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“Pretty Little Liars” recap (4.01): Unicorn Planet

Previously on Pretty Little Liars, Alison DiLaurentis flew her airplane around town all day wearing a mask of her own face, before finally landing in a meadow to rescue her pals from a fire that she set with her mind. The Liars returned to Rosewood covered in soot and shame to find Detective Wilden’s police car covered in swamp goop and playing a video of Ashley Marin running under him with her car on an indestructible loop. A thing in Wilden’s trunk grossed them out real bad, which was saying something for a group of girls who had already come in contact with a necklace made of human teeth, a homemade porno of their dead best friend that revealed itself frame-by-frame over the course of an entire year, live earthworms in their chow mein, a blood-soaked doll-sized replica of their dead best friend crowing, “Follow me, end up like me!”, half a dozen corpses of people they’d made out with at some point or another, and the brain of a dead cow stuck to a kitchen knife.

Rosewood town square. The Liars open the trunk of Wilden’s car to reveal a whole dead pig. It’s A at her very best, not only because she somehow managed to get her hands on a whole dead pig, but also because of the triple-whammy metaphor she’s dropping on them: dead cop, Animal Farm, and Lord of the Flies, obviously. Rather than marveling at A’s continued ingenuity and literary prowess, the Liars freak out about fleeing the scene because some random Rosewoodians are wandering around after dark like they’re brand new to this town. Mona calmly hops into the driver’s seat and does her adrenalized hyperreality voodoo to steal the hard drive that has the footage that implicates Ashley Marin.

At Spencer’s, the Liars scamper around in a frenzy, flipping around to different news channels and staring out the window and chewing on their fingernails, while Mona rolls her eyes and sips some wine and reads Dante’s Divine Comedy in the original Italian on her iPhone. Finally, she’s like, “Hey, amatuer hour, why don’t y’all have a seat so we can talk about the best way for me to keep us all alive?” The Liars want answers to the riddles they still haven’t solved – which, basically, is all the riddles – and Emily also wants to smash up Mona’s face a little bit.

Mona doesn’t understand why Emily is so mad. Two years ago, she couldn’t have survived carbon monoxide poisoning, or catching on fire, or getting GLASS IN HER HAIR, or time travel. She barely made it through Ali’s death. Mona goes, “When I met you, the Night of a Thousand Nights would have killed you, but would you look at yourself now? Threatening to beat my ass, surviving the death of not one but two girlfriends, and I’ll bet you one hundred dollars if I lathered you up in poison sports cream right now, you wouldn’t even feel a thing. I suppose my thank you card got lost in the mail.”

She then sits them down for a fireside chat to explain the intricacies of the psychological warfare she so graciously bestowed upon them. Highlights: Shana’s in love with Jenna, they’re both scared of Melissa, Mona thought CeCe was Ali when she came to visit her at Radley, she wishes she could have been the one to murder Ian but a different hero completed that task, Toby started working for her right after he made his first million as a teenage carpenter in Bucks County, and Lucas gave Emily that gloved massage because he knew Emily had petted Hanna and Hanna had petted Caleb and being three degrees from caressing that lovely hobo was better than nothing. The Liars fall asleep to the sweet sound of Mona weaving her tale of benevolence around them, and wake to find that she’s made a coffee run. Pink Americano for Emily, skinny latte for Hanna, non-fat half-caf extra-hot soy chai latte with a one-third shot of espresso and no foam for Aria, and a five-gallon straight black big gulp for Spencer. She even got Ezra’a favorite for Aria to take to him: whole milk in an Adventure Time cup with a bendy straw.

To complete her initiation into the group, Mona even offers to give them a tour of her lair, which she calls her “casa,” because who wouldn’t call a winnebago home when it was chock full of clown masks and severed doll heads and a collage of dead girl photos a zillion hours of surveillance footage and burlap baby-face zombie costumes and weapons of mass destruction and blueprints of hell. On the way to the lair, they spy the cops checking out Wilden’s swamped-up car. They also spy a very dead Wilden lying in the street.

“Kill the pig! Cut her throat! Spill the blood!”

“We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples.”

Toby has been hanging around outside the charred lodge all night, playing with the lighter he found on the forest floor when he awoke from getting clocked in the skull by The ShennaBot Thing. He flicks it on and flicks it off and flicks it on and flicks it off while watching the fire department sift through the rubble. They find a burned up red coat, of course, and Toby’s eyeballs nearly pop right out of their sockets.

In Mona’s lair, the Liars take turns getting offended by what they find. There’s video footage of Wilden dressed in drag as the Queen of Hearts on the Nightmare Express, chatting up the other Queen of Hearts – Mona says it’s Melissa – about how they’re going to throw Aria from the train. And there’s that Phantom of the Opera mask that Mona wore over that Ali mask that time when she was rubbing all up on Hanna. Hanna goes, “Seriously, man?” And Mona is like, “If you haven’t yet worked out that this whole entire thing is a ploy for our eventual marriage, you’re dumber than that time when Aria dressed up like Lord Licorice.” Their reminiscing is interrupted by: a) someone hacking into Mona’s laptop and deleting all the important things, and b) some creepy kids with echo voices calling for Alison to come out, come out, wherever she is.

Spencer’s face goes, “Hide and seek? Oh, fuck yes.”

The Liars dart from Mona’s winnebago out into … a portable-lair docking station? There’s a playground nearby and five little girls dressed like five tiny Liars playing with five Liar-shaped dolls. Aria is the one who reaches out to them because she was a stepmother not too long ago, so she has a way with children. The Aria doll has a pink stripe in its hair, the Mona doll is dressed like her church mouse days, the Hanna doll is wearing a doll fat suit(!), the Spencer doll comes with a string of pearls, and the Emily doll is listening to Beyonce on a tiny toy iPod and liking it just a little too much. The kids say they got the dolls from Alison, who started playing with them as soon as Mona docked her lair here.

The Liars split up to deal with their individual business.

Pam (hi, Pam!) comes home from work early to find Emily and Hanna squabbling over Mona’s trustworthiness, but she breaks it up and asks Emily to take a gift basket over to the old DiLaurentis place because Mrs. D is moving back to town to set up a crazy shop. Emily is like, “Sure thing, Mom. Visiting the DiLaurentis place with a gift basket has never sets into motion an unbreakable chain of events that ends with me wailing and writhing and sobbing my eyeballs out in the middle of the road while the coroner wheels away the body of another girl I’ve made monkey with.”

Mrs. D is equally insensitive to the long line of lesbian deaths Emily has suffered because of her home. When Emily shows up with a gift basket – which, amazingly, contains a bottle of champagne, like, “Congratulations on having the balls to move back into the house where every homo goes to die!” – she asks Emily to help carry some boxes of Ali’s stuff inside to Ali’s room. Emily is all, “So, I mean, you’re just moving all around the country with Ali’s collection of animal bones and spider juice and frog brains and clown knickknacks and stuff?” Mrs. D says that’s exactly what Ali would have wanted, which is totally true and Emily knows it.

She calls Hanna to tell her Mrs. D is building an Ali shrine in Ali’s old room, and Hanna goes, “Don’t worry about it, dude; once Lucas gets word of it, he’ll rock up in there in his muddy shoes and tear that shit right down.” Hanna’s main worry is that Mrs. D is actually just setting up Ali’s room so Ali can move back in, so Emily explains that even though you sometimes think you see Ali, and even though you sometimes think she rescued you from a lodge fire or an exhaust-filled barn, and even though you sometimes think you got to second base with her, it’s only your imagination.

Hanna follows Mona to some abandoned garage in the woods, where she locks up the lair to keep it safe from Ali’s ghost and those terrifying children for a few days. Hanna really wants the hard drive from Wilden’s police car, and since just asking for it didn’t work, she tries a different thing. She goes, “Hey, Mona, you know there’s stuff in that camper that could bring us all down, right?” Mona sighs, says, “It’s been a long time since I’ve allowed myself to imagine a scenario that involves ‘us’ and ‘going down,’ Hanna.” And then she hops in the car and buckles up for her ride back to town.

Aria is doing some journaling at the Brew when Ezra wanders in to also do some journaling at the Brew. Aria tries to sneak out, but she’s wearing seven-inch titanium moon boots, so Ezra hears her trying to clomp away. She says, “Should we share some tea, some talk of you and me?” And he bursts into tears because it’s just so Aria to be wearing astronaut shoes and quoting T.S. Eliot. He can’t have tea with her though, can’t talk about her dragonskin petticoat that trailed along the floor, because he’s taken a permanent job at Rosewood High again because he has medical bills to pay because one time Aria punched his son in the face and knocked him off the bed and he had to get stitches and a cast and everything, and town physician/psychiatrist/optometrist/veterinarian Dr. Wren Kingston doesn’t work for free.

Toby and Spencer go rooting around in the crispy lodge wreckage and run up against another ghost. Spencer goes, “Was that another ghost?” And Toby goes, “Yeah, probably, whatever, I’m hungry, let’s go get a sandwich.”

But what they really get is shacked up. Since Spencer has a ten bedroom house and no family, Toby stays the night with her. In the morning, he cooks her breakfast and smiles like the sun at her and says “boyfriend” about a thousand times until she’s literally shivering. He’s like, “I know; I like the way it sounds too.” And she is like, “No, dude, I haven’t had coffee in six minutes. I’m getting withdrawal tremors.” They hug and Toby gets a text from A about how he must still be so sad that he never really found out how his mother was murdered to death.

You know I loved seeing Spencer cracked wide open like a lunatic, but boy howdy, am I ever a sucker for seeing her put back together again.

Rosewood High court yard. Emily forgets who she’s sitting with for a second and tries to have a conversation with Aria about how to tell Paige about Wilden, but Aria has fine-tuned her hearing to only register noise when it has something to do with her, so she talks right over Emily about how Ezra looks shockingly similar to the way he looked in the pilot episode, right down to the choir boy hair and the sweater vest. She is stirred from her nostalgic ruminations by Vice Principal Hackett who scowls at her and mouths, “I can read your thoughts, you whore!” Aria tries to think of something besides Ezra, but she hasn’t been able to do that in over two years.

Hanna is wearing a wig and it must be true that Mona really loves her because she doesn’t go, “Whoa! Your head!” when Hanna walks up to her in the hallway. A random student tries to engage Mona in a conversation, but she dismisses him in French, and turns her full attention to Hanna, who is using pronouns like “us” and “we” and causing Mona’s heart to bang around in her chest like a baby bird perched on the edge of its very first tree limb. The way you know Mona is truly trying to reform is that she takes a deep breath and tells Hanna not to say “we” unless she means it, instead of running helter skelter through the Pennsylvania countryside looking for Caleb so she can axe-murder him and take Hanna as her wife. They agree to reconnect this afternoon, like old times, with some shopping and some gossiping and a possible visit to Lucky Leon’s Cupcakes. (And french fries and/or Kissing.)

Aria, meanwhile, is creeping on Mr. Fitz from behind a locker door and I guess Hackett’s intuition works even behind closed doors because he summons her to his office and produces several dozen glossy 8x10s of her and Ezra just full on doing it. He’s like, “Well, these arrived this morning, along with some more artistic shots of the inside of your ear, from the studio of Jason DiLaurentis, so guess who’s expelled and guess who’s headed to prison?” Aria zooms out of his office and into the hallway where Ezra is being led away in handcuffs. She cries. Oh, she cries. And then she shakes herself out of her daydream.

Hackett only called her to his office to give her some paperwork for Ella, but Aria’s so shaken up by the first lucid thought she’s ever had about the legal and ethical repercussions of boning her teacher that she sends him a text and says she’s going to start seeing other people. Maybe his brother. Maybe a hobbit with a heart condition. Maybe she’ll just hold a competition to see who can sling a pizza the farthest.

One of the most fascinating things about PLL fashion is – well, I mean, obviously the most fascinating thing is that Mandi Line is a wizard. But i6 has been so interesting to watch how she has allowed each of Liars’ styles to evolve over the years while making very, very sure to keep their aesthetic as teenager-y as possible. The biggest transition from actor-to-character in recent years has been Shay to Emily, because every year of her life, that girl just gets sexier and sexier. So, they do the best they can. Ponytails and layers and vests and everything, but I guess sometimes there’s nothing you can do to combat the sheer power of her whole sexual deal, so you’ve just got to be like, “Fuck it, dim the lights and let’s hope the camera doesn’t catch on fire.” Which is exactly what’s happening right now as Emily and Paige lounge around in her bedroom talking about colleges. I mean, honestly, if you’re not legitimately hypnotized by that shirt and those shoulders and that collarbone and all that glorious, unleashed, disheveled hair, I think you’d better go with Jenna to the basement of Rosewood General Hospital and buy yourself a new pair of eyeballs.

So, Stanford has offered Paige a full swim team scholarship and Emily is very torn between doing the thing she knows she should do (congratulate Paige) and the thing she wants to do (fling her iPad across the room). Because California is halfway across the world and one time Paige was all bangs and cardigans and destructive, closeted rage and now she’s standing here wearing a unicorn t-shirt that she obviously cut the sleeves out of all by herself, smelling like coconut cupcakes and chlorine and exuding this quiet, magnetic self-assurance. Which is to say that her awesomeness is increasing exponentially by the day and Emily doesn’t want to miss a single second of the way she’s transforming into into a white-hot bundle of ever-glowing perfection.

Paige finally realizes that Emily’s not giddy with glee because she’s misundertanding the presentation. Paige isn’t talking about her future; she’s talking about their future, and she’s absolutely manic with hope. She says they’ll be safe in California, happy in California, sunkissed in California, and lezzerly-kissed in California, and there will be beach days and road trips and shared space where their books are combined and their legs are intertwined and when Emily goes out to pick up pizza and beer, she won’t get carjacked by a doll that wants to murder her.

God. GOD. Just look at this girl right here. She wore khaki shorts and a french braid and wrote a letter asking Emily if it really could be true that they were the same. She rode her bike to this house in the middle of the night, rain pelting her face and thunder clapping all around her head, to ask Emily to forgive her for not being brave. She sneaked into Emily’s car and stole a kiss and begged her not to tell. She stood in this very room as tears splashed down her cheeks and she said the word “gay” out loud for the very first time. She held Emily’s hand way out in the woods, away from prying eyes, and said she’d never be able to love her out loud. She’s been paralyzed by fear, blinded by self-loathing, stricken mute with insecurity, trying and trying and trying to stay on top of the water. She’s fucked it up, she’s fallen down, she’s very nearly drowned. And now she’s standing here in this bedroom, tall and proud and very nearly bursting with love, asking Emily to start a brand new life with her. She’s growing, she’s going to keep growing, she wants Emily to grow with her.

Emily flicks her eyes up and sees Paige’s face gazing at her like she’s Christmas morning. She says yes.

Paige goes, “Yes, as in ‘Yes, you agree you should stop getting killed’ or ‘Yes, you will make a home with me in California’?” It’s the second thing. And it’s the biggest commitment anyone on this show has ever made. Emily says, “I really love you. I want to be with you.” And Paige says, “I have used up literally every ounce of my willpower keeping my hands off of you in that shirt, so come here to me right now.”

They makeout while One Republic grins and sings: Take us down and we keep trying / Forty thousand feet, keep flying.

I’ll tell you what, Lindsey Shaw is a goddess among women and Paige McCullers is the best lesbian character in the history of television and I’m going to cry like a little bitch when she gets murdered.

Hanna and Mona return home from an afternoon of intense shopping and Mona finally tells Hanna she knows that she’s only pretending to be her friend. But then she makes the big gesture and gives Hanna the hard drive from Wilden’s car. She tells her that even when she was running under her with a car, she really did love her.

Emily kisses Paige goodnight in her car, and finds her blissful sapphic bubble popped by the presence of Jenna Marshall. She goes, “Did you slither on down here to comment on my love life?” But no, Jenna slithered on down here to tell Emily to tell Toby she’s sorry about all that rapey incest stuff. She’s got a gun and a girlfriend who can disguise her in one of ten million costumes, but she figures she’s not long for this world now that all the hundred people who saw Ali the night she was murdered are also getting murdered. Emily’s like, “Well, anyway, I’m still wearing this shirt and this is my bare stomach now, so good evening, madam.”

At home, Spencer gets the feeling that someone is peeping on her, and indeed someone is peeping on her, and that someone is her half-brother’s mother, Mrs. Wackadoodle DiLaurentis. If she was drinking milk and chopping vegetables and filming Spencer through the blinds, I’d think she was a reincarnated Ian. Spence also gets a message from A telling her to check out the inside of Wilden’s casket for the next clue on the scavenger hunt that has become her own personal “Hounds of Zaroff.” Mona gets the same message and so they tag-team Wilden’s coffin and find Hanna’s mom’s phone. So, I guess Ashley Marin is A’s next target.

After the funeral – during which Aria spends the whole time scowling at Maggie and Ezra, and Mona spends the whole time scowling at the Liars on their four-seater pew, and Spencer spends the whole time scowling at this lady wearing a black lace veil, and Emily spends the whole time scowling at Jenna – everyone gets new text from A. It’s a Biblical allusion because they’re at church and A likes her themes: “The truth won’t set you free. I’m going to bury you with it. -A.”

To make matters even more complicated, there’s a new detective in town and he’s now obsessed with Liars because of the way Detective Wilden was obsessed with the Liars. He gives them a heads up that he’ll be calling them all down to the station real soon to discuss their many altercations with the law. There’s no escaping a “possesion of shovel” charge once it’s on your record.

And then there’s Toby, who breaks Mona’s mobile lair out of its hiding place and drives it to meet A because she promises information to him about his dead mom. On the way, he flashes back to when he dressed like Charlie Brown and cried alone in alleyways when little kids hurt his feelings. Ali tried to kiss him one time while saying shitty things about his dying mother and he told her to leave and so she stormed out and called him a loser. He cries in the flashback and he cries in the flashforward and it’s a good thing he’s not listening to Spencer’s breakup playlist or he’d for sure drive that winnebago right off a cliff.

The Risen Mitten dresses up a new doll in a black hoodie and sets it inside her dollhouse with the other Liars. Then she examines her mask face in the mirror. It’s kind of burned up, but that’s OK. You can buy those Ali masks at the Costco in Rosewood, 100 of them for only five dollars.

As always, my biggest and bestest thanks to Maggie Rose (@margaretrosey), the greatest screencapper in all the lands! Welcome back, everyone!

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