TV

“Pretty Little Liars” recap (4.06): Ravenswoon

Previously on Pretty Little Liars, Spencer and Emily got into a delicious tangle of cross purposes at Cicero College because Spencer wanted to zoom around campus wailing for Tippi the Bird to stop flying high in the sky with Ali’s helicopter and come on home, while Emily wanted to secure an education at an institution of higher learning. Both of their plans were foiled when Hanna showed up and started waving a gun around before taking three steps into the backyard of the Gamma Zeta (Shut Your) Pi (Hole) sorority house and trying to bury said gun using a beer stein as a scooper. Aria played Scrabble and roasted s’mores.

Hanna Marin’s got 99 problems and a shovel ain’t one. Unlike Detective Wilden, whose preferred brand of investigating involved lurking on the Marin’s back porch all the days and all the nights and dressing in drag while tossing teenagers from trains, Roma Maffia and her crack team of well-mannered police professionals know some actual laws. For example, carrying a concealed weapon on a college campus without a permit is a third degree felony that can result in seven years in the slammer jammer. Roma Maffia wants to know who Hanna is protecting, and Hanna is like, “Lady, you don’t even have time for that list.”

And she’s right. Ashley Marin crashes into the interrogation room and drags Hanna home. Tom is there also because it was his gun that Hanna was scurrying around with in the dirt at the frat party. The police are keeping it for testing because two bullets are missing and duh, it killed Wilden.

It defies logic and history and tradition and all odds that four seasons into Pretty Little Liars these writers can still find ways to up the ante on a show whose opening play was the murder of a teenage girl. But somehow episode 77 is even more intense and more must-see than the pilot. One thing I really love about this season is how the Liars are getting more frantic and unhinged by the second. It’s causing them to go at each other and then make up because they love each other too much to stay angry and then go at each other again because A has never been playing, but now she’s especially not playing. Their mania is also causing them to do stupider and stupider shit every week. At one point in this episode Toby for real goes, “Spencer, you are following a lead that was given to you by a bird.” And Spencer honestly doesn’t see why it’s an issue.

Anyway, Ashley and Tom quarantine Hanna inside the house, and before they can start confiscating her technology, she calls Emily, who is panicking just as hard as she is. In fact, Emily is ready for Hanna to tell her parents that Alison’s ghost has been doing emotional jujitsu on them for two full years, and also framing them for all the murders she does all the time. But before she has Hanna convinced, she has to hop off the phone because Shana Costumeshop strolls into the locker room looking fine as hell in a Sharks tracksuit talking about, “How do you like my puffy drapes now, bitch?”

Private school really wasn’t for Shana because of how they don’t offer classes in Creepin’ and Survivin’ like Rosewood High, so when she heard Emily swam her face into a wall and had to quit the team, she figured this was just the place for her. Emily stole Paige, she’ll steal Emily’s swim team spot. Emily blinded Jenna, she’ll become Jenna’s eyeballs inside the school. Emily’s rage is incandescent. She drops her phone into her bag and drops her jaw like a cartoon coyote. Oh, and she’s wearing some kind of yellow mesh roller derby jersey that somehow makes her face even more amazing-looking. Shana spies some flyers for open mic night at the Brew in Emily’s bag and she goes, “While I’m taking your girlfriend and your dreams, I’ll take one of those too.” Emily snatches back the flyer and stuffs it into her backpack and scowls and makes up her mind once and for all that Shana has got to be eradicated. For a single shining moment, you can practically see the Spencer-ness in her eyes.

Over at the Marin’s, Tom is stomping around and shouting and gesticulating and acting like a rooster on ‘roids. I mean, never mind that he abandoned Ashley and Hanna, started a new family with that awful Kate Randall, and made it perfectly clear that the only time anyone in this house was at liberty to reach out to him was for midnight booty calls. He’s here now and he’s in charge and he knows everything, including how his daughter – What’s her name? Lana? Banana? – is a felon! “WHY’D YOU STEAL MY GUN, HANNA? WHY’D YOU TAKE IT TO COLLEGE TO AND ROLL AROUND IN THE DIRT WITH IT, HANNA? WHY’D YOU KILL THAT COP, HANNA?

Why do you suck donkey balls, Tom? You just shut your damn mouth. Where have you been? Nowhere, is where you have been. You don’t know shit about shit.

Just, as an example, Tom, you don’t know that Ashley can say “I didn’t kill Wilden and I didn’t bring your gun inside this house!” And Hanna can say, “When I was looking for mom’s swamp shoes, I found the gun that killed Wilden inside her closet!” And both of them can be telling the truth. You can’t comprehend the vortex they live inside, where there are multiple landline phones in every room and fake architects die of strokes on the front porch and random potted plants get hurled at the back window without any explanation and the rigatoni is made of silver dollars and an omniscient invisible zombie wages emotional war just for giggles.

Ashley insists that someone is setting her up. Tom insists that no one would do that. And A insists that if Hanna even speaks her name, both of her parents will end up in jail and she’ll be living off of canned beans down at Uncle Jesse’s hobo shanty for the rest of her life.

At the Brew, Aria and Emily and Spencer assess their daily damage. Spencer’s problem: Tippi the Bird sang her into a dead end in a sorority house murder room. Emily’s problem: Shana is trying to absorb her life forces and become her. Aria’s problem: “I guess I don’t have any problems today, as per.” (Emily: “Wrong, bitch. Shana tried to set your ass on fire, run you over with a car, and now she’s your new lab partner.”) Eh. Whatevs. Aria offers to train Connor, the new Brew employee who makes shitty coffee and keeps dropping the fine china all over the floor. Spencer and Emily take advantage of their moment alone to make up after their Cicero brawl. Spencer’s like, “Look, I get that my relentless sleuthing myopia, unlimited resources, and inability to accept defeat on any level must feel like getting bulldozed a lot of the time. But I love you, and, I mean, I’m clearly not getting into college at all, so I totally support your pursuit of a degree at Podunk U.”

Their moment is interrupted by Mona, and where the hell has she been? Standing at the edge of town, spray-painting the population count up and up on the Rosewood City Limit sign as all these parents flock home to fuck up their children’s lives? No, she’s been trying to track down her mobile lair. She would like to speak to Spencer about it in private, but Spencer goads her into dropping the bomb that it was Toby who stole it, and Spencer who helped him cover his tracks. Spencer’s like, “How do you-” And Mona goes, “What? How do I know when you’re being sketch? I may not be A anymore, but you can’t turn off adrenalized hyperreality. I sense your shade in my soul.”

Spencer rushes home and mixes up a cocktail of espresso, Red Bull, Monster, NOS, RockStar, and Mountain Dew. Then she tells Toby they’ve got to tell the Liars why he stole the lair. He’s like, “But if you do that, I’ll never find out what happened to my mom. My dad won’t tell me. That gorgeous Eddie Lamb from Radley won’t tell me. A is the only one who knows and she’ll cut me off forever if we tell them.” The way you know Spencer loves Toby with her whole over-caffeinated heart is that she’s able to exercise a kind of decorum around him that usually only the Liars get from her. Anybody else, she goes, “Yeah, but endgame: Your mom’s still dead. My thing wins.” But she straddles the line between her allegiances and calls up the Pi (Holes) to try to dig up some information on the bird phone. She may not be able to give back the lair, but maybe she can offer up some new clues.

Emily and Aria rush to dime out Spencer to Hanna, but she’s kind of got her hands full with other stuff right now. The whole time Aria is on the phone with Hanna – again: landline, because her parents seized her iPhone – Emily is aggressively whispering at Aria about what she needs to tell Hanna to do. And it’s not the same thing she was saying this morning, by the way. This morning, it was like, “Tell your parents about A so no one has to go to prison.” Now it’s, “Hand over that video footage from Wilden’s car because: 1) It puts more suspects in play than just your mom, and 2) it implicates Shana Costumeshop in some way, and that bitch has got to be destroyed.”

Hanna has to hang up the phone because Tom needs the line to call any old person who will listen so he can tell them what a crazy psycho bitch his ex-wife is. Finally, Ashley just cracks with answers, which Hanna overhears from the hallway: Yes, she stole the gun. Because yes, Wilden was blackmailing her. And yes, that’s why she came to Tom for money. And yes, that’s why she took the gun into the woods to meet him. But before she could shoot him – and you bet your bottom dollar he deserved her wrath – he grabbed the gun from her and she bolted.

Caleb drops by for a visit, but having the people who love Hanna best and know her most and also know a thing or two about doing stupid shit with a gun near the scene of a murder is not an appealing proposition to Tom and Ashley. They kick him out. Hanna is like, “Do you not understand that he only has six more episodes before he goes to Ravenswood forever?! Do you not think a little second base fondling might do me some good right now?!” They do not and they do not.

Aria has agreed to tutor Connor the Coffee Boy, but he’s not interested in her for her awesome Faulkner zingers. He wants to have sexual intercourse with her. She pushes off his kiss, very kindly, and explains that while it is true that the May/December thing really gets her going, it only works when she’s not the authority figure. So “Go sports, and all that” but also “Get out of here, little kid.”

Emily stops by Hanna’s under the pretense of dropping off her homework, and the main way you know that Ashley and Tom don’t know their daughter’s life is they totally believe that she takes Physics. Hanna is pacing around her room at this point, trying to convince herself not to jump out of the window. Emily gives her a hug and then launches into her thing again about the video footage from Wilden’s car: “Just give it to me and I’ll give it to the police. I know it looks bad because it shows your mom driving over Wilden with her car, but it also shows Jenna and Shana dragging him off into the woods later on. Shana, OK? With her uninjured shoulder and her history of making out with Paige and her whole … face. Let me have that video and Shana loses and I win. I mean, everybody wins. We all win. I’m not Spencer.”

Hanna opens about sixteen different secret compartments in her jewelry box and makeup cases and hands over the hard drive from Wilden’s car. Then she goes downstairs and stands around sadly watching her parents juggling hot frying pans and accusing each other of various criminal activities some more. Emily puts the video on a CD and takes it to the police station, her fingerprints all over that bitch, and sneaky-drops it on Roma Maffia’s desk. Then she returns the drive to Caleb with her apologies for being unwilling to feel him up on Hanna’s behalf.

Caleb’s like, “It’s going to be OK, we’ve got the truth on our side!” And Emily’s like, “Yes, good point, the truth has always been so helpful to us in the past!”

Spencer chases down Emily in the hallway and goes at her like the winds of a Category Hastings hurricane. One breath, no pauses: “The girls at that sorority house said probably Ms. Grunwald hid in that murder room which means she’s probably the one Ali kept calling over and over from Hilton Head that summer which means she was probably Ali’s most trusted confidante which means she probably knows where Ali hid her Horcruxes so if we can just track her down and shake her down we probably can start destroying the pieces of Ali’s soul she stashed all around Pennsylvania and then we’ll kill her pet snake with a mannequin leg and she’ll probably be gone for good and then we can finally all go to sleep for the first time in two years!” Emily scowls, says, “That’s a lot of probablys, Spencer, even for you.”

Spencer drops her head and walks away and Emily only has a few seconds to feel like a dick because she hears beautiful violin music coming from that room where Noel Kahn and Aria one time sang and played the guitar as awkwardly as possible in each other’s faces. It’s Shana, of course. She’s a master violinist. She and Jenna play enchanted flute/violin duets down by the pier sometimes because they like to watch the mice drown themselves. Emily falls under her spell for just a second and then snaps out of it when she thinks about Shana’s fingers playing Paige like a stringed instrument. She turns around and punches a hole through a locker.

Aria is trying to enjoy a quiet moment of journaling in the hooligan-filled halls of her high school when Mike galumphs on over and says, in slow-motion, “Hoooowwwww coouuulllld youuuu hooook uuuuup wiiiiith Cooooonnnoooor laaaaast niiiiight?” It’s like he’s speaking whale or something. It’s weird. Aria stomps off to the boys’ locker room and starts shouting down Connor about how he made a move and she dismissed him and get your facts straight, asshole. But then Connor turns the tables real fast: “Girl, everybody knows you blew Mr. Fitz’s whistle. What’s the matter? You can’t get off unless a guy understands the symbolism of the green light on Daisy’s East Egg dock or something?” Aria flips around to see Ezra standing there, which makes the situation at least twice as embarrassing.

She blitzes past them and goes to have a talk with some stairs about her feelings. Ezra’s spiritual gift is tracking down Aria on stairwells while she’s silhouetted against giant windows. Half their makeouts have occurred in just such a place. He wants to help her and she wants to be helped by him, which pisses her off because she doesn’t want to need it and she absolutely cannot have it so she shouts that he can’t be the guy who bakes her cakes and puts her back together anymore.

You know I love to give Aria a hard time, but she’s stronger than I’ll ever be. That’s twice in like a week that she’s given up her greatest source of comfort to keep her comfort-er safe. In your life, how many people are you truly known by? For Aria, it’s Ella and it’s Ezra and it’s the Liars, too, but they’re always getting exploded. Ella and Ezra are the two people who knew her in her bones and make her the most important thing in their lives. And she pushed them away to keep them from getting hurt. And now she’s the most alone person on this whole show. Willingly. That’s some selfless courage.

It’s easy to clown on Aria, but she can’t help it that she’s only ever been locked inside a box with a corpse once in her life, you know?

Spencer gets a hot tip from one of the Pi (Holes) that Ms. Grunwald lives in a town called Ravenswood now, so off she and Toby go in a BEAUTIFUL TOYOTA to find out what’s what.

And here’s what: Ravenswood isn’t a town so much as it’s a parallel dimension where every diner is the diner Emily was kidnapped from on The Night of a Thousand Nights and every car is from the ’60s just like what Jenna drove Emily around in when she found her roofied at Ali’s empty grave. A million birds are cawing and swooping and the only color that registers in the spectrum of normal human vision is the vibrant whiteness of the roses on the grave where this woman is holding vigil in a black traveling cloak. There are no road signs, presumably because all roads lead everywhere and nowhere, and none of the townspeople will even look at Spencer and Toby in the face. Every shop on the square is an oddities shop, except for the pharmacy which is called Grave Concoctions probably. Dead Man’s Drink is the pub. It’s because the town is famous for birds and graves, it says it right there on the town sign, and the whole thing scares the absolute hell out of Toby. He shivers and shivers and begs Spencer to get in the car and drive them home.

They head on out to Sawmill Road where a grizzled gardener is chopping the heads off of full-bloom roses and fingering the flip phone in his pocket. (The best part of this whole scene is that Toby is aghast at the way this dude is hacking up those rose bushes.) Spencer tries to find out if he’s the keeper of the grounds here at Grunwald Estate, but he says he’s the only one here and he likes to reserve his conversations for the Master of the House, if you don’t mind. Toby stands there the whole time gaping at this fella’s poor shearing technique. He’s so visibly upset that Spencer has to drag him back to the car.

Emily’s brain is so fogged with hate for Shana today that she can’t even figure out her next move, so she goes to Mona and asks to get in on whatever game she’s running. Mona explains that she’s in the exact same position as the Liars now. A knows everything she’s done, everything they’ve all done, and without her RV full of evidence and Bratz dolls and grenades and stuff, she’s basically just waiting to get set on fire like the rest of the Liars. “And this time,” she says, “Maybe no ghost spirits us to safety. This time, maybe we burn.”

Back in Ravenswood proper, Toby knows that he’s got to power through the heebie-jeebies of this place and get Spencer a sandwich and a cup of coffee if he’s going to make the drive back home with her. He goes “Low Blood Sugar Spencer is worse than No Caffeine Spencer.” Which is adorable but not as adorable as Spencer’s rejoinder: “Wow, your girlfriend sounds awesome.” But she’s too distracted to eat anything right now because inside a hair salon she spots The Grunwald.

Somebody mentioned last week how amazing it is to watch Spencer interact with people who aren’t the Liars or Toby, and I’ve never really thought about it like that before, but it’s so true. The Liars and Toby and me and you, we’re used to Spencer’s single-minded mania and complete lack of finesse. It’s endearing to us. We love her. So we make ourselves a kind of the cushion for her, right? So when she slams up against us all the time, we sort of lean into it at the exact correct angle so it feels like a hug or little tickle. But the rest of the world does not know how to handle the way she comes at them, words and eyes and manners crackling like lightning. She bashes up against the world and it dents the world or the world pushes her off like she’s attacking it. She runs at us, she ends up in our embrace. She runs at the world, the world shoves back.

Like Grunwald over here. Spencer walks right into that salon, not even a how d’ya do?, and goes, “Remember when you were physically abusing sorority girls at Cicero College and disappearing for hours at a time in that murder room with the pink phone and the werewolf claw marks on the walls? I think maybe my dead friend – Ali was her name, you probably saw about her murder on the news – spent one full summer calling you in that room, maybe looking to extort you or looking for a safe house or something? Maybe she called herself Vivian? Maybe she landed her plane in your backyard sometimes? Her hair was blonde or brown. Sometimes she was probably wearing just her face, but other times she was probably wearing a mask of her face over her face. Do you know who I’m talking about? I think she might still be alive.”

The Grunwald says she didn’t know Ali’s human form and she certainly doesn’t know her phantom form. And then she hides in one of those hair dryer hood machines until Spencer goes away. Outside, Spencer is like, “She’d rather set her head on fire that talk to me!” And Toby gently puts his hand on her arm and goes, “Honey, I love you, but Tippi is the one who sent you here. A goose chase started by a literal bird. I think you need to eat.”

Aria is crying and crying and red-eyed and puffy-faced and crying in her room. A little because of the slut thing. A little bit more because the black-and-white narrative she assumed everyone else believed about her life (like she believes about her life) isn’t true to them. But mostly because it fucking sucks not to be able to reach out to the person who knows you best and loves you most just because you’re not sleeping with each other anymore. Mike comes in and apologizes and promises to make things right. Aria knows for sure he’s talking vandalism, but it’s just so nice to have a hand to hold for a second, she agrees to let him help her.

At the Marin’s, stupid Tom tries to assuage his guilt and exert his superiority by telling Hanna she could have come to him at any time if she needed help. She’s like, “When, exactly, should I have come to you, Dad? When you were bitching me out because your new daughter alcohol poisoned me? Or when you left us so broke mom had to rob a dead woman?” Tom’s like, “Fair enough. I’m worse than Byron Montgomery.” And yes, you ass, you are.

Ravenswood. Happy Hour. Eerie choir music starts up and is coming from every direction because it’s being piped all over town by speakers, speakers everywhere. All the townspeople go rigid and amble on over to the cemetery to stare glassy-eyed and open-mouthed at this white angel statue. Spencer waves her hands in front of a couple of faces. No recognition. And then she seems someone she recognizes. Shana Costumeshop! Shana is holding a wrapped package and Spencer bolts before she can peep her. She’s sprinting down the sidewalk like an insane person so Toby does the same from the opposite direction. They meet up in time to see Shana hop into Jenna’s car – the one from The Night of a Thousand Nights – and ride away. They try to follow her but are assaulted by dead ravens dive-bombing their BEAUTIFUL TOYOTA.

Toby is like, “What the actual fuck is happening right now?”

Magic, Toby Cavenaugh. Pure televisual magic.

Back at the Brew, Emily gives Aria her choice of the first pastries shipped over directly from Donut Castle. When Spencer arrives with tales of Ravenswood, they ooh and aah at all the right moments, even though they’re still pissed at her a little. Then she gets to the part about Shana being there and Emily puts her fist through the table. (“Costumeshop!“) Good timing. Roma Maffia shows up and asks if Emily can take a little break and come on over to the police station alone for a minute. At the door, Emily looks back at Aria and Spencer like, “If I never see you again, I love you. Tell Hanna. Tell Paige.”

This next bit is one of the most expertly crafted Pretty Little Things this show has ever done. Shana hops up on stage and starts playing her violin, beautifully, and while she weaves her homosexual dark music magic around us, Ezra creeps up to the Brew and stares inside at Aria, all forlorn and full of feelings; Connor takes out the trash to find Mike in a hoodie bashing in his car with a baseball bat; and Emily is at the police station finding out that the video she left for Roma Maffia is just footage of Red Coat wearing an Emily mask holding a sign that says “guilty” in front of the Welcome to Rosewood! sign.

(Please accept this as my official request to have Shana as a leading character in Ravenswood. She is outstanding in her sketchiness.)

The Emily mask is the most traumatic thing this show has ever done to me. My back was in front of an open window when I was watching this episode and when I got to that part, I jumped up and moved into a corner and all the hairs on my neck and arms were standing at attention. It felt like someone had dropped ice down the back of my shirt. I’ve got chills just writing about it right now.

Roma Maffia is like, “This was a weird thing for you to leave on my desk, don’t you think?” And Emily’s mind blown so wide open that she’s just like, “Yeah. Yeah, it was.”

The police show up and arrest Ashley for the murder of Detective Wilden. Tom’s gun was the one that did it. Ashley’s fingerprints were on the bullets. As she’s being dragged away to the police car, Ashely is like, “Hanna! Sweetheart! Pack your stuff and move to Emily’s! Your father is awful! Don’t forget to take a box of elbow macaroni with you! Do you understand what I am saying, Hanna? The pasta on the top shelf of the pantry! The currency of mac and cheese!”

The Risen Mitten breaks into a car and hot wires it and is wearing Emily’s face, a murder of crows in the distance screaming to beat the band.

My screencapping partner – the perfect, perfect Maggie (@margaretrosey) – is perfect. I just thought I’d remind you.

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

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Back to top button