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“Pretty Little Liars” recap (4.21): The Scarlet Letter

Previously on Pretty Little Liars, Spencer staged an intervention to tell Aria she was dating Ali’s Board Shorts, but it turned into an intervention for Spencer because she was addicted to Adderall. Shana fled Rosewood after driving Emily all over town for secret meetings with Ali and coaxing Emily into retrieving some of the cash Ali had stashed here and there and in every porcelain doll head in Pennsylvania. Hanna made a move on Travis from the tow truck company, but Ashley intervened and took her to smash some plates instead of some hearts. And Ezra finally revealed to Aria that he dated Ali, knew who Aria was before he started dating her, and has been writing a “True Crime” novel about Ali’s fake death for the last two years, a thing that required an NSA level of secret surveillance on unsuspecting people, including all the Liars. There was a ski lift. Faces were made.

Aria has assembled the Liars at her house to reveal to them that Ezra is not A, but is, in fact, the creepiest guy they have ever met in a town that requires proof of extradimensonal creepiness before it allows you to become a citizen. They listen intently as she explains his “True Crime” novel and how he’s been spying on them all these years and how he thinks one of them killed Alison. Emily is the first one to say out loud, “So you mean he’s been watching A torture us all this time, but he hasn’t done one single goddamn thing to intervene and help us?” And Aria says, “Yep, because he didn’t love me.”

Now here’s the rub but I don’t want to belabor it because clearly I’ve got other stuff to write about in this episode. More than once, Aria says that Ezra didn’t love her, and then offers up various proofs, like how he watched an omnipresent demon ninja nearly kill her on multiple occasions, how he’s going ahead and publishing that book, and blah blah blah. She’s grasping for any sliver of evidence that he loved her, which is normal, and maybe he did. But it doesn’t matter. He is a guy who dated a 15 year old, then knowingly seduced a 16 year old and engaged in a relationship with her, while secretly spying on her and her best friends (for two years!), while abusing the position of power he had over all three of them.

So when Aria goes to bed and remembers the day they met, and she puts the new frame around the memory, she jumps up and vomits. Poor lamb. (Lucy Hale acts this shit out of this episode.)

Spencer’s mom and dad have hologrammed themselves into the Hastings family kitchen this morning, taking time from their busy Out of Town doings to persuade Spencer to go to rehab. She’s worried that with rehab and Radley on her record, she’ll never get into college, and any other set of parents in the world, they’d go, “That is the least of our worries right now, sweetheart; the most important thing is for you to get well.” But the Hastings’ are like, “You make a good point: Not getting accepted into an Ivy is worse than death. Good luck with your pill habit!”

Rosewood high lockers: Hanna sees Travis milling around in a suit and when she presses him, he says he’s going to court because the stuff Wilden was using to blackmail his dad has finally come out, and the cops have arrested him. Spencer finds some uppers in her locker, a gift from A, and when Emily offers to take them and dispose of them, Spencer demures and says it would be better if she puts them in her purse and carries them around town and throws them away when she’s ready. Emily goes, “Yeah, that makes sense, in terms of addiction.” Spencer doing Jedi mind tricks on everyone this morning! I guess some of that adrenalized hyperreality is still in her system!

Emily barely has time to mention Shana’s new plans for Ali’s money when the Liars spot Aria marching by, thunder exploding in a personal cloud over her head and hair crackling with electricity, eyeballs as big as the moon. They try to stop her from smashing through Mr. Fitz’s door and demanding that the substitute teacher produce Ezra right this second. When the sub just stands there looking hornswoggled, Aria crashes back through the door and stomps down the hall shouting, “LIAR AND A COWARD!” She doesn’t want the Liars to take her home! She doesn’t want a hug! She wants to find Ezra Fitz and run him through with an enchanted sword!

In the courtyard at school, Emily blitzes by Paige without a hello and so Paige has to call after her, like, “Uh, hey, girlfriend!” Then:

Paige: We should hang out some time due to us being lovers. Emily: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I gotta deal with Aria’s public meltdown later and then do a couple of errands. Get poisoned by my toothpaste. Dig my mom out of the rubble in the kitchen where a truck ran through the wall. Just the regular stuff. Paige: Is that one hundred thousand dollars of cash money in your backpack? Emily: Yeah, it’s my birthday present from my grandma. Paige: Your grandmother gave you a wad of hundred dollar bills totaling one hundred thousand dollars for your birthday? Emily: Yeah, her mattress is stuffed with money. It’s what people do because of The Depression. Paige: Sure, OK. You wanna grab some dinner after you go to the bank and deposit the one hundred thousand dollars in cash that your grandma dug out of her mattress and gave you for your birthday? Emily: Yep, sounds good!
Paige rolls her eyes when Emily kisses her and walks away.

Aria does not find Ezra, but that doesn’t stop her from breaking into his apartment and very nearly burning it to the ground. She goes through all of his “True Crime” novel files. Just boxes upon boxes of feelings journals full of feelings about how Aria is spilling her guts and the guts of all the Liars because she suspects nothing. He even writes down one of her most painful memories about finding out her dad was doing to Meredith what Ezra was doing to her. She throws stuff and knocks stuff over and growls and howls and stabs things and rips prints off the wall. She spares his typewriter, because even when she’s losing her goddamn mind, she’s still Aria.

Also still herself despite going through withdrawals the likes of which I have never seen in my life from ADD medication, is Spencer Hastings. The Liars find Aria crying in the wreckage of Ezra’s apartment. When they rush in to make sure she’s OK, she says in the smallest, saddest voice that now, in addition to dealing with the knowledge that Ezra was creeping on them for two years after dating Alison DiLaurentis, she also has realized that she just handed him their secrets too. Emily and Hannah pull Aria to her feet and help her to the door, but Spencer, just sweating and shaking and convulsing, is like, “The hell you say. We are not leaving all these clues behind.” Hannah goes, “Spencer!” And Spencer is like, “Look, if Santa wrecked his sleigh, it’d be sad that Christmas was over forever, but that doesn’t negate the fact that somebody’s going to get their hands on all those toys.”

On the way home from Ezra’s Hanna pops by the court house to visit her reading club buddy, Detective Holbrook. She asks him not to press charges against Travis’ dad because Wilden was an abuser who deserved to die, and Travis’ dad was trying to get out from under his manipulative thumb. Holbrook sighs and says he cannot sidestep the law, even for Hanna Marin and her beautiful face. Maybe if she wasn’t wearing some floral patterned feety pajamas, he could. But not today.

Emily goes to the post office to drop off Ali’s satchel of money and you know Paige has followed her ass there, like, “Hey, Ems. I’m also here to deposit an obscene amount of birthday money into the bank – oh, wait. Is this not a bank? Is this a random post office in a random town where a person might go to do, gosh I don’t know, A stuff?” Emily frog-marches her outside and things get real ugly.

Paige grabs the envelope of money from Emily’s hands and threatens to turn it over to the police if she doesn’t start talking, a thing that makes my internal temperature rise about ten degrees, and not in a good way, because you know this conversation is heading straight to Ultimatumville. Finally Emily shouts out, in the middle of the day in the middle of the street, “ALISON DILAURENTIS IS ALIVE, OK?”

Paige’s face looks like when you see Godzilla for the first time after a lifetime of people telling you there’s no such things as Godzillas. They go to the park and sit on a bench and:

Emily: I really wanted to tell you. Paige: Nope. Emily: She’s afraid and alone and she needs that money. Paige: I’m sorry, I just – the girl who made both of our lives, and the lives of your three best friends, a series of hellscapes has been faking her own death for two years and now she’s back and you’re very clearly putting your life, my life, and our relationship in jeopardy to help this monster? Emily: Kind of. Yes, to the jeopardy thing, but she’s not a monster anymore. Paige: Let me just say again: Nope.

Emily: Look, regardless of what she’s done, she’s in serious trouble and she’s broke and she’s on the run and who I am on the inside will not allow me to ignore that. Paige: Fine, you can have this money back … if you promise to cut off contact with her. Emily: Fine, but if you tell literally anyone about this, I will seriously never forgive you. Paige: Cool, so we’ve both just taken away each other’s autonomy in one single conversation? Emily: Sure sounds like it!

One of the things that makes serial storytelling so tricky is that every writer on earth is working from the same Big Book of Stories and the temptation is to turn the page to a different thing but land the same punches over and over and over again. It’s why on most shows, after about three seasons, characters usually become caricatures of themselves. Their redeeming qualities and their comical conditioning and their foibles become more and more exaggerated and they end up sort of collapsing in on themselves as they live out the same tale in a different room or a different city or with a different partner.

Pretty Little Liars falls victim to that sometimes because all TV falls victim to that sometimes, and life is that way too – a Spencer Hastings, for example, is never only going to Radley one time – but the character they’ve sidestepped that trap with the most has been Emily, which is something I find shocking almost every time I think about it. It’s not just that she’s a lesbian and I’m so used to tired tropes or elementary school fables when it comes to gay characters on TV, but also because Emily’s whole deal is: she works hard, she loves everyone, and she makes courage look easy. There’s a reason the Harry Potter series didn’t revolve around the Hufflepuff house; there are only so many ways you can say how nice a person is before the audience falls asleep. Gryffindors and Slytherins, that’s where the action is.

But Emily Fields, the writers keep putting her in these impossible situations and asking her to fight her way out without violating her core goodness, a conundrum that is as rare as a unicorn on television and seventy-eleven billion times more interesting than whatever coming out/cheating/pregnancy/death thing is everywhere else. And this story she finds herself in right now is like the ultimate challenge of her innate Emily-ness.

On the one side you’ve got Emily and Paige doing the exact same horrible thing to each other, which is: Taking away the other person’s agency in the name of safety and love.

After everything Paige has been through with being emotionally tortured by Ali and then physically tortured by ol’ Lyndon James, she needs to have all the facts in front of her and make her own decisions. And by refusing to tell Paige the truth, Emily is blowing up their relationship because Paige can’t trust her and Emily’s guilt is causing her to avoid Paige – but more than that, she’s robbing Paige of her right to have jurisdiction over her own life. Which is never a fair thing, and is especially unfair when Emily’s secrecy one time led to Paige being kidnapped, stuffed in a trunk, and bound and gagged in a murder cabin, with a knife pressed against her throat by Emily’s ex-girlfriend’s fake cousin.

And Paige is doing the exact same thing to Emily. Sure, it makes perfect sense that she’d write that letter to the police in a little while, and that she’d grab that money and start demanding things. It makes sense for a billion reasons, some of them motivated out of burning love for Emily and a frantic fear for her safety, some of them motivated out of emotional PTSD and straight-up self-preservation because of her past with Ali, and some of them, surely, are born out of the knowledge that Alison was Emily’s first love. But Emily says to her, very specifically, “Do not take this out of my hands, Paige.” And Paige nods and kisses her on the cheek and takes it right out of her hands. And, like a mirror, she does this to a girl whose agency has been violated in a myriad of horrific ways over the last two years.

OK, and one the other side you’ve got Emily and Allison, whose love for each other was born out of a toxic soil of closeted codependency and emotional manipulation, but was watered with a genuine affection and admiration for one another. Ali also stole Emily’s agency from her, for lots of reasons. Ironically, she wanted to teach her little mermaid to claim her own power. Not so ironically, she wanted to keep her little mermaid in a cage where she could be comforted and strengthened by her golden love.

The common denominator of those equations is Emily and the variables in those equations hate each other’s guts. And not in some catty “Make no mistake, she’s mine!” kind of way (although, admittedly, that’s got to be part of it), but in a “She keeps me warm” “Well, she keeps me safe” kind of way. And so then: Now what, Emily? Keep your Hufflepuffness intact while honoring the girl you love, the girl you promised to share a future with; and saving the girl you’ll always love with a piece of your true self, the girl who made and broke you in a hundred ways in the past. Gain the world; don’t lose your soul. Wrap your arms around everyone and make them all OK.

For me, you can shake every single Pretty Little Liars thing down to one core idea. Jenna is the one who said it, back in season three, when the Liars found out she had her sight again and were trying to coerce her into making their lives easier by making her life infinitely harder. What she said was:”This is the new deal: I feel a lot safer when I am in charge of what happens to me.”

This show is a commentary on a lot of things. Surveillance culture. Fight vs. flight responses, both socially and physically. The psychology of identity. The abuse of authority. Toby and Caleb and Paige have never been wrong for wanting to save their girlfriends’ lives; nor have they been wrong because their altruism was muddled with their own self-preservation instincts. But what they keep doing is violating the one thing the Liars are fighting so hard to wrap their hands around, which is the real thing this show is about, at the end of the day: a group of young women battling their way through a culture saturated in rape and victim blaming, pulling each other and pushing themselves to a place where they can stand up and say what Jenna said. “This is the new deal: I am in charge of what happens to me.”

Other people’s secrets give you power. Ali figured that out very early in life. And now everyone she touched is trying to reclaim themselves, including Paige and Emily. And their secrets, right now, their sources of power, are at complete odds with each other. And that shit is the opposite of black and white.

So, I mean. Wag your finger, if you want, and fall into that #Paily vs. #Emison trap that oversimplifies this glorious story to an absolutely insulting degree. But I’m not going to do that. Watching Paige drop off that letter last night, it felt like a physical punch right in my heartspace. But not in a way where I felt violated by the story or the writers. That right there was a total Paige McCullers move. In fact, it exhibited a level of McCullers-ness that I frankly worried was gone from her forever. She’s a gay girl who almost took her own life because Alison hurled so much shame and hate at her. But she won! She accepted her deal! She came out! And she got the girl! Not just any girl: Paige McCullers got the girl!

She’s a beautiful, competitive, cupcake-eating, trash can-smashing, tender-smoochin, insecurity-pummeling firecracker of a human being, who came face-to-face with the knowledge that her torturer is alive and putting her girlfriend’s life and her relationship in danger. What the heck did you want her to do? Paige McCullers isn’t going to roll over and play dead. She’s going to do the opposite of that in the way that causes the most collateral damage. She’s not going to stop until she finds a coconut one!

The reason this episode is so devastating is because it makes perfect sense. Emily and Ali, individually, drove Paige to do something that of course she was going to do, and in going there, she’s going to drive Emily right away from her. Shipping wars are predicated on the idea that whoever does right and is right gets the girl and whoever does wrong and is wrong loses the girl, but that’s fucking ridiculous because that’s not how life works, even a little bit, and if the totality of a relationship can be boiled down to something you can shout in 140 characters, it’s not a relationship I care about investing myself in, emotionally.

This was always going to happen to Paige and Emily if Ali really was alive. In my perfect world, we’ll get to see Paige and Ali battle it out like lightning next season, and I don’t just mean in a fisticuffs for Emily’s heart. I mean, we’ll get to see Paige take her victorious journey even further, conquering ghosts and zombies and echos of shadows she never knew she’d have to fight. And we’ll see Ali taking back what was stolen from her by whomever has been stalking her like prey, while she continues to challenge our Madonna-whore complexes. We’ll get to see Paige form alliances with unlikely Liars, or find solace with Toby or Caleb or (god-willing) Mona. I love Paige McCullers and you know exactly how much. I love Emily, too. I don’t love Ali, but I want to know her story, for real. Give me Katsa. Give me Sansa. Give me Hermione Granger, Katniss Everdeen, and Susan Pevensie. I’ll take Lisbeth Salander and Scarlett O’Hara. I’ll take Lyra and Eowyn and Hester Prynne. Shit, man, even this show’s ubiquitous red “A” is a play on The Scarlet Letter.

Right now, though, I feel heartbroken because of how organic this catastrophe is, and really lucky that Emily and Paige are the kind of gay characters I’ve been dreaming about watching for my whole grown-up life. I feel lucky that their heartbreak is as anchored to the ethos of Rosewood as Aria and Spencer and Hanna’s. You know how the people you love best can make you the most angry and the most sad because life is is a prism of a zillion different colored motivations? It’s like that, coming and going in two completely different directions.

Anyway, so over at Spencer’s, she’s rifling through all the stuff that she scored at Ezra’s and she finds a business card for the PI that her dad told her he hired to follow Melissa, but Ezra has intimated that it was Spencer he was following. And also she finds a flashback scribbled into his journal: On the night Ali got murdered, Spencer chased her into her backyard, an extension of the fight they were having in Spencer’s living room about Spencer coming clean to Melissa about boning Ian, I think. Spencer picked up a shovel and reared back and scowled. It’s the same memory Emily had about killing Ali, so I think what’s happening is Annabeth Gish is going around town planting these things in all the Liars’ brains on the sly.

Spencer handles this trip into the Pensieve exactly how you’d expect. She yells at her dad. She yells at Toby, then tricks him into looking up at some clouds so she can escape from him. I can’t explain the way Toby explains this to Peter, but it is so funny for some reason: “She asked me to go into the Brew to get some coffees, but when I turned around, she was gone!” I think it’s how earnest his face is, like he lost a puppy or something.

Where Spencer has gone is to the DiLaurentis house to manhandle Jessica and demand some answers. Did she see Spencer attack Ali? If so, why didn’t she ever say anything? What is the secret she has with Peter, besides their bastard with that hair, and why won’t anyone tell her if she’s a murderer. She legit scares Jessica, which is no small accomplishment considering her daughter was constantly getting her way by holding her breath until she passed right the fuck out. So she tells Spencer to scram.

Back at home, Toby and the Hastings’ holograms say Spencer’s gotta get some help. And she does. She took those pills A left for her.

Also out roaming the nighttime streets is Aria. Hanna intercepts her on her way to Holbrook’s house to confess to having a relationship with Mr. Fitz. Again, the saddest thing: What sent her over this new edge isn’t more rumination on the way he exploited her, but more proof that “he doesn’t love me!” because she called his publishing company and found out he’s going through the book. Baby girl, even if he doesn’t publish that book, even if he does love you, it’s a moot point. Man, she’s gonna need some therapy. We’re all gonna need some therapy.

Finally, back at Emily’s, Paige wants to make out and make some dinner, but Emily is like, “Aren’t you even a little bit grossed out by what we did to each other today?” Paige is like, “Yeah, but I’m going to do something real dumb if I leave here.” So but Emily asks her to leave, and she does something real dumb (for very understandable reasons, which I spent a thousand years writing about above). She writes a letter to the cops telling them Ali is alive, she points them in the right direction, and she drops the note inside a police car. Sometimes a thing is more real than right or wrong.

The Risen Mitten drinks some wine and sits in front of the fire and thinks about burning Ezra’s “True Crime” novel.

One zillion thanks to my screencapping partner @margaretrosey. She got Mona on Buzzfeed’s “Which PLL character are you?” test and I got Toby, so we’re only relating to each other in character now. So I should tell you she is my Lord and my Savior. She is my queen. And here are all her screencaps.

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