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“Pretty Little Liars” recap 4.12: The Chamber of Secrets

Previously on Pretty Little Liars, Tippi the Bird led Toby and Spencer to the monochrome village of Ravenswood, where Shana Costumeshop and Jenna Marshall work as zombie reapers, ferrying dead people back and forth between Rosewood in Jenna’s time machine/classic Mustang convertible. The Grunwald lived on Sawmill Rd, which was a nice change of pace from the minimalist lair where she used to live, wedged behind a wall of the Shut Your Pi Hole sorority at Cicero College, accepting calls day and night from panicked teenage girls who were constantly being hunted like wild game. Emily’s shoulder and house both got busted, thanks to A’s fleet of kamikaze chauffeurs, and she almost lost Paige too, but had a mushy squash realization at a hoedown right before the lights went out.

Ashley’s near-brush with the death penalty for the first degree murder of a cop caused Hanna to brainwash Mona into brainwashing her, but a ranch hand named Travis finally came forward with evidence to clear Ms. Marin’s name. And Toby’s mom was super dead and remained super dead and he ran in circles and sold out the Liars and rejoined the A-Team and cried and flashed back and acted eleven kinds of cagey, the end result of which was: His mom is still dead. Oh, and Cece Drake rooted around under the DiLaurentis porch, just bunkin’ with Mike Montgomery, eatin’ Cheetos, drillin’ holes in the floor, wearin’ a fancy coat, learnin’ Tang Soo Do from Little Mikey’s kung fu books.

In Rosewood, MTV is Murder Television and it’s 24-hour coverage of whatever current homicide investigations are going on in town. Saturday morning it’s cartoons for the kids so basically The Smurfs, only Gargamel is wearing a mask of his own face and only always going after Smurfette and sometimes British Smurf and Cop Smurf are in cahoots with him. Today the Liars are watching MTV and reporters are saying a witness has come forward who can corroborate Ashley Marin’s story that Wilden was still alive when she left him in the woods. (Un?)fortunately when the doorbell rings, it is not the good news that Ashley’s charges have been dropped, but is instead a special delivery from A: Four Magic 8 balls, customized to spell out a warning: “If she goes free, you’ll hear from me. Kisses! -A” Aria goes, “Man, so Cece is coming after you guys because Ashley isn’t going to fry for Wilden’s murder? What a shitshow your lives are.” And Spencer is like, “If I were going to tweet this, I’d probably call it #WorldWarA.”

Rosewood High. Mr. Fitz is lecturing on The Tempest, talking about, “Prospero was overthrown as the Queen Bee of Milan, so he went to an island and developed adreanalized hyperreality and commanded a whole army of spirits that sometimes wore masks and sometimes didn’t wear masks when doing Prospero’s mischief, like playing the flute real creepy and shape-shifting and causing these best friends to lose their minds, running all around the island where they were shipwrecked, fighting off invisible ninjas.”

After Ezra’s little speech, in which he casts himself as Ferdinand and not Prospero, note, he asks Aria to stay after class to thank her for letting him cry on her shoulder post-hoedown. She smiles sweetly, says, “Oh, it was my pleasure. Knowing Malcolm isn’t your son makes me feel a lot less guilty for letting him get kidnapped. As your friend, I feel that way, I mean.” She rushes out into the hallway to call Jake (as a boyfriend) to see if he wants to go to The Brew tonight to listen to a poetry reading from the next Poe (who absolutely positively of course resides in Rosewood, PA and is no doubt dating the next Emily Dickinson, who also was born and bred here), and as soon as those words are out of her mouth, Jake hangs up on her. Just kidding. They make plans to have dinner and see Insidious 2.

Down at the precinct, Hoedown Travis balks at identifying Ashley as the person who nearly killed Det. Wilden but didn’t kill Det. Wilden, but then he remembers the way Hanna looked at him like a hero and mans up and does it.

Ashley watches Caleb pet Hanna and tells him he’s the best boyfriend in the world for sticking by them through their various thieveries and murders over the years, and also for being like the one decent guy in this whole entire town: “You never joined the A-team, you never were a pedophile, you steered clear of whatever daily Hastings bullshit, you didn’t kill anybody or get killed by anybody, you never ended up in an asylum for criminally insane teens, you actually attended school even though it is not a requirement here, and when you got a storyline about your parents, you let it play for a couple of episodes and then you fucking dropped it like a champ. You’re a real stand-up, fella, Caleb Rivers. I hope you never leave.”

But you know who is leaving? Ashley Marin! She’s leaving the jailhouse as a free woman! The DA has dropped the charges based on Travis’ story! When Roma Maffia gets back into town, she is going to hurl someone through a wall!

At school, the power dynamic in Emily and Paige’s relationship has finally shifted back in Paige’s direction – thanks in no small part to that hoedown outfit, I guarantee you – and now Emily is begging her to be patient for just another minute while they move the final few A puzzle pieces into place and nail Cece for Wilden’s murder. Paige goes, “If I was going to leave you because your life is a daily deathtrap, I probably would have done it after your dead girlfriend’s fake cousin bound and gagged me and tried to cut out my heart with a pocket knife, so that’s not an issue. But while the pendulum of decision-making is swinging my way, you’re moving into my bedroom and I’m sleeping by the road-facing wall, which is a thing that should have happened the second you got homeless, if only Spencer hadn’t peer pressured you into becoming the kind of person who makes the most convoluted possible decision every single time you’re faced with a choice.”

Emily agrees and goes to the Marins’ to welcome home Ashley and formulate the next step in Operation Nail Cece Drake. But as per the usual, A uses her gift of making them forget what’s important to deal with what is urgent. And what is urgent is that another package arrives and inside is a tiny child-sized coffin and in the coffin is Mona doll in a church mouse outfit and glasses like from that time when Ali laughed at her worship music moves. Aria laughs nervously, all, “Heh. I thought for a second it was going to be Malcolm, not that it matters since he’s not Ezra’s kid anymore, but still.” And Hanna whips out her phone and speed dials Radley, but the switchboard operator won’t connect her with Mona because Mona checked out yesterday. Hanna’s like, “Do you remember if she was wearing overalls and glasses and pigtails? Do you remember if anyone was waiting outside with a shrink ray gun?”

The A-note in the coffin basically says that the Liars are getting framed for murder one way or another this year and if one of them won’t take the fall for Wilden’s murder, A will just murder and murder and murder everyone until one of those charges sticks, starting with: Mona. Spencer has of course memorized Mona’s class and extracurricular activities schedule. Today is French Club. She sends Emily there to look for Mona. (Emily who finally realizes she should call Paige for backup for these assignments.) Spencer herself is going to work her Hastings lady wiles on Dr. Wren Kingston. Hanna and Caleb decide to stake out Mona’s house, even though Caleb is pretty sure Mona sent that doll herself. (Mona has a house, though? Does she also have parents? Siblings? Does Mona have a dog?) And I don’t even know about Aria. Probably she is going on a date with Jake. (Ha! Yes, that is exactly what she is doing!)

So at Wren’s house, Spencer peeks in the windows and sees that all his shit is strewn everywhere and boxes and empty hangers and so obviously he is moving. Also Spencer sees Jenna’s Ravenswood hell ferry from the Night of a Thousand Nights.

But she does not see Shana Costumeshop hiding out in there like the sexy creepster reaper she is.

Rosewood High. French Club is as absolutely awful as you think it is, just berets and baguettes and an Eiffel Tower and no one even bothering to mask their contempt for English-speaking persons. Emily has to resort to the French app on her phone from when she was in Haiti, and if Paige wasn’t already disgusted enough with this pantomime, the mention of the dominion of Rumer Willis seals the hate inside her heart. Emily asks in broken French if French Club Jackie has seen Mona, and French Club Jackie rapid-fires French back at them. Paige’s scowl gets scowlier and scowlier until she finally goes, “OK, cut the crap, Jackie. Where the fuck is Mona? Say it in English and get those croissants out of my face!”

Turns out French Club was throwing Mona a Get Out of Radley Party, but she didn’t show.

Isn’t that amazing? How many Get Out of Radley Parties do you think the clubs in this school have thrown for that girl? Five to ten each, at least. Right? Does she just post it on her website page the night before she’s getting out and then everyone scrambles to get cupcakes and decorations? Or do you think they just keep the supplies on hand so they’ll always be ready? Probably that’s how they do it.

Toby is in his loft ignoring calls from his girlfriend and crying and crying and crying, presumably because he one time got to do jogging and hot tubbing with Spencer and now all he does is join the A-team and listen to his dead mom sing and stare at boxes full of his dead mom’s stuff and visit Dr. Palmer and pretend that his girlfriend is his mom, who is dead. He rides a raft down to the coffee shop on a river of his own tears and spots Shana Costumeshop filing away various bills of lading and death certificates for the packages and people she transports to and from Ravenswood in Jenna’s car all day long. She conveniently leaves one of the shipping labels behind. It is addressed to Wren Kingston, who is in London, where also Melissa is, with her blazers. Toby calls Spencer to give her the news, not because he has forgiven her for telling her best friends that he’s doing A-stuff that is endangering their lives and the lives of their parents, but because he wants to let her know that her boyfriend is tag-teaming with Melissa.

(“Wait, you’re working with my sister?” “No, your other boyfriend!” “Debate Team Andrew? I took off my bra for that guy one time!” “No, your other-other boyfriend!” “Are you being weird about Paige just because I had one sex dream about her?” “WREN! YOUR BOYFRIEND WREN!” “Ohhhh.”)

Spencer explains as calmly as possible that Toby can’t just disappear without warning, even if he’s pissed, because: a) It’s a total asshole move to punish her for something that’s his own damn fault, and b) Sometimes when he leaves in an unexplained huff, his fake body turns up dead in the woods and Spencer goes cuckoocachoo down to Radley. He agrees he’s acting like a dick. Yes, about not returning her calls or texts. But also because A has proven over the course of four seasons that she is a sadistic, pathological liar and so trusting her to tell the truth about his dead mom – which, no matter what, still results in the endgame of his dead mom being dead – at the expense of Spencer and her friends is like the most selfish/pointless thing ever. Toby is sorry. Spencer forgives him: “It’s OK, honey. If perfect Caleb were ever to leave town forever and Ezra turned out to be the ultimate mastermind behind our demise, you’d be the best boyfriend in town.”

Reach for the stars, men of Rosewood!

Toby and Spencer settle onto the couch and snuggle up and watch TV and give their brains a break from all the Marion Cavanaugh gobbledegook they’ve endured this season. Did she jump from her window? Was she pushed from her window? Did Marion Cavanaugh secretly know parkour? Who cares: The second season of Revenge is finally on Netflix.

Jake and Aria’s date night is as boring as every other date night they’ve ever experienced. To me, the ultimate awesomeness is when you’re in love with someone who loves to be boring with you, but it only works when you’re actively being boring together, not when you’re so bored of each other and each other’s stuff that you develop narcolepsy. Aria stops the movie and Jake wakes up and says, “Turn it back on, it was putting me into a coma and I could really use the rest.” But Aria kisses him goodnight and kicks him out and then be-bops on down to The Brew to hear the morbid poetical stylings of the town’s new Poe. Guess who she runs into? You’ll never guess. OK, yes you will. It’s Ezra. He says the new Poe reminded him of Aria in that he was pretentious and obsessed with death. “Remember that one story you wrote, Found But Lost? About that cat that wore a cat costume over a dog costume over a gopher costume and ransacked your dad’s office and then got buried alive? I always thought that story was about Alison.”

They chat about art things and it’s always heady to chat to someone with a cute face about art things so Aria smooches his lips mid-art things talk and then they both pull away and act stunned and shy and talk about art things some more.

Caleb and Hanna stake out Mona’s house. He thinks Mona is upstairs watching from her window, getting off on the fact that Hanna is so worried about her, and he’s probably not wrong, but at least he’s here and at least Hanna is letting him be here, which is more than she’s let him do most of the rest of the season. It’s fitting and also sad and also hilarious that Caleb and Hanna are spending their last night together cuddled up in the car stalking Mona. Mona couldn’t have orchestrated that plan better if she’d used blackmail and extortion and blood-soaked animatronics: “Follow me, end up in lesbians with me.”

And finally, at Paige’s house, Emily is staring out the window waiting for whatever car is about to crash through whatever wall, muttering a steady stream of worry about Cece murdering Mona. Paige pulls her away, brushes her hair out of her face and quiets her mumbling with a finger to her lips. “Emsy,” she says, “Mona poisoned you with your own sports cream. Cece called you ‘Americano’ like nonstop. They’re both monsters. Maybe they’ll kill each other, which they both deserve. Maybe we can not talk about them for one night and do other stuff.” One of those stuffs gets taken right off the table when Paige’s dad shouts, “DOOR!” Paige opens her bedroom door and rolls her eyes and apologizes that her parents are so strict. Emily says it’s cool, that they’d act the same if Paige had a boy up in here, and then they burst into laugh-tears and remember when Paige tried to go out with Sean that one time to prove to herself that she was straight.

(“And then you came to my house and came out and kissed me!” “And then you met Samara, the worst GSA counselor ever, who tried to shove me out of the closet at her pace!” “And then you murdered Samara and dumped her body in Face Lake!” “And then your other girlfriend’s murderer tried to murder me!” “And then Spencer had a sex dream about you!” “Wait, what?”)

Seriously, though, for the first time since the Halloween train, Emily finally feels safe. In Paige’s bed in Paige’s room in Paige’s lap, she falls right to sleep. You always knew Paige was one of those girls who wouldn’t stop stroking your hair and your arm and your back after you fall asleep. She’d keep on doing because she’d want to comfort you even in your dreams. She kisses Emily’s head and sighs contentedly and offers up a prayer to the cowboy gods, thanking them for those chaps.

It’s nice that all the Liars get a small reprieve to be loved on for a second.

The next morning the Liars meet to confess that none of them know if Mona is still alive and, frankly, Hanna was the only one who did anything more than frown about her imminent murder once they left their meeting yesterday. Emily’s like, “I tried to care, but, you know, I’m staying with Paige now in Paige’s bed and-” Spencer makes a low humming noise in the back of her throat and Emily arches an eyebrow at her. One sex dream about Paige is one thing, but daytime fantasizing is entirely another. They are interrupted by another special delivery! This time, it’s an empty box. Only, no it’s not. It’s a magic box with a fake bottom that Spencer knows how to work immediately because she spent a couple of summers wheeling home wagons of trophies from magic camp because of course she did. Inside the trap door is a saw with a message scrawled on it: “Watch me make a girl disappear! Kisses! – A.” Spencer spitballs for a second: Magic isn’t real, magic is sleight of hand, magic is seeing something you can’t believe and believing it anyway. We’re the audience, A is the magician, Mona is the girl who gets sawed in half.”

Emily heaves a huge sigh of relief. She was finally starting to believe one of her girlfriends might survive two straight season finales, but the saw really freaked her out.

Spencer launches into an amazing Hermione-esque monlogue about the hows and whos of magic while Hanna tries to figure out how the magic box works while Emily and Aria go straight to the internet where they find out The Great Charlemagne is doing mime magic in that one park in Ravenswood this afternoon. Spencer goes, “Put on your time-traveling boots and whatever outfit you have that looks best desaturated. We’re dimension-jumping, bitches.”

Also dimension-jumping are Caleb and Toby. Toby spots Shana leaving Mona’s house in Jenna’s hell ferry, so he speeds along after her, and Caleb just decides to hop on this old-timey bus to Ravenswood that you can only catch by the light of the Harvest Moon when you are The Chosen One. It’s foggy. None of the passengers have faces. Bus fare is your blood.

I’m already super late with this recap, so I don’t have time to get into the technicalities of it, but I do want to say the last half hour of this episode made me scoot all the way up to the edge of the TV, my mouth wide open and my palms all sweaty, like I’m always telling my nephew not to do, but I couldn’t help myself because I was so nervous and so freaked out and so excited. And boy, did it ever deliver.

The Liars rush to the town square in Ravenswood and you know that crazy old awesome bitch The Grunwald is there watching The Great Charlemagne do his creepy clown deal. Charlemagne beckons Aria forward with one black-and-white finger and she’s like, “No way, dude, boxes are the only time anything bad ever happens to me.” She finally gets dragged up on stage and Charlemagne makes her disappear and Hanna wets her pants and Charlemagne makes hwe reappear and Hanna claps and claps and claps – and then they realize that they watched nothing awful happen to Aria while something awful happened to Emily, which is basically the premise of this whole show. They get a text from A talking about “Leger de main, bitches!” Which means: Sleight of hand in French and is proof Paige was right about stupid French Club.

Emily gives the Liars a ring-a-ding-ding to let them know she is trapped inside a coffin and being zoomed along an industrial conveyer belt toward a circular saw. She’s hammering on the box with her fists and sobbing and screaming while Spencer works out that The Grunwald lived on Sawmill Road and so that’s probably where Emily is about to chopped in half. The Liars bolt to the warehouse behind Red Coat and hammer on Emily’s pine box coffin from the other side.

It is a testament to how caught up I was in my euphoric Ravenswood panic that I actually followed a mental zipline during this scene about where the show would go if they actually killed off Emily. “Take Aria, Marlene! TAKE ARIA!” is actually a thing I was shouting at the television. Also: “SHOVE THE GODDAMN BOX OF THE CONVEYER BELT! SHOVE IT OFF, YOU ASSHOLES. SHOVE IT OFF!”

The finally pop off the coffin lid with a crowbar just as Red Coat kills the power. Red Coat runs up the stairs of the warehouse! While Red Coat runs out into the street! Two Red Coats! Aria chases the one up the stairs and Spencer chases the one out into the road. (Hanna hauls Emily to safety and hugs her and pets her head and wipes away her tears.) OK, and so Aria’s Red Coat gets trapped on this overhead walkway and you know what Aria does? Kung Fu, y’all! Tang Soo Do! She jumps and punches and twirls and whatever martial arts stuff, and then she finally kicks Red Coat’s Ali mask off her face to find Cece Drake underneath it! (Unless this is one of the days when Ali is trading bodies with Cece Drake, in which case it’s an Ali mask over a Cece shell over an Ali soul.) Aria kicks her right off the ledge and then tries to save her but Cece (or Ali) plummets to her death on the warehouse floor!

Spencer can’t catch her Red Coat, so she returns to find the Liars comforting Aria about becoming a murderer – “The second one is easier,” Emily says – but then they realize Cece isn’t dead on the floor anymore! Cece is alive and running through the streets! She survived the fall! Or her body died but Ali’s soul lived on! Or Cece was never more than a host carcass for Ali’s spirit! WHO KNOWS! I LOVE THIS SHOW SO MUCH! The Liars follow Cece over to A+’s lair and it’s the real fucking deal, dudes. Same old stalker pictures of Ali and stuff, but no burlap babyface zombie costumes, no dolls, no clown masks. No, siree. This place has CCTV of every place the Liars ever go: The Brew, RWPD, Rosewood High, their houses, the town square, Dr. Sullivan’s office, Radley, all those barns. It’s like the kind of nucleus command center setups you see in comic books. It’s perfect. It’s why A+ is everywhere (and nowhere!). Also, there is a timeline for every single one of the Liars, all the way back from the time Ali went missing until now. Also on that timeline is: Ali herself, just living and moving around and doing things and breathing and having a heartbeat and flying some planes. Hanna spots a journal that she recognizes and pockets, and then she calls Caleb to see if he can help them hack into A+’s computer. He cannot.

One very awesome thing the Liars find is accounting records because A+ has totally formed a corporation and is paying people to do her bidding. Cece Drake, for example, got two payments last week for running Red Coat interference. One other very awesome thing the Liars find is like this full Mr. Rogers closet of suits and cardigans and dude shoes, which makes them think this lair belongs to Boardshorts. On account of he is the only dude they know who messed with Ali that isn’t dead, so maybe he also is A+. The Boardshorts theory seems the most legit because they also discover all these photos of Ali being happy and flirty before she got murdered, which would have been in Cape May. One of the shirts in the photo is a shirt Hanna remembers Ali buying for a date with an older guy.

While the Liars are ransacking Boarshorts’ lair – and also finding a like World War I gas mask suit and invitation to a Ravenswood history party, which, by the way, Ali has apparently RSVPed to – Tippi the Bird’s eyeballs watch through some parrot-shaped eyeball holes in the wall.

At no point do the Liars stop to marvel over the fact that Ali is still alive and being stalked as much as she was when she was alive the first time. No, instead, they decide they’ve got to get to this Ravenswood history party and protect her from Boardshorts who will be there wearing a World War I gas mask suit. (This, after they rescued Emily from being sawed in half and watched Cece Drake rise from the dead using just a little bit of sexy willpower, OK? That’s what’s happening right now. That’s how fast they have trained themselves to downshift.) They rush into the night and collide on the sidewalk with The Grunwald, magical ice blue eyeballs as magically ice blue as ever.

Here: “You bitches really are as stupid as Allison said you were when she was calling me all the time in my murder room at the Shut Your Pi Hole sorority house to tap into the psychic powers I possess. She wanted to know which one of her old man boyfriends was going to murder her that summer, and I told her, and I was right, and so I drove to her house the night it happened and pulled her out of her grave and she was still breathing – holding her breath for a long time was a real specialty of that girl’s – and so I took her to the hospital but she disappeared along the way. And now here you are, leading him to her again.”

Could The Grunwald not have tapped back into her psychic powers to find Ali after she disappeared from her car that first time she got murdered? Could The Grunwald not have tapped back into her psychic powers at any point over the last four years to warn the Liars about all the times they were going to die? COULD THE GRUNWALD NOT HAVE TAPPED INTO HER POWERS TO KNOW EMILY WAS GETTING SAWED IN HALF IN HER OWN BACKYARD TWO MINUTES AGO? The Grunwald does not have time to answer these questions because behold! she is The Grunwald! The Liars want to know why Ali hasn’t contacted them if she’s still alive on account of obviously she can trust them and The Gunwald, she just cackles because: 1) Hello, they have all see Ali’s ass multiple times over these years, stealing their shit, dragging them out of danger, kissing their faces, so obviously she has contacted them, and 2) The Grunwald is a witch, a real one, so it just feels good to cackle.

She tells them to scram, that they’re not going to Ravenswood history night because Gas Mask is following them to Ali, instead of the other way around. And then she turns on the spot and disappears into the mist.

Emily says “soothsayer” once The Grunwald is gone, which is my favorite part of the entire episode, Emily conceiving the word “soothsayer” in her head and then saying it out of her mouth. The Liars try to figure out if The Grunwald is telling the truth or if she’s crazy, so apparently a lifetime with Mona Vanderwaal still hasn’t taught them that those two things aren’t mutually exclusive. Are they going to Ravenswood history night or not? Yes. Yes, they think they will. They get to wear costumes. What’s another night of watching Ali get killed when costumes are involved.

From the shadows, a dude watches them. He watches them and he walks across the street and he tromps up a flight of stairs and he clomps into Boardshorts’ lair and he sees it’s been ransacked and he smashes the closet door with his fist … and he is Ezra de Mimsy Porpington Fitzgerald!

Maaaan, what a season. Thank you guys for allowing me to recap it for you. #BooRadleyVanCullen is the best thing on the whole entire internet, and that’s down to you! And a forever thank you to my screencpaping partner Maggie (@margaretrosey), who says I can officiate her wedding one day, which I will of course be doing in an Alison DiLaurentis mask and Tippi the Bird crown.

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