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“Pretty Little Liars” recap (4.14): Doppelganger Destiny

Previously on Pretty Little Liars, four friends suffered years of physical and psychological torture at the hands of their dead best friend’s time-traveling ghost and her army of minions, which consisted of human beings in various states of adrenalized hyperreality, at least one half-blind half-cyborg, and a parrot. After making sure they were run under by cars, poisoned, broken-hearted, hospitalized, institutionalized, hijacked, kidnapped, buried, hypnotized, blown up, drowned, massaged, closeted, shamed, arrested, burned up, and blasted into outer space, the time-traveling ghost revealed herself as a living, breathing not-ghost who just wanted to come home and sleep in the bed her mother had been keeping warm for her.

The Liars have retired to Spencer’s bedroom to debrief what the actual fuck is going on. Spencer stares out the window for a good thirty minutes at that barn where Ali disappeared to begin with and Melissa and Ian copulated and created a demon fetus. They ought to just burn that thing down, she thinks. Emily flat out refuses to put on some pants. And Hanna very seriously contemplates taking a month’s supply of ice cream into a closet and holing up in there with some stretchy pants and her iPod. When the only thing they can figure out is that not a single one of them is happy that Ali isn’t freaking dead like she’s supposed to be, they decide to get some sleep and hit up the cemetery at their earliest convenience.

Ali’s body has been moved inside Rosewood’s giant mausoleum, but it is Hanna who helpfully points out that it is not, in fact, Ali’s body at all. “What I don’t get,” Hanna says, “is how this body was identified as Ali’s body. And I don’t just mean when the coroner did the autopsy before she was buried the first time. I mean all the times she was reburied. We know Emily dug up her dead ass at least once. She spent one full Halloween in a drink cooler on The Nightmare Express. That corpse has been more places than Maya when she was on the run from Cousin Nate.”

Unfortunately, they’re out of suspects. Everybody Spencer has accused over the years of being A or killing Ali is either dead or blind or her brother or her boyfriend or on the lam or Mona, whose only real crime, it turns out, is loving too much and being too fabulous. Hanna says “theory” and “plan” and Spencer huffs and looks at Aria and Emily like, “Can you believe this bitch right now?” She’s wearing Aria’s clothes and doing Spencer’s job. All she needs to do is snap at Paige for being perfect and she’ll have assumed all the Liar’s personalities at once. But Spencer is turned on impressed despite her jealousy when Hanna says they need to find out who was actually buried under the gayzbo in Ali’s yard and work backwards.

Emily hits up Mrs. DiLaurentis about the whereabouts of Jason, who I’m pretty sure hasn’t been seen since he fell down that elevator shaft and jumped out of the window in the ER. Right? Was that before or after Mona stitched him up on his own front porch using a sewing needle and homespun thread and whiskey as a sterilizing agent. Anyway, Mrs. D says he’s off in Montana getting another head transplant but if it’s an emergency she can get in touch with him. Emily says it’s not an emergency; she just wanted to ask if he’d spoken to Ali lately is all. Mrs. D giggles and says Ali talks to everyone in her family every day, which reminds her she needs to wash this comforter she literally just put on Ali’s bed. “She one time held her breath for three full days when I forgot to change her linens!”

Things are less weird but still a bummer over at the Marin’s place where Ashley cannot get an interview for a job because of the high profile murder investigation that branded her a cop killer. They’ve got some savings, but lasagna dollars don’t last forever.

At school, it’s good news/bad news w/r/t everyone’s significant other. Toby is home from his experiments of measuring the color of air with Dr. Palmer (good) but he’s brought his dead mom storyline with him (bad). Mona’s dress is insane and all she wants to do is take Hanna for a ride in Jenna’s dimension-jumping ’66 Mustang (good) but Hanna is back to being cold because of all the latent A-torture feelings she’s holding onto (bad). Paige offers to help Emily shoulder her otherworldly burdens while looking like one million bucks and bragging that she’s actually very good at worrying (good) but Emily throws out that classic lesbian no-winner: “Just let me feel the feelings I feel when I’m feeling them, god” (bad).* And Ezra has turned off the lights in his classroom and is holding a flashlight under his chin, reciting lines from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde like, “IF I AM THE CHIEF OF SINNERS I AM THE CHIEF OF SUFFERERS ALSO!” (good) but Aria’s not as smart as Mona so she fails to realize that he’s basically threatening to strangle her to death (bad).

*Honestly, of all the lesbian things to happen on this show, this is the absolute most lesbian of all. Tell me you haven’t had this conversation with your girlfriend at least twice already this week:

Paige: I’m so excited about this thing! Emily: I’m sorry I’m not more excited on your behalf; I’m just all over the place right now. Paige: Yeah, I kind of noticed. What can I do to help? Emily: Uh, you can stop trying to fix me, for starters. Paige: Aw, Ems, don’t feel like I’m trying to fix you. I just want to stand up under your emotional burdens with you and keep you from teetering over a cliff of psychological doom. Emily: Don’t feel? Don’t feel? Well, I do feel! My feelings are what I feel and they are real and they are mine and don’t you tell me not to feel them!
And as Emily storms away Paige is like, “Well anyway, I did win that race after all, and I set a new state record! THANKS FOR ASKING!”

In the computer lab, Hanna shows the Liars all the research she’s been doing and Spencer has to sit down for a second because she’s overcome with the vapors. By Googling “labor day blonde alive/dead girl bitch” Hanna has discovered a parallel dimension where another group of Liars had an Ali go missing. She emailed these AU!Liars to see if they want to grab a bite and commiserate but before they can firm up their plans, a newsreel from the ’50s fires itself up on the projector and A has encoded a message onto it that is a double-dog dare: Whoever finds Ali first gets to keep her. Which, I mean: OK, fine. You can have her, A. She’s a monster and we couldn’t give a fuuu-oh, wait. Never mind. We still inexplicably care what happens to the monster. Our monster, I guess.

There’s a strange man in Spencer’s kitchen, making a sandwich, looking really intense and stressed out, cross-examining the pickles. After a moment, Spencer realizes this is the man who provided the sperm that fertilized the egg that replicated the cells that gave her life, and she also remembers that he did the same thing for an egg one time in Jessica DiLaurentis’ womb. “Sir,” she says. “I mean, um … father? Dad? Yeah. Dad, can you help me find my half-brother Jason.” AND NO HE CANNOT. He tells Spencer to stop looking for Jason and stop talking to Jessica DiLaurentis and when she agrees to do only one or the other, he says he’ll track down Jason and make sure he’s alive.

Spencer then turns her attention to Toby who has gathered signed affidavits from literally every employee to ever work at Radley Institute for the Criminally Insane saying that his mother did not commit suicide but was, in fact, thrown from a sanitarium window. But it is not enough! He wants Radley’s parent company, a giant healthcare conglomerate, to release a statement saying that Marian Cavenaugh died in an accident and not in a suicide! Toby. Sigh. You know how people say “Go big or go home?” I know you know because I am looking at your hair while I am typing this. Well, this storyline with your mom, it’s time to take that one home and lock it up and never speak of it again.

Spencer says she is a mouse and Radley’s parent company is an elephant and she’s going to spook them and keep this storyline going indefinitely.

Dammit Spencer! The face I am making at you right now is this face!

At The Brew, Hanna tries to convince Aria and Emily to have a coffee date with her and the AU!Liars but Emily is sharpening some knives and loading some guns and polishing some nun-chucks and mumbling under her breath about “…and stay dead this time.” Hanna goes, “Dude, what is your deal right now?” Emily glowers at her and breathes real raggedly about, “My deal is my deal and I feel what I feel!!!!” Emily’s rage would be Seussical. They are interrupted by the sight of a beautiful hobo strolling through the front door like the kind of guy who just got home from Uncle Jamie’s Bean Farm and not a desaturated alter-world where he keeps dying and coming back to life. Hanna kisses his face. In the background, Aria swoons. Emily uses a sword to chop a couch in half.

Emily does agree to meet up with the AU!Liars, though, and it’s as banana trousers as you knew it was going to be, starting with the fact that AU!Emily and AU!Hanna look like if those doppelgänger dolls from the campground came to life and grew up into teenagers. AU!Emily is gay, which we know because of how they put her in flannel. AU!Emily and AU!Hanna weave a yarn about how their Ali, who is named Sarah, was a real dick but she made them feel special when she wasn’t making them want to die, but then she disappeared and now they’re plagued with this strange sense of relief and guilt and mourning and unbearable lightness. AU!Emily is like, “The last thing she said to me was that I liked Rihanna a little too much. She wasn’t very nice.” Unfortunately, she also was still alive when not-Ali’s body was buried under the gayzbo in the DiLaurentis’ backyard. She went missing the day after Labor Day. So. Not her, then. Ali can jump through time and space but she can’t bust up a concrete foundation.

Now. The best scenes of the episode and some of the best scenes of the whole entire series. Ezra is at that outdoor bookshop in town, perusing whatever Gothic paperbacks, when Mona skips up looking like Minnie Mouse going for a job interview at one of those Starbucks inside Barnes and Noble. I don’t know. Have we ever seen Ian and Janel in some one-on-one scenes before? They play off each other so beautifully. So intense and creepy, like a gorgeous game of terror chess.

Mona: Mr. Fitz! It seems like every time I see you you’re cradling an old novel or a photo of one of your under-aged students, all of whom adore you, of course, with your symmetrical little face and that choirboy hair! Mr. Fitz: I was just looking for something to supplement my re-read of Jekyll and Hyde. I decided to go with Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. Mona: I’ll bet you did. Mr. Fitz: And what about you? Are you here to flesh-out your knowledge of Stevenson’s works? The Suicide Club, maybe? That seems right up your alley. Mona: Oh, you know, Treasure Island is more my speed. Treasure maps, parrots, a coming-of-age story about the ambiguity of morality.
They decide this thing is going to take a few minutes, so they sit down across the table from each other with cups of tea and get even more real.

Mona: As I’m sure you know, I found a cow brain in my locker last semester and I can’t help but notice that under your, hmm, watchful gaze, Aria Montgomery has never found any dead animals in her possession that she did not slaughter herself for her fashions. Mr. Fitz: And as I’m sure you know, I am in the know about at least some of the bodies you have dismembered and stashed in various hidey-holes around town over the years. Mona: Speaking of which, you assigned Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart as extra credit this week. Hearts buried under floorboards. It’s-forgive me-telling. I relate to that narrator, you know: “I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth.” Mr. Fitz: Yes, so do I: “I heard many things in hell.” Mona: [Blinks, frowns, blinks again.] Interesting. Really interesting. Welp, I gotta bounce. We’ll talk soon.
Oh my god, I loved that so much. Sinister Fitz is so much better than every other Fitz. Go bonkers with your evil, dude. Mona’s still going to destroy your soul, but it’ll be way more fun to watch.

Spencer and Toby hit up the lady in charge of the legal stuff at the company that owns Radley, and Spencer stares at her so hard and says the word “Internet” about a hundred times and finally the lady agrees to issue an apology to the Cavanaugh family for paying a police officer to change a report about a patient at an asylum 20 years ago that was hurled from her bedroom window rather than jumping of her own accord.

Hanna returns home from meeting with the AU!Liars to find Mrs. D offering her mom a job down at the old DiLaurentis real estate office, Haunted Properties, LLC. Ashley is ecstatic. Hanna is skeptical, especially when Jessica is like, “Oh, isn’t this grand! Ali will be so glad! Last night I was giving her a bath in my dreams and she mentioned to me that your mother needs a job. Well, I knew just what to do. The people in this town are so weird and unforgiving when it comes to murderers.” Hanna thinks that’s rock bottom for the day but that’s because she doesn’t know what’s going to happen next, which is: Caleb getting squirrelley with her and saying “it’s complicated” three thousand times because he has to go back to Ravenswood. It’s kind of bonkers that he doesn’t just straight up come out and say, “My best friend is a ghost and I also keep getting myself murdered.” Like it’d be such a stretch for Hanna to wrap her mind-grapes around that scenario.

Over at the Hastings’, Peter comes home for a record second night in a row to find Toby fawning over Spencer even more than usual. He’s like, “Mr. Hastings, your daughter is so dang smart!” And Peter is all, “Well, she’s not Melissa smart, but yeah, she’s pretty good at figuring out most stuff.”

Then Toby does that thing. You know the thing. Like, your person, your best friend, your partner, your girlfriend, your wife. Your person listens to all your inane ruminations and rants and raves and obsessions because that’s what they do. But that’s your person. The other people in your life, they don’t care about that shit. No one wants to hear you talk about, like, what you hated about the latest issue of Batwoman for 55 hours straight, but your person will do it because they love you best. But you can’t go into your person’s parents’ house and start in on some kind of arcane diatribe about Batwoman because your person’s parents do not give a shit.

Except when Toby explains his whole mom storyline, Peter super gives a shit. In fact, he suggests a way to make this storyline last another full half-season: How about getting Radley’s parent company to just shut Radley down? (Andy Reaser wants me to tell you his joke he didn’t think of in time to make it into the #BooRadleyVanCullen tweets last night: “I want to see Radley taken apart, doll by doll!”) (I LOL-ed.) Toby thinks it’s a great idea. Spencer thinks her dad has six layers of ulterior motives in tearing that place down. Also, she hasn’t quite given up the dream of another ghostly waltz with Ali, if you want to know the truth.

Aria and Ezra meet up in the town square and he asks if she wants to drive somewhere creepy as fuck with him and she’s like, “Duh, that’s the whole premise of this show.” So they go to a cabin in the woods where phone and internets and iPads and stuff don’t work at all. Last time a Liar did that, Paige McCullers ended up bound and gagged inside a closet and Emily stabbed a fake cousin to death on top of a lighthouse. Sadly, Ezra and Aria just confess their love and hook up. But happily, as Aria looks out the window afterwards and ponders how to break this news to Kung Fu Jake without really telling him anything at all, Ezra sneeky-glances down to this secret floorboard compartment where he’s definitely hiding body parts like Mona said he was!

AU!Hanna shows up at The Brew and Emily almost smashes her in the noggin with a kettle of boiling water before remembering this is just what happens when she meets women: They chase her down and try to marry her. AU!Hanna has a lot of guilt. Emily-sized guilt.

AU!Hanna: Before AU!Ali died, I wanted her to die. Emily: I feel you. AU!Hanna: No, like sometimes at therapy I get hypnotized into believing I walloped her in the face with a shovel and I like it. Emily: No, really, I feel you. AU!Hanna: If I ever found out she was still really alive, I think it might make me act like a for real asshole to the people I love most. Emily: Dude, seriously. I know. AU!Hanna: Because I loved AU!Ali but I also just really fucking hated her guts. Emily: Yep.

On the window seat in Emily’s room, the one that is plump with a thousand Paily tears and feelings and confessions, Paige sits with her hands in her lap and waits for Emily to explain her latest round of PTSD. Emily can’t actually say that Ali is alive yet for a lot of reasons, one of the main ones being that Paige would lose her goddamn mind, so instead she starts talking about how Ali gay-shamed her. It’s actually a really beautiful scene. Emily says that Ali let Emily kiss her once, which she thought was a gift, but then realized was really only Emily crafting her own Emily-specific ammunition with her soul strings and loading that shit right into Ali’s gun. Paige had this conversation with Emily once, a little bit, in the karaoke bar, but it was only abstract then because Paige was still in the closet and neither of them had ever said the words “puffy drapes” out loud. In typical Paige fashion, she doesn’t mention the way Ali called her “Pigskin” and stole her first love letter to Emily and forced her so deep into her own personal self-hating hell that she barely survived.

Instead she says, “I hate her for hurting you. Hearing her name basically makes my head burst into flames. But if you need to open yourself up to that pain to let it go, we can hold hands just like we did when I opened myself up and let go of the pain of being closeted, right here on this window seat, just by saying it out loud.”

You know this shot; it’s the “if I say it out loud” hand-holding shot, revered so that Paige is the comforter this time.

Fear of the name only increases fear of the thing itself. Albus Dumbledore said that. A wizard who believed in the power of redemption and the danger of Sorting too soon. You know Paige attends the church of Albus Dumbledore. A good thing, too, since he’s one of the only people in the world who knows how to destroy horcruxes.

Hanna and Caleb finally break-up for real and it’s way sadder than you even imagined, despite the fact that we’ve known it was coming since ABC Family first said the word “Ravenswood.” She slams the door two times to try to keep him from walking away, but she lets him walk out the third time and falls right into her mom’s arms because her dad did this same thing to them once too and old wounds suck llama balls. Hanna doesn’t just let Caleb go, though. She follows him to town and reminds him not to forget the coffee he left on the roof of his car and he says he won’t forget anything and he ugly-cries his way right out of town. Oh, beautiful hobo. If you ever find yourself missing the full spectrum of color, you always know where to find us. Our central heating and air ducts are always open to you.

Out in the hills at Ezra’s “friend’s” cabin, The Risen Mitten opens the secret floorboard compartment and whistles down the stairs for Tippi the Bird to come on up to the kitchen for a rotisserie chicken supper.

Guys, guys, guys, it is so great to be back! As always, I have got to give Maggie (@MargaretRosey) an enormous shout-out/internet hug for creating the greatest screencaps on the internet. This season she’s even sharing her full albums with you guys so you can grab the caps and use them for your own projects. If you take any of them, be sure to tweet her your thanks. She works really, really hard.

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