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“Pretty Little Liars” recap (4.07): Uterus before Duderus

You guys, forgive me in advance. This recap is late and it’s going to be much shorter than usual. I’m moving across the country in a couple of days and I dislocated my shoulder over the weekend so typing for more than ten minutes at a time feels like GLASS IN MY HAIR and I don’t have adrenalized hyperreality to ease any of my physical pains or emotional anxieties! Mona, save me!

Previously on Pretty Little Liars, A planted a gun in the closet where Ashley Marin keeps her swamp shoes so Hanna obviously stole it and tried to cover it up with twigs and leaves and grass on the campus of Cicero College. Turns out the gun was the one that killed Wilden, and Ashley’s prints were all over the bullets, so off to prison she went. Emily paid the price of giving her face to a stranger in the woods, and that price was Red Coat wearing her face on a video waving around a sign labeled GUILTY! And Spencer got into trouble with Emily and Aria because Mona dimed her out as an accomplice in Toby’s mobile lair theft, which lead her to doing some sweet-ass time-travel to a place made of a whole other color than Rosewood.

Let me tell you something lesbians are awesome at doing: Passive-aggressive cleaning. It’s the perfect way to feel your angry feelings. OK, because, for starters, you’re doing something helpful. You’re working hard. Because you care. But you can use the chores to drive home your anger, by: a) Being hawkishly silent. b) Opening and shutting drawers and cabinets with just a liiiitle more forcefully than necessary. Not enough to be accused of slamming things around, but enough to punctuate your closemouthed fury. c) You can use the task to highlight how your girlfriend has done you dirty. For example: “Would you mind putting this mixing bowl on the top shelf. My shoulder is still busted because of how I was risking my life and my future happiness to rescue our friends from attempted murder while you were dicking us over by helping your boyfriend steal the one thing that could have made our lives a little less dangerous.”

At the tender age of 18, Emily Fields has already mastered this move, and Spencer is feeling her wrath as they clean up the Marin’s kitchen. Aria joins them to say Hanna still isn’t eating anything, and their next move is going to have to be cake frosting and a wooden spoon. Emily forgets her frustration with Spencer immediately because they are the Liars and Hanna is their Hanna and that’s the most important thing right now. They all hold hands because of true love.

(I ship Liars so hard, you guys. Their friendship is my most best ship of all ships.)

Upstairs, Caleb – who one time shot his own self in the gut with a gun on top of a lighthouse, and is headed to Ravenswood in like ten more minutes – tells Hanna over the phone that he’s never going to do anything stupid and that they’ll have all the time in the world to snuggle and sex it up after Ashley is cleared of her murder charges. Then he hangs up and Toby hands him a cup of coffee and they make out so fiercely my TV explodes. Just kidding, they’re only tag-teaming to solve the mystery of A, which is foolish in the extreme because if Mona couldn’t do it, they sure as crickets can’t do it, but they’re very beautiful standing together all intense and motivated by love. Would it be better if Paige was there? 1,000 times better, yes. Was I momentarily panicked that this show was going the mansplaining/prince charming route? Yes, also. I have got to learn to relax into these writers who have proven themselves beyond reproach a thousand million times already. It’s just so weird being treated respectfully as a gay woman by television.

Pam pops into Emily’s room early in the morning to tell her she’s set up an appointment for her to start getting shark piss injections into her shoulder because it can’t be any more harmful than the poison elixir A had her using that time, and it’s pretty safe to say she’s not getting a call from any Cicero sororities about scholarships. Emily offers to help pay with her coffee shop tips or even get a second job as a teenage handyman like Toby because he only works two days a months and makes one million dollars per hour. Pam says not to worry about it; they’re doing pretty OK with Wayne’s Army pension and her job as Keeper of Keys and Grounds at Rosewood Policery.

At school, everyone’s getting a real giggle out of Connor’s car, with the crunched up windows and “LIAR!” painted across the door in spray paint. Mike thinks he deserved it for calling Aria a slut, and Aria agrees. She just wants to make sure Mike doesn’t think he deserved it enough to do it. Mike’s like, “Aria, please. I play field hockey. I’ve never even seen a baseball bat or sledgehammer or shovel or whatever did that to Connor’s car. And anyway, I was sitting alone in a windowless room in New York when it happened paying for things in cash and not asking for receipts.” A better alibi would have been open mic night at The Brew, but that place, like every other place in Rosewood, is just crawling with lesbians, and Mike’s not digging his way out from under the DiLaurentis’ porch and taking a flea bath to go to an event where he can’t even score.

Binging on Orange Is the New Black maybe made you think that prison ain’t nothin’ but lesbian sexytimes, but guys, no. Ashley Marin looks pitiful right now in her orange jumpsuit. And Hanna looks ten times more pitiful, if you can believe it. They try to talk about what Ashley is going to wear to court, but that ends in heartache because Veronica told Hanna to tell Ashley she can’t wear jewelry. They try to talk about the black-tie gala coming up for the library, but that ends in heartache because Ashley can’t promise to be Hanna’s date. Then they just try holding hands, but this asshole guard bangs on the window shouting about, “NO TOUCHING!” It’s just awful. I don’t know how I feel worse for Ashley than I did when Caleb got shot or the Liars got clubbed over the head and sealed inside the Montgomery’s basement, but I do!

Over at BrOTP Clubhouse (No Girls Allowed), Caleb and Toby are trying to dig up the flight plan for the plane that landed at Thornhill Lodge, so they can discover the identity of the person who either started the fire or extinguished the fire/rescued the Liars or trapped the Liars inside the building/was Ali or was Ali wearing an Ali mask. Caleb questions Spencer’s ability to memorize the plane’s N-Number, but Toby goes, “Dude, sometimes, for like foreplay, Spencer just likes me to quiz her on passages of Russian literature she’s memorized. Trust me, she remembers what she saw.” Again, they’re so adorable, but they’re asking these total amateur hour questions like, “How could Ali possibly start a fire at Thornhill Lodge and then make it all the way back to Rosewood to frame Ashley for murder?” The night that girl died, she was at her Nana’s place down in Hilton Head doing a vocal chord transplant on a parrot, hanging around in her backyard in Rosewood accepting visits from literally every person in town, fat-shaming and gay-shaming the shit out of Hanna and Emily over in Spencer’s barn, menacing Toby in prison and Jenna in blind camp, fucking Ian up at the kissing rock, and whatever doll surgeries that were her nightly routine. Being in two places at the same time, a mere 25 miles from each other, is like taking a day-drinking nap to Alison DiLaurentis.

They track down the point of origin for Red Coat’s plane to an airfield near town, probably the one where Aria went to take flying lessons that one time, and the person who keeps the flight plan records is that half-Jason looking guy who was Jenna’s escort to Wilden’s funeral (and also the guy Joss was sleeping with on Mistresses before things started getting really leztastic with her and Alex). Nigel is his name. He accepts a bribe from Caleb of twenty dollars and a year’s supply of Uncle Jaime’s Hobo Farm Mixed Bean Medley , but the only thing he can tell them is that it was a private flight and he can’t be expected to remember everything when it was so foggy the night that plane landed at Thornhill Lodge.

Anyway, the flight was registered to John Doe, and who even knows where that guy is?

Toby sighs dramatically and wishes he was home with a nice glass of Pinot and his Blonde Girl file, Spencer drinking coffee out of one of those double-doozy beer hats and chattering away in the background about clues and the themes of nihilism in Crime and Punishment.

At school, Emily is flipping out because Shana disappeared after open mic night to do who knows what kind of god awful schemes in her continued attempts to take over Emily’s actual life, but Hanna assures her that unlike Hogwarts – she actually says “Hogwarts”(!) – none of these hallways lead to a Room of Requirement where Shana is cooking up Emily-based Polyjuice Potion or practicing the Imperius curse to use on Paige. They are interrupted by some jocks who’ve got their LOLs on about Ashley being in jail, but Emily shuts their shit right down by flexing all up in their faces and going, “You fuckers? May have heard I killed a guy.”

Mr. Fitz comes running before Emily can puncture one of their lungs with only her loyalty stare. He whisks Hanna away to social safety and tells her not to worry about turning in her lit essay right now because she’s got real life stuff happening and he gets that because he’s got real life stuff happening too. Like, does she have any idea where he can dispose of some empty spray paint cans, a baseball bat, and a hoodie? Hanna tries to speak his language, talking about, “Thanks for helping me not feel like that one lady in that one book who gets judged by ol’ Judgey Eyes while she’s doing her knitting.” Mr. Fitz isn’t as bamboozled as the time when Spencer jumped into his passenger’s seat and he thought he was getting carjacked, but he is mildly confused. Hanna thanks him for being a decent guy, and he’s like, “Wow, thank you for that, Hanna. Seriously, though, do you know how a person goes about disposing of criminal evidence?” Hanna gives him Spencer’s phone number.

Vice-Principal Hackett corners Aria on the stairs and requests an audience. He wants to know if Mike has confessed to smashing up Connor’s car and when Aria says that he couldn’t have done it because he was home Skyping with Ella, even though it would have been like 3:0 in the morning at Donut Castle, Hackett goes, “OK, but let me ask you this, then: Has Pam Fields been by to do her weekly pill counting of the medicines in your house? Can you say for sure Mike is taking his Vandalism Capsules? I think we can both agree we don’t want another Blind Girl Craft Fair pottery smashing debacle on our hands.” Aria assures him Mike is taking his anti-wrecking lozenges, twice-daily.

Emily drops by RPD HQ to get the insurance stuff she needs for her shark piss injection appointment, but is distracted in the extreme when one of the detectives checks in a key that is labeled “Wilden’s Apartment.” Emily’s like, “Uh, mom, hey, can you print out directions to the doctor’s office? I’ve been feeling weird about using my GPS ever since that doll hacked into it and I drove myself into a locked barn and almost died of carbon monoxide poisoning.” This is a lie, of course. Emily will never realize how terrified she should be of dolls taking over all the technology in her life. She just wants Pam to give her a moment alone at her desk so she can steal Wilden’s house key.

You who else is being an exemplary parent today, and, in fact, has been very awesome this entire season? It’s Byron Montgomery. He’s upset because he thinks Mike vandalized Connor’s car and now he’s probably getting expelled, but when Aria explains that Connor made a move on her and then started spreading rumors, Byron’s like, “I fully understand exactly what you are saying to me and what you are not saying to me, and trust me when I tell you, it will be taken care of.” Ella would be so proud, Byron! Maybe you just needed to get that virginity guardian thing, and that homicidal kidnapping mistress thing, and that whole “You better apologize to my girlfriend for acting like a teenager whose father destroyed her family when you caught him having an affair in the backseat of a car in the middle of a busy intersection” thing out of your system.

Hell. Typing that made me hate him again.

Hanna is forging some checks to pay the water bill and power bill when Spencer comes over wearing her most somber face to tell Hanna that the good news is that her mom might get to come home from jail – in 20 years. (The bad news is that she might get the death penalty for first degree murdering a cop.) They hug. Hanna cries. It’s horrible. It’s so horrible. I can’t look at it.

Spencer goes to Aria for comfort after using all her Spencer powers to keep Hanna in once piece. Aria’s like, “Could this get any worse? Hanna’s mom might be in jail for the rest of her life. I know your mom is harshing your Spoby vibe something fierce being In Town all these weeks because of having a client who is actually still alive. Emily won’t shut the fuck up about puffy drapes. I mean, what next, Spence? Red Coat drives an automobile into one of our living rooms?” Emily interrupts her doomsday monologue to say she’s got a key to Wilden’s apartment and get your shit together because it’s time to be for real.

And they are for real. They’re so for real that even though they still don’t close the blinds even though A has videoed them doing every illegal thing for four full seasons now, they do put on gloves to keep from getting their fingerprints all over Wilden’s shit, which includes: Mail that is mostly bills (Spencer uses some kind of infrared light technique to discern this information), porn (Aria flips out for 15 minutes about this, presumably because his porn collection is physical DVDs and not on the internet like the rest of humanity), and a cooler full of those fancy steaks Emily’s dad buys for Emily’s uncle every year. The Liars open up the meat and are discouraged to find that it only contains putrid steaks and not a severed head. But the steaks are from A, and the rapidity with which the meat has spoiled leads them to believe it is a thank you gift for whatever part of the Thornhill Lodge stuff he was responsible for. (Which, according to Melissa, was setting the fire, right?)

Hanna cries alone in her mom’s room for hours and hours, trying to pick out the best court outfit. One that says, “Vehicular assault possibly, but definitely not cold-blooded murder.” She tries to convince Ashley to plead out so she can come home later rather than never, but at this point, all Ashley has is the truth and one million dollars baked into ravioli in the freezer in her kitchen. She says no.

Also crying is Ezra Fitz, who, let the record show, looks just like Clark Kent these days with his hair the way it is and his chin the way it always has been. He’s at school on a Saturday trying to get some paperwork done, but mostly just trying to stay busy to keep his mind off of Aria slash his new life of crime. He’s super duper sad, but then he sees Aria sitting on the bench outside of Hackett’s office and he gets so happy, and then sad again because he can’t be that guy for her anymore. When I take my puppy’s tennis ball away, she is the absolute saddest, and sometimes on my way to stashing it in the out-of-reach toy drawer, I’ll fumble it and she’ll be like, “WE’RE PLAYING SOME MORE!” but then I snatch it right back up and store it, and she gets dejected even more than when I originally took away her favorite thing. Which is what Ezra’s face did when he saw Aria sitting there.

He says he knows he can’t be her boyfriend and comfort her in boyfriend ways but is there any information she can give him that might get Mike off the hook, like, I dunno, the fact that there is literally no proof at all that he did anything wrong? Aria cannot give any information, and since America’s laws decree that everyone is guilty until proven innocent, Mike’s just going to have to get put down. Aria goes, “Hackett asked me if Mike has been taking his Vandalism Pills. I told him yes. I hope I wasn’t lying.” Ezra is like, “Did he ask you that to your face?” And Aria is all, “Trust me, dude, it’s the least inappropriate thing of all the things he’s ever asked me. Detective Wilden had more tact than this creep.”

After their meeting is over, Ezra storms up in that office and goes, “Oh my God, Hackett, you can’t just ask someone’s sister if her brother is taking his anti-ransacking caplets! That’s like the rules of The Physician—Patient Privilege Act of 1845!”

BrOTP Clubhouse. You know that lighter Toby found by his face when he woke up at Thornhill Lodge after being clobbered in the noggin by Jenna and Shana? Well, he’s sitting on the couch flicking that thing on and off. On and off. On and off. Then he has an idea. The compass on the lighter made him think it came from a pirate ship, but the more he thinks about it, and the fact that Nigel Wright’s name is engraved on it, the more he starts to wonder if it belongs Nigel Wright. He and Caleb go back to Rosewood International Airport and Youth Pilot Training Facility to ask just that, but Nigel says no! He did not fly a blonde girl in a red coat wearing a mask of her own face to Thornhill Lodge start a fire to kill her friends and rescue her friends from a fire to keep them from dying! He says all he did was fake a flight plan for a girl named CeCe Drake and what would you do if someone came at you wielding a mannequin leg and asking for a favor? Toby tries to kill Nigel Wright, but he escapes.

They are able to hack into his cell phone, though, and discover that he has been calling the same number in New York over and over and over. Toby goes, “Wait, I know this one! OK, all we have to do is train a parrot to sing that number and the release it into the wild. It’ll lead us to either a lair or a barn or a lair inside a barn, where we’ll find a key piece of information that will allow us to teleport ourselves through a wormhole into another dimension at another spot on the space-time continuum. Probably there are going to be birds trying to kill us, so bring a helmet.”

“Planning to play with a tesseract, are we, boys?” Spencer says when she arrives to lend them a hand. They bring her up to speed and she tells them Cece did visit Mona at Radley, so maybe she is Red Coat. Toby’s face. He goes, “Um, Spencer. A sidebar.” He drags her into the kitchen and wonders how long she was going to sit on this information that CeCe was a frequent Radley visitor, because in case she’d forgotten while dealing with the problem of trying to keep Ashley from getting sentenced to death by the great state of Pennsylvania, his dead mother, who is still dead and will continue to be dead, potentially did not come to be dead by suicide, but instead by being thrown from a window by one of those rare beasts, The Blonde-Haired Girl. Information that was given to him by an institutionalized former psychiatrist who is writing a book about the taste of the wind.

Spencer goes, “Honey, I love you. I do. But two episodes was plenty of this storyline. I cannot allow you to keep on like this. Take off your shirt. Let’s go home.”

Aria takes a hand-written thank you note to Ezra’s apartment because Mike told her about the way he convinced Hackett not to expel him based on the no evidence he had against him. Ezra invites her inside for a slice of pound, some light petting, a few photos with paper bags over their faces for old times’ sake. “Come on,” he says, “Maggie took Malcolm to a midnight showing of that Stephen King movie with the homicidal clown. We’ve got plenty of time.” But she stuffs the note into his hand and bolts away because five minutes of reading their Feelings Journals out loud to one another and she knows they’d be naked.

Emily takes Wilden’s apartment key back to RPD HQ but isn’t able to return it because all the detectives are swarming Pam’s desk because they realize it is missing. She feels appropriately shitty. She goes home to peruse the America’s Finest Steaks website page as suspiciously as possible, and of course she can’t even get hacked into there to find out what cut of meat Wilden liked to eat because Pam comes in hollering about how she missed her shark piss injection appointment. She says she’s taking Emily to all future appointments, which shouldn’t be a problem because she’s fired from Police because you have to keep up with keys if you’re going to be the Keeper of Keys.

Pam goes downstairs to call Wayne and tell him they’re even bigger Poors than they were before. She doesn’t have time to adequately explain her suspension from Police, though, because A drives a motherfucking car right into the middle of the living room and nearly kills her!

Nigel Wright has a little tea date with Jenna Marshall’s sunglasses. He is very sorry he fucked up her plan, but he hopes he didn’t fuck it up too badly because he still wants to have sex with her, because Jenna must be better in bed than literally any human being ever has been.

The Risen Mitten stops by the Home Depot to buy a home repair guide and gift card, onto which she writes, “Buy some new windows. I hope I didn’t give you the shutters. – A.”

My screencapping partner Maggie (@margaretrosey) is a person you should follow on Twitter and also adore.

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