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“Pretty Little Liars” recap 4.11: Dancing Away with My Heart

Previously on Pretty Little Liars, A sucked out Emily’s brain through her ears while she was asleep and replaced it with a new lame brain wired to give up on all the best things in life, including swimming and puffy drapes and Paige McCullers. Hanna descended further down the rabbit hole of absolute madness when Veronica was forced to recuse herself as Ashley’s lawyer because of an ineffective little Radley tantrum she threw at Mona. Spencer and Toby got into the weirdest, sex-destroying role playing situation ever when she pretended to be his dead mom to trick a deranged former psychiatrist into spilling the details of Marion’s maybe-murder. And Aria sat around soaking up all the awesomeness of the world while eating vegan burritos with Kung Fu Jake.

Well, Cece is the supervillain now. Spencer has decreed it; thus it is so. She’s been wearing a Red Coat and living under the DiLaurentis’ front porch and flying planes and setting lodges aflame and staring up Emily’s skirt, all as punishment because the Liars were girls with Ali when she broke that sorority sister’s neck at Ian’s frat party and got Cece kicked out of college. Emily’s ready to pack up her shit and move literally anywhere else, but is willing to shelve her peeper creeper problems for the moment so Hanna can meltdown some more about how her mom doesn’t have a lawyer.

But the Liars even have to pause that conversation because Lt. Tanner swaggers right into the Rosewood High Courtyard to mess with them, all, “Emily, hey there. How’s homelessness working out for you? Actually, oddly enough, I was just over at the wreckage of your house picking through the rubble and I found one of the swamp shoes someone was wearing down at Face Lake the night someone murdered Detective Wilden. Isn’t that crazy, Hanna? Basically, we just do Reverse Cinderella Ballistics now, and then it’s off to the electric chair with someone.” Lt. Tanner waltzes out of there with a song in her heart, Hanna punches a hole through the table, and Spencer decides it’s time to offer up Cece as a suspect in Wilden’s murder investigation.

How is she going to put Cece on Tanner’s radar? Duh, she’s just going to lead an expedition to that crawl space under the DiLaurentis’ porch where Cece has obviously been living and sleeping and eating canned beans from Uncle Jaime’s Bean Farm while wearing masks of everybody’s faces, just interchanging them at her leisure like she and Ali used to do with their souls. Wearing a mask of Emily’s face, staring up through those kitchen holes at Emily’s hooha. The only problem is getting Ms. D out of the house long enough for them to conduct a thorough investigation. The task of keeping her occupied falls to Hanna. All she has to do is let Ms. D take her shopping. Hanna’s like, “Sure, OK. My life isn’t already enough of a shitshow. Let me just go try on dresses and see how many times Ali’s mom calls me ‘Hefty.’ That’ll be a balm to my blossoming PTSD, I’m sure.”

None of the Liars bother to ask Spencer what she hopes to find in that crawlspace to implicate Cece, or how whatever they find could be more convincing than Ashley’s fingerprints on the bullets inside the gun that shot Wilden in the face. Partly they’re just so strung out on evidence overload at this point, who even knows. But also the word “hoedown” gets bandied about, and so obviously they divert their attention to that impending glory. After the Liars break – Spencer to give it one last go at trying to care about Toby’s dead mom – Hanna bursts into tears and falls against the soda machine and then realizes some random guy is peeking at her from around the corner like a cartoon Spy vs. Spy kind of guy, so she wraps her Barbie blazer around her tightly and stomps off, glaring at him the whole way.

Emily is reading the love college recommendation letter Rumer Willis wrote for her when Paige drops by the computer lab to firm up plans for the hoedown. She is wearing a Boy Scouts uniform, for starters, OK, and this is how come I know for sure that Emily’s brains have been addled by some kind of Dark Magic: She doesn’t even lose her breath or her balance or her sense of decorum looking at Paige McCullers looking at her in that outfit. She just hands over the letter and hems and haws about how she doesn’t really know if she’s got time to go down at the hoedown with her girlfriend because Spencer says they have to dig around in the dirt under the DiLaurentis’ porch to see if they can find like a letter from Cece confessing that she killed Wilden stuffed inside an empty Doritos bag. Paige’s eyes get narrower and narrower the whole time, not because Emily is getting cagier by the second, but because she’s reading Rumer Willis’ letter, and it’s basically like: “Clutched in her graceful hands, a power tool becomes a scepter. She is queen of the Habitat – her earth auger digging a well, unearthing my dirty thoughts. The ground is my body; it quakes in anticipation of her post hole digger!”

Paige is like, “I’ve read Lost Girl fanfiction that isn’t this explicit, dude. And that show is about a succubus.” Emily snatches the recommendation letter from her and marches off to Mr. Fitz’s classroom to get a second opinion on its appropriateness. Ezra hasn’t shaved or eaten or showered or slept and he tells Emily to get back to him when she’s got a real actual problem, like there’s a car parked in her living room and her parents can’t afford for her to go to college and she can’t get a scholarship if she can’t swim and so probably she’s going to live in Rosewood, slinging coffee and getting violated at massage parlors and having Cece Drake stare up her skirt for the rest of her life. Like when any of that shit happens, get back to him. Right now he’s got a noggin full of stuffed animal names and no children made up of his DNA to share them with.

Caleb and Hanna make hoedown plans, too, although she continues to feel exactly zero urgency about spending time with him even though he only has like 45 minutes left on this show. She’s reluctantly agreeing to go two-stepping with him when she finds an an envelope full of hundred dollar bills in her locker, stuffed into an envelope from Cece’s old snake-wrangling boutique. (Remember that time when Aria and Ezra’s brother spent like two full on-screen hours freaking out about spilling wine or something on the carpet at Cece’s boutique? Remember when he slung that pizza at that guy’s head?) It’s not the weirdest way Hanna has ever received a wad of cash from an unknown source. One time she found three thousand dollars taped to paper towels in a public restroom, but she still feels squirrely about it. She tucks the money into her purse and gets out of there.

She goes to The Brew and guess who follows her? The guy who’s been creeping on her all day at school. She accosts him and tells him whatever NAT Club bullshit he’s up to, he can just stop it right now, because at this point there’s pretty much nothing keeping her from snapping a person’s neck in broad daylight.

Aria, you will be shocked to hear, is faring much better than either of those Eeyores. Jake is waiting for her outside of school and she asks him to go to the hoedown and he says yes and they kiss and the world is all kittens and butterflies and cookie dough ice cream.

Spencer and Toby are sitting in the truck she bought him with the money she procured when she pawned Melissa’s engagement ring in that Great Gatsby town. Those details aren’t relevant; I just love that story. So, she’s trying to talk to him about who would give Hanna all that cash, and why. If Spencer is leaning toward benevolence, someone is trying to help with Ashley’s lawyer bills. If Spencer leaning toward some kind of set-up, which is her default position, something something Cece Drake. Toby doesn’t care. He wants to talk about his dead mom some more and his yearning only gets stronger when he turns on the truck and his mom starts crooning in stereo surround sound, that song she sang from that sheet music A delivered to Toby. When Spencer finally realizes what is, she flips out, crying and clenching her fists and absolutely shrieking, “TURN IT OFF TURN IT OFF TURN IT OFF I CANNOT DEAL WITH ONE MORE MINUTE OF THIS STORYLINE TOBY I AM SERIOUS TURN IT OFF.”

Toby takes out the CD and on it is a note saying there’s so many more of these CDs of his dead mother singing, so of course he dials up Dr. Palmer to ask if he’s got a full record collection of his mom yodeling or whatever. Somehow that’s going to prove she was murdered and didn’t kill herself, which still results in the same endgame of having a dead mother, so I don’t know. He actually wants to drive up to Dr. Palmer’s asylum right this second to get more of the not-answers he always supplies, but Spencer’s got important shit to do, specifically: crawlspaces and hoedowns.

Aria and Emily start the crawlspace investigation without Spencer, but it’s fruitless because: 1) Spencer obviously has the best flashlight. Some kind of ultra LED tactical number with alternate infrared optics that can be mounted to a sniper rifle, no doubt. And 2) Spencer is the one who does evidence. By which I mean Spencer is the one who unearths the most random trinkets and free associates until she has pinned whatever mystery they’re doing at the time to whatever suspect she’s dogging at the moment. They do find a button – “Oooh, does it look like it popped off a red coat?” – but forget about it when they hear some sinister clanging and banging. It’s only Spencer, announcing her presence like the Hulk. Emily and Aria fight over who gets to tell about the button, but they’re interrupted by the sound of someone else stomping around in the kitchen. Once they confirm that Hanna is with Ms. D, Aria sticks her big ol’ beautiful eyeballs right up to those kitchen floor holes and almost gets a knitting needle shoved into her retina! It’s terrifying! It’s amazing! She is aghast!

Back at Spencer’s, the Liars fill Hanna in on the eyeball poking thing and she’s like, “So, was it like one needle in one hole stabbing at one eyeball, or were there like needles coming at you everywhich way from all holes at once, because if we’re being honest a team of Red Coats seems like a real possibility at this point. We’ve been here before. Maybe Emily can spring some kind of surprise attack, like a dozen bear traps underneath the kitchen table…” But no! Emily will not be doing any more investigating inside that house! In fact, she is moving into Spencer’s house this very night! Even if she has to live inside Melissa’s blazer closet, she will do it! ENOUGH EFFING CRAWLSPACES.

Spencer says if she’s going to move in, maybe she could do it another night. Or another week. Or maybe just sometime in the future when Toby’s not going through so much stuff. Hanna, who mostly doesn’t seem to remember that she has a boyfriend anymore, tells Spencer they all get what it’s like to have a boyfriend, even Emily, but this sketch-ed up way she’s acting seems to be rooted in something far more nefarious than mismanaged priorities. Spencer says Toby will come clean when he feels ready, and so bizarre: It is Aria, perpetual haver of boyfriends who take her out of the A-game, that cracks Spencer’s nuts about it. Just: “A car smashed into Emily’s living room and a rock smashed into Emily’s shoulder and she doesn’t even have a future anymore! Hanna’s been run over half a dozen times and her mother is going to be executed for the first-degree murder of a police officer! And I ALMOST GOT POKED IN THE EYE!”

Spencer finally comes clean that Toby is, for all intents and purposes, back on the A-Team, doing A’s bidding, because A is giving him little snippets of information that prove his mom was murdered and not suicided. Satisfied that this quest is important in any way at all, Aria excuses herself to go try on boots at The Brew while Toby stares at a texted photo of an abandoned car, which it turns out later is Dr. Palmer’s old car, and of course all of the psychiatric records of his former patients are probably in the trunk, including recordings of Marion Cavanaugh performing cabaret and spoken word poetry and saying with her own voice, “Toby, my son, I did not die of suicide, but was instead hurled from my window by Alison DiLaurentis wearing a costume of Alison DiLaurentis.”

Is this Spencer’s fault somehow? Did following her to a parallel dimension on the advice of a parrot break his brain?

At The Brew, Ezra – looking homeless-er by the minute – spots Aria and inquires after the health of her cellular telephone, noting that it must be in the bottom of a swamp or some such thing since she has not used it to return his multiple texts and phone calls. Jake busts up their conversation, and Ezra excuses himself, and Aria swoons over the turquoise hoedown boots Jake slips onto her feet like Cowboy Cinderella. You know I love to give Aria a hard time, but she’s going through an actual thing here that never doesn’t suck. That thing where you’re trying with all your brainpower and heartpower to fall in love with someone wonderful who is legitimately trying to sweep you off your feet while being deeply, inevitably in love with someone who is all wrong for you except the way your spirits snap together like Legos. The person we really should feel sorry for is Jake and all the Jakes of the world who deserve what we’ll never be able to give them.

(Cripes almighty! Did I just say “we” about me and Aria Montgomery? Will wonders never cease?!)

Emily and Spencer and Hanna are packing up Emily’s stuff in Ali’s shrine room when Emily’s vision latches onto a bottle of blue nail polish and her brain flashes back to this time when Ali was torturing her by painting her toes and insisting that she break up with Ben because of how he’s the leftover mushy squash at the buffet and she’s a raging homosexual. She says if you don’t take care of yourself, don’t make your own decisions, you’ll spend the rest of your life getting bent into the shape other people want you to be in. It’s really wise advice, actually, but Ali follows it up by saying she’ll do the deed with Emily, which causes Emily’s eyeballs to bug right out of her skull. (“What deed?“) But really Ali is offering to break up with Ben on her behalf like she broke up with her doppelganger’s boyfriend one time, and at least Ben probably won’t pull a gun on her.

Back in the present, Emily goes, “Uh, hey, Spence, did Ali ever tell you about the time one of her friends’ boyfriends pointed a gun at her? Probably it was Wilden and Cece because of the way our weirdly selective memories about Alison tend to work. Like, Wilden was in love with Cece and maybe stalking the shit out her so maybe the only way she could be safe again was to kill him? We thought it was Ali and Wilden in Cape May, but maybe it was Cece and Wilden?”

And then, guess what? CECE DRAKE! She’s back! She’s milling around some kind of lair of her own – which: if she has that, why does she need to be living under Ms. D’s porch? – chatting on the phone about how she’s not coming back to Rosewood and whomever needs to keep whatever promise and there’s a red coat in the corner and pictures and newspaper clippings of Alison all over the place and a rucksack full of mannequin legs over there in the corner.

Hoedown, bitches. Almost as soon as the Liars arrive at the hoedown, the guy who’s been following Hanna around town all night asks her to dance. It is her custom to only dance with nerds at parties for hundred dollar bills, but she makes an exception for this guy, this Travis, because it turns out he was out at Face Lake the night Wilden was shot. He saw Wilden and Ashley fight and then he saw Ashley leave. Next thing you know, he saw a time-traveling ghost swooshing through the woods and a dead body on the ground and he rushed the hell out of there. The next day, his truck was back at his family’s tow truck business with a wad of cash in the front seat. He never went to the cops because his family, like all families in Rosewood, had beef with Wilden and he didn’t want to go to jail for cop-killing. He gave the money to Hanna as a kind of penance, but she doesn’t want his money. Pastor Ted has oodles of money. What she wants from him is some testimony.

I don’t really have time to talk about just how much I loved the music in this episode. You know I’m a country girl, born and bred in the foothills of the north Georgia mountains, so I just interpreted the whole thing as a love letter.

Toby spends his time at the hoedown standing around looking pissy, mumbling about how he could be listening to his dead mom music instead of dancing with Spencer who looks hotter than the damn sun in those overalls and hat, and then he gets a text about the location of Dr. Palmer’s car of patient records, and he splits. Spencer sends Caleb after him, just as he was about to enjoy two full plates of fried chicken, and of course the police show up when they’re looking super-duper suspicious, just as A intended. Ugh. Toby, I love you. But what in the world, man. What in the world.

Jake and Aria boot-scoot the night away, all smiles and heel-tapping and murder-free bliss. At one point, Jake tells Ezra, who is tending bar because he is the only person there old enough to tend bar, to back off. And at another point Emily, who is being just absolutely awful and ignoring Paige all day long, tells Aria she should stop ignoring Ezra and talk to him about how his not-son is moving across the country and so he’s going to not be able to be a not-dad to him up close.

OK, and while all the line-dancing is going on, red coat is surveying the scene from the barn balcony, completely conspicuous in her standard issue mask/blood-colored cloak. Emily and Spencer spot her and run after her through the crowd and out of the barn and finally are forced to conk the hayride driver over the head with a shovel to steal his truck to chase her down. But as Spencer is wrasslin’ with the stick, she and Emily notice something crawling up through the hay like a snake or a shark or something, just slithering toward them in the most spectacular fashion. Emily, the seasoned murderer of the two, hops out and snags a hoe and starts maiming the hell out of that hay, just trying to chop up Red Coat into a hundred thousand pieces. It is the most deranged thing we have ever, ever, ever seen any of the Liars do. Like more crazy than Spencer’s hair in Radley. Emily is possessed. Her eyes. Just kill kill kill. She doesn’t manage to bludgeon Red Coat to death, but she does fish her actual red coat out of the hay.

OK, and now let’s talk about Paige McCullers. What she is wearing is pure fashion fanfiction. The vest, the navel-bearing flannel, the chaps, the hat, the motherfucking belt buckle. She looks sexier than anyone has ever looked on this show, possibly sexier than anyone has ever looked on television, and she came to this hoedown even though Emily stood her up because she punches defeat in the balls and she wasn’t going to sit around in her room crying all night. Not when this outfit was in her possession. Emily stares at her forlornly for half the night, but not forlornly enough. She should have rushed her and begged Paige to forgive her, but it’s been a day, and we know that. Crawlspaces, that flashback, red coat swimming through the hay. Finally, she has a second to breathe and she walks right up to Paige and says she doesn’t want to have the mushy squash. Paige goes, “Are you drunk?” (When you’ve roofied each other as many times as these two have, it’s always good to check.)

But no, Emily is not drunk. She says she wants to dance with Paige before they turn off the lights. Right now. In this moment. She means it literally and she means it metaphorically, but she still doesn’t know how very close she’s skirting to a lifetime of mushy squash remorse. Her shoulder; her parents’ finances; her growing, gnawing, nearly-incandescent anger about the random unfairness of life; the narrative other people have forced onto her; her own constant murder: She’s letting all of those things dictate her actions and she’s so full of guilt and so scared of hope that she’s pushing Paige – and Paige’s great gift of finding a way to win, no matter what – away. And let me tell you something about Paige McCullers: You find a girl like her once every 25 lifetimes. The people who make us happy are never the people we expect, so when we find them, we’ve got to treasure them. You hear me, Ems? There are other vegetables at the buffet, but on this planet, there is only one Paige McCullers.

Pretty Little Liars does a pretty remarkable job juggling all the things they have to juggle to make this show work. The love stories, the friendship stories, the mystery, the mayhem, the sphere of relationships that rotate around each Liar. I mean, really, every Liar has their own world that revolves around them: parents and love interests and other friends. The show has finite resources, of course, so it’s fun to giggle about how everyone’s parents are always in Out of Town and Noel Kahn and JennaBot disappear for months at a time. The main thing is always going to be the Liars, and I like that and that’s how it should be. But if I could have one Pretty Little Wish, it would be to see Paige get incorporated into the larger Liar universe.

One thing this season has toyed with is pairing up characters who haven’t really shared time together before. It’s a Joseph Dougherty special. He’s very good at it. And it would be amazing to see Paige and Spencer trying to work together (in their field hockey uniforms?) to solve crime, or Paige and Hanna trying to find common ground because of how they love Emily. Paige is like Spencer and Mona in the sense that she is fully charged and so at the edge of herself all the time that you never know what she’s going to do. It’s just so rare to see a character like that on TV, and for that character to be a queer women with one of the most emotionally resonant and satisfying growth arcs of all time? I just don’t want to end up with the mushy squash, you know. I’m not speaking as a shipper. I am speaking as a lover of stories that matter and characters that make the world feel brand new again.

Anyway, Paige and Emily two-step to Lady Antebellum’s “Dancing Away With My Heart,” which should spawn some gloriously angsty fan fictions between seasons. And they are lovely, and they are adorable, and they are the sexiest, and – oh, OK. Time to talk about Ezria again? Cool.

Aria goes to Ezra’s apartment to hear about Malcolm. He feels so relieved she’s there but totally shitty because he knows she shouldn’t be there. Or, well, that’s how I feel. Maybe he already killed Malcolm and Maggie and ran them through the woodchipper like he did with Jackie Molina. I don’t know what goes on in that beautiful head of his. Of all the awesome things to be spying on tonight, A chooses the most boring one. She listens at Ezra’s door, peeks through Ezra’s keyhole, and is Cece Drake. YES.

The Risen Mitten knits tiny Liar dolls and tiny clothes for the tiny Liar dolls and then she stabs the stuffing right out of them with the same knitting needle she used to almost blind Aria earlier in the day.

My screencapping partner Maggie (@margaretrosey) has been traveling around the country being awesome all summer and I have missed her more than words. But she’s back now and that’s why these screencaps are so much better than they were last week and so follow her on Twitter and show her your love.

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