfriend over there about his breakfast this morning – if you hurt her.

Back at Kahn Kabin, Hanna discovers a room hidden behind a door behind a bookcase. It’s like … an exposed single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, a mattress, some dirty bedclothes. Obviously some hobo has been squatting there. Hanna sighs, says, “Caleb …” But no! It wasn’t Caleb! It wasn’t Caleb at all! It was Maya! They find Maya’s bag and tear that thing apart: a handmade card Emily gave Ali for her 14th birthday (creepy!), a knife with the initials “L.J.” carved into it (creepy!), the bus ticket she bought to San Francisco, but never got to use (Jeeeeeesus!). And just when you think it can’t get any fucking scarier, the window shutters slam shut and the door slams shut, one-by-one Just Kablam! Kablam! Kablam! Kablam! Emily is like, “And of course.” While Hanna politely enquires into the darkness, “Hello? Can we help you with something? We were just searching through our dead homeless friend’s possessions.” 

Spencer is just staring at a photo of Maya on her iPad. It’s amazing how much attention these Liars are paying to Maya postmortem. I’m not even sure they could have picked her out of a police lineup when she was alive. Her computer bleeps a new message. It’s an email from Noel Kahn talking about, “Stay out of my locker! Email me back with a picture of you looking at evidence in your underwear! It’s for a friend!” Attached is a video, and the video is from the security camera at Kahn Kabin, and the video is of the night Maya was murdered.

During the middle of this bedlam, Aria and Ella wander hand in hand in the town square and giggle about how their boyfriends are the cutest. Love you, ladies, but I gots no time for this right now. Hanna and Emily are trapped in Noel Kahn’s – and/or CeCe Drake’s – murder room!

OK, so Hanna and Emily scream for a while, until Emily calculates that even their practiced hollering for help isn’t going to span the distance of two miles. When they hear a car drive away, Emily smashes one of the windows, which results in Hanna getting GLASS IN HER LEG, which results in Emily just Hulking the fuck right out. She rips the sleeve off of her shirt and bandages Hanna’s leg while wailing on the broken window with a baseball bat. She has had it. Emily Fields has had it. Once she breaks through the wall, she throws Maya’s hobo possessions over one shoulder and Hanna over the other shoulder and carries them to safety.

You guys. Maya was living in a murder room. A murder room. Like, at night, by the light of that single exposed bulb, she was making signs for Emily’s swim meets. Riding into town on her bike to buy milk and bread and glitter. This is where she crafted the decorations for her Under the Sea sex with Emily. IN THE MURDER ROOM. And then at night, she’d just will herself to sleep clutching a pocket knife. God, that is the saddest thing I have ever heard. Maya! 

Oh, and also: “A” spray painted the side of the building to let the Liars know she’s coming back for them.

Emily runs all the way back to Rosewood with Hanna on her back like a spider monkey. When they get there, she calls Wren to come patch her up, because Hanna and Caleb are still pretending to be broken up and the hospital is too dangerous because surely Detective Snape’s got guard dogs staked out at that place, knowing its only a matter of time before one of the teenage girls in this town shows up looking for stitches or a cast or a new set of eyeballs. Hanna can’t roll up to the hospital spilling her blood all over the place when Snape wants like two gallons of it for some kind of pagan ritual. So, yeah, they call Wren.

Any other show, you’d be like, “What in the world.” But this show, you’re like, “Correct decision. Nice one, Han.”

So, Wren stitches her up, right there on the kitchen counter, and makes her a meatball omelet and propositions her, again, for intercourse.

Emily comes home to find Nate lurking on her porch. He’s feeling guilty about how he screamed at Jenna earlier for not accepting his first date gift for the first date they never went on. He claims to never have behaved in such a stalkerish way before – besides earlier this year when he killed Maya, and now when he’s hanging out in the shadows on Emily’s porch in the middle of the night – and would she please forgive him. Emily’s like, “Sure, whatever. I just escaped from being trapped in an abandoned building again, and inside I found a bunch of shit that used to belong to a dead girlfriend again, and glass nearly killed me again, and – oh, whatever. Here’s some of Maya’s stuff.

Nate sniffs one of the scarves from the bag and determines the exact time and date that Maya was wearing it the last time he saw her. He cries. Emily cries. He leans in for a kiss. Emily leans in for a kiss. They kiss. Emily pulls away and he’s like, “I’ve been wanting to taste the lips that tasted Maya’s lips for so long now, ever since I made my first measurements for my Emily-skin suit.”

Paige is be-bopping down the sidewalk with some Chinese food in her hands a song in her heart. She rounds the corner of Emily’s yard, smiling, and then she spots her kissing Nate. Her face breaks like her heart inside of her, and she runs back down the sidewalk slinging chicken lo mein everywhere and knocking over trash cans. It’s crazy. Crazy hot. I don’t know how, but it is. (Also, this is hilarious.)

Now, look, I don’t trust Nate as far as I can throw Ezra’s Delaware lovechild, but I think we should really unpack this Nate-snog. I’ve already seen half the lesbian internet lose its mind over this thing. But, OK. Say for a second you’re Emily Fields. And the first girl you loved was stolen by death. And the second girl you loved was stolen by death. And in the middle of trying to solve the mystery of both of those things, your heart (gloriously!) (unexpectedly!) opens itself up to a plucky gal with the widest smile and the brownest eyes and an earnest, abiding affection reserved just for you. Even if you have the courage to tell that girl there’s an aching chasm of grief just outside her reach inside your heart, there are some things she can never know.

Because how do you explain that kissing her makes you feel alive like fire, but that you miss Maya’s kiss so much it makes you die a little inside every time you remember it? How do you explain that you’re eager to move forward with her, but that a part of you will always be rooted in sorrow in the past? How do you tell her the hard truth of exactly who you are when you can feel her heart beating like a terrified puppy in your hands, just shaking and shivering and trying so hard to be brave enough to survive the thunder for both of you?

You tell her what you can tell her. You tell her what it’s fair to tell her. But then what? What about the grief that is spilling out of you like an impossible water cycle: always present, never ebbing, raining down and evaporating and fogging up your soul.

Well, then Nate would feel like a gift, wouldn’t he? Someone who knew Maya as well as you, loved Maya as much as you, who is as consumed with finding her killer as you are – as much for the promise of self-healing as for retribution.

You can brain out over this scene if you want, throw things at the TV because another lesbian kissed another dude. You can refuse to contextualize it, refuse to examine it from any other angle than your own indignant black-and-white moral superiority, refuse to give in to empathy or even to reason. You can do that. But this right here, this thing with Emily, it’s not whatever sweeps weeks bullshit we’ve been subjected to for the past 20 years. This show has never, ever, ever been about satisfying the male gaze. This right here, it stands alone. Emily is not turning straight, she’s not questioning her sexuality, there’s no message here about how gay women just need the right man to straighten them out.

At the end of To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout Finch says to her brother, “Naw, Jem, I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.” And in this moment, Emily isn’t thinking about how Nate is equipped with a dick; in her mind, she has stripped him down to one kind of folk, the same kind of folk as every other kind of folk, and when she looks at him like that, she sees the fury and desperation of her own grief reflected back at her. And she reaches out to comfort them both.

Not only does it make perfect sense for Emily, it’s also a damn fine piece of writing. Tell me three weeks ago you believed a time would ever come when you would want to comfort Paige and wallop Emily. Tell me you believed in a time when you would take anybody’s side over Emily’s. These writers broke down Paige not to discard her like failed-date Chinese food, but to tenderly knit her back together, to set her free and let her come alive. Don’t you get what that means? What it means that we’re on Paige’s side right now, that we’re actively rooting for the girl who one time shoved Emily’s head under water, that we now see in Paige all of the panic and promise we see in ourselves? We didn’t get here on our own; we got here because the writers brought us here. We believe in Paige because they gave us a Paige to believe in. This scene isn’t about taking away the lesbian we root for; it’s about giving us a pair of lesbians to stand behind.

A pair of lesbians who now can, for the very first time, approach one another on a level playing field.

A pair of lesbians who are, above all, people.

Real love isn’t written in the spaces between the stars. Real love is standing in front of a person with your hands outstretched, all of your scars and failures and desperate insecurities on display. It’s about asking a person to cherish you, yes; but more than that it’s about asking a person to forgive you. Find that, find a girl who sees you and allows herself to be seen, who extends to you the kind of grace she, too, needs to have extended – not once, but always and always, over and over – and then you’ll have discovered true storybook love. Fairy tales are about wishing on stars; actual life is about crawling around on your hands and knees in the dirt, digging to the dirty truth of yourself and letting that self be loved.

Or, as ol’ Scout Finch’s dad would say: “Real courage is … when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”

This is the way I want to be told stories, the way that makes me reach for my favorite books to explain how I feel. I’m not telling you to like it. But I am telling you I like it. I like it an awful lot.

Paige texts Emily to say she’s physically ill and needs to cancel their date. Emily’s face says she knows Paige knows.

OK, I’m running out of time and I’m like ten thousand words over my limit so here’s the rest of the episode shakedown: Ezra confesses to Aria that he found Maggie and then kicks her out of his apartment without much ceremony. Spencer and Aria and Hanna watch the Kahn Kabin video footage, the timing of which proves that Jenna and Noel and Garett could not have killed her, and at the end of which Maya gets jerked out of the frame by her kidnapper, presumably. Ella and Zach decide to make a real go of it, and I cannot wait to see Byron Montgomery’s face when he finds out. And at swim practice, Paige is positively vibrating with pain and rage. Emily thinks about confessing, is halfway to confessing, but a coach who is not Coachprah – >:( -calls them to the pool.

The Risen Mitten irons and hangs up a team’s worth of black hoodies, and on the TV all you can hear is “WHEEL. OF. FORTUNE.” Which, if my guess is correct, means we’re going to see a Russian Roulette style smackdown complete with a torture wheel next week. Two episodes episode until the summer finale. Will the Liars survive? WILL WE?

If, by chance, these are my last written words due to the angry lesbian mob that is about to lock me inside Noel Kahn’s cabin, I just want to leave you with this: WOOD SHOP! 

Please allow me to shout out my screencapping partner Maggie, who busted her ass to get these pictures to me today even though she was traveling. Follow her on Twitter; I’m still convinced she’s Maggie of the Delaware Maggies.

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