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“Pretty Little Liars” recap (4.24): You ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?

Previously on Pretty Little Liars, Alison DiLaurentis punched the space-time continuum in the teeth and knocked it out long enough for her to: fly from Hilton Head to Philadelphia (like literally fly; as in, she was the pilot of the plane); visit Jenna in blindness rehab; take a cab to Rosewood; rent a storage locker for one of her many lunchboxes full of clues; hide the key to the storage locker in a doll’s head in Emily’s bedroom; make some porn with Ian at the kissing rock; entertain visits from Jason, Cece, Melissa, Byron, Jenna, Garrett, and Spencer in her backyard; attend a sleepover with her high school best friends; rub Toby’s DNA all over her monogrammed friendship bracelet; and get clonked in the head and buried alive and pulled up out of the dirt like a winter tulip by a psychic sorority mom who lived in the walls of Cicero College. Like in the span of what should have been a single Labor Day, Alison DiLaurentis accomplished all of that. And so much more.

Let’s do it like this: With the help of Noel Kahn, who I guess was Ali’s grandma’s neighbor in Georgia on the other side of the yard, the side where Shana’s family didn’t live, the Liars meet up with Ali at her place of employment. She has decided to come clean to them, a thing she couldn’t figure out how to do, except for in bits and pieces hidden away inside porcelain doll skulls tucked away in haunted houses flush with mad mirrors, these last few years. Have a cup of coffee and settle in for a tale to beat all tales from the world’s most fabulous fabulist. (Just kidding; don’t drink the coffee – it is 100 percent roofied.)

What you know: Ali spent most of Labor Day weekend in Hilton Head, where Ian won a golf tournament and paid for a lover’s suite for two at Tippi B&B.

The whole story: Ali had been getting threatening texts from A and severed, blood-soaked doll parts in the mail ever since that Halloween where one of the baby-face burlap-sack zombies menaced her in an abandoned house, so she thought a romantic weekend away with Melissa’s boyfriend was just the thing she needed. Unfortunately for her peace of mind, Melissa showed up and went full Hastings on the situation. When Ali overheard Ian saying he was just messing around with Ali to pass the time until Melissa came back to him, she allowed herself three nanoseconds of hurt feelings before shifting into combat mode and hacking into his computer. Her first instinct, by the way; the hacking. Caleb would be so impressed. What she found was a hard drive full of peeping tom vids, courtesy of the NAT Club, including a clip of Jenna forcing Toby to make monkey with her.

What you know: Ali visited Jenna at Philadelphia’s Hospital for Newly Blind Sexy People.

The whole story: Ali thought maybe it was Jenna who was doing the A stuff to her. Maybe she was mad ’cause Ali wore it better re: Lady Gaga on Halloween. Maybe she was mad because Jenna had eyes for Emily at said Halloween party, but Emily only had eyes for Ali. Or maybe, just maybe, she was mad because those eyes she had for Emily were no longer working at all due to being hit right in the face with a firecracker thrown by Alison DiLaurentis. Either way, she had plenty of reasons to be pissed as literal hell at Ali. So Ali popped by for a visit and showed her the video she found on Ian’s computer of the monkey-making with Toby and his hair. Ali promised to release the video into the wild if the texts didn’t stop.

What you know: Ali wore a yellow shirt for one million hours on the one night she was murdered.

The whole story: Ali put on that shirt and went downstairs, where her mother was having a frantic phone conversation about, “You have to send someone right now! I’m very worried! Fuck you, suck a pair of frog nuts, you do what I say!” Alison was halfway out the door when Jessica told her to march her ass right back upstairs and settle in for the night. Ali told her if she was worried about the bullying situation, she could dial it back, because she had a list she was working from and tonight was the night she was going to figure out a way to subdue every single potential threat. Jessica DiLaurentis, she just huffed and said, “Do you have eight sets of eyeballs, because if not, you can forget about ever leaving your room again, due to: there are four Hastingses and you can’t turn your back on any of them.” But then she picked back up her phone and started squawking, so Ali borrowed some of her sedation pills and hit the trail.

What you know: The Liars had a sleepover in Spencer’s barn the night Ali died. Beyonce was discussed at too much length by a young, closeted Emily Fields. Aria’s hair had the pink stripe.

The whole story: After explaining to Emily that every person likes Beyonce, but when you’re fixated on Beyonce’s boobs enough to sl0w-mo her videos on repeat, probably there is something gayer going on with you, Ali drugged the Liars with her mom’s sleeping pills. She rejected a couple of calls from Toby during the roofie-ing process, but once the Liars were all tuckered out, she met him outside the barn where he told her there were no hard feelings for getting him sent off to juvie because, for one thing, it introduced him to do-rags, and for another, it stopped him getting raped by his sister. Ali was happy he was happy. Getting to blind someone with fire was just a bonus. A side-dream, really.

What you know: Ali was boning Ezra.

The whole story: LOL, JK. They were not boning.* They met at the Hart and the Huntsman where she ordered a gin and tonic in Ezra’s peripheral vision with a fake ID and so he definitely thought she was at least 21, OK? He was of course reading Tender is the Night – “You’re the only girl I’ve seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming” / “I am a woman and my business is to hold things together” – which she Website Paged on her phone and chatted him up about. They had a relationship that did not include sex, which she reminded him of the night she died. He zoomed on up to her door in his Prius talking about, “15?! Are you effing kidding me?” She shrugged it off. She told him when she met him that lies were more fun than the truth. When she left him that night, he said he’d never see her again, and she said, “S’cool, but you better spell my name correctly in your book.”

What you know: Ali was boning Ian.

The whole story: LOL, JK some more. They also were not boning.* They were courting in a celibate way, despite what the homemade mausoleum porn would have you believe, a thing he reiterated aloud to her at the kissing rock the night she died. She was in survival mode by then, and honestly didn’t give two poops about the romance, but she did tell him to tell Melissa to back the heck off of her or all his NAT Club videos were going to the po-lice and the You-Tubes. He didn’t take that news very well. He tried to reason with her that releasing the videos would ruin her family, but Jason already almost clubbed her in the head with a hockey stick once that summer, so she had a hard time summoning some fucks to give about his hypothetical demise.

(*If this finale has one failing, in my eyes, it’s that it went out of its way to shoehorn in the idea that Ali is a virgin. And the reason that rubs me the wrong way is that it plays into the idea that a woman can’t be innocent unless she’s innocent. Like, how gross is it that “innocent” means “not sexually active” in our society? Real gross, is how gross. I had hoped we might see Ali challenging that virgin/whore complex that permeates nearly every pop culture conversation we have about women these days. There was this article in TV Guide a couple of weeks ago that said, no lie, “Viewers recently learned that Ali, an overly sexual instigator” blah blah blah. And while it didn’t come right out and say it, the intimation was that she kind of got what was coming to her because she was a fifteen year old who wasn’t ashamed of wanting to fuck. It’s not fair to want Pretty Little Liars to be everything, but it’s so good so I do!)

What you know: Spencer picked up a shovel and hollered at Ali in her backyard.

The whole story: The reason Ali’s roofies didn’t work on Spencer is because she was “speeding” on her ADHD meds. So, when she woke up from her little cat nap in the barn, she went looking for Ali to finish the fight they were having about how she needed to come clean to Melissa about snogging Ian. When Spencer made to swing the shovel at Ali’s head, her pill bottle fell out of somewhere and Ali was like, “Dude, come on. I know you watched Saved By the Bell.” Two amazing things in succession: 1) Spencer followed along behind Ali, dragging a shovel with her like how Charlie Brown would do. The sound mix in this scene is so awesome. 2) She knelt down in front of Ali to beg her not to tell Veronica and Peter about the drug thing, which caused Dana Piccoli and Valerie Anne and I to jump out of our chairs. The way it was filmed, Spencer slipping down out of the frame and Ali’s face, was some straight up AO3 tomfoolery. Spencer went back to the barn and went back to sleep, meaning she neither clubbed Ali nor one of the fifty Ali lookalikes in masks and yellow tank tops running around Rosewood on Labor Day night.

What you know: Ali got smacked in the face with a shovel and buried in her backyard.

The whole story: Ali got smacked in the face with a rock and buried in her backyard, a thing her mom watched from the kitchen window, before burying her alive. (Hanna, verbatim: “I can’t believe your mom buried you alive!”) The whole time she was shoveling dirt on top of her daughter’s almost-corpse, she was crying and talking about, “You twat, I can’t believe you’d do this!” While Ali silently screamed for help. Luckily, as you know, The Grunwald had a premonition that one of the many garden tools being swung at Ali’s head that night would eventually make contact, so she went on over to Ali’s house and pulled her out of the ground. She took Ali to the hospital, but Ali left because A was still on the loose.

What you know: Ali returned to Rosewood for the first time to visit Hanna in the hospital.

The whole story: Correct, actually, and also probably to steal the cookies from her hospital tray so as not to encourage a hefty backslide in a time of such duress.

What you know: Someone in s black hoodie saved Spencer’s life by pushing Ian off that bell tower.

The whole story: IT WAS ALI!

What you hoped was true but scarcely dared to believe: While walking aimlessly down the road, covered in grave dirt and bleeding freely from her forehead, Ali ran into Mona Vanderwaal. The one with the pigtails and glasses who danced in church. Mona took her to the Lost Woods Resort, cleaned her up, tucked her into bed, kissed her forehead, told her she should Tom Sawyer herself right out of town and stay fake dead to stay safe forever, and then bebopped over to the adjacent room, which was already her A lair! OK, in this room, where the walls were plastered with photos of Ali’s face, was a doll house that also was plastered with photos of Ali’s face. Jesus Christ Allvanderwaal! So good. Mona brushed her Ali doll’s hair and put her in the doll house and set out to the mall to buy human Ali some new clothes.

Before she helped Ali escape, under the Vivian Darkbloom alias, red coat in hand, Mona was treated to some makeover tips from Alison: “Burn the knee socks. No, burn your whole entire wardrobe and those barrettes. Lose the pigtails. Use my stylist and my cosmetologist and when somebody staples a cow brain to the inside of your locker, you fucking force feed them cow brain soup for supper.” Mona thanked her, stood outside in her Amish clothes for the last time, and watched her walk away.

Batman: You ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight? I’m going to kill you!Joker: You idiot! You made me, remember? You dropped me into that vat of chemicals. That wasn’t easy to get over, and don’t think that I didn’t try!Batman: I know you did. You killed my parents.Joker: Wha-what? What are you talking about?Batman: I made you – you made me first.Joker: Hey, bat-brain, I was a kid when I killed your parents! I mean, I say I made you, you’ve gotta say you made me … how childish can you get? [Puts on a pair of glasses] You wouldn’t hit a guy with glasses, would you?While Ali is filling in many of our gaps in knowledge, Detective Holbrook rounds up a full house of suspects down at the precinct. There’s Cece Drake, glorious with no makeup, and while she will not confess to killing Wilden, she does confess to knowing who it is that is buried in Ali D’s grave. Also questioned are Peter and Melissa (who came home when she ran into Toby in the quaint English village of London (pop. three hundred) and Veronica, who offer the police nothing, but that doesn’t mean Melissa doesn’t know who killed the girl whose name Cece knows. She whispers it to her dad. It’s a cop out, but if it means more shady Melissa in season five, I’ll take it.

The cops think they’re closing in on the Liars in Philly. Hilariously, one of the desk cops just first-name-checks Spencer, like, “We’ve got a lock on Spencer’s car.” That’s how often she comes up in conversation here. But the joke is on the cops of Pennsylvania, again. The Liars are in New York. But someone knows. A masked person with a gun, who shows up and fires at the storefront window where the Liars are chatting. They make a break for the roof. When the door bursts open behind them, they are shocked to find Ezra on the other side. (Not shocked: Me and Val and Dana. At the same time, before we even saw him, we said in unison like some Liars reading some texts: “Ezra. Came to get redeemed, gonna get shot.”) And that is exactly what happens. The masked man (or woman? 40/60 on it being Paige, to be honest) shoots Ezra in the gut and jumps from one rooftop to the other. It’s a ballsy move considering that Hanna grabbed his (or her?) gun and screamed for him (or her?) to take off his (or her?) mask in such hysterics!

Then, it’s all eyes on Ezra, who is bleeding out on the rooftop while Aria cries and cries and shakes her fist at the sky. “He was supposed to always be home eating cakes and being virginal!” she screams. “He was supposed to have the feelings of a gentle lamb! A lamb!

That was a joke. The real thing all eyes are on is Emily’s hair. Three heartbeats from death and she could still be starring in a shampoo commercial.

The Risen Mitten wallops Jessica DiLaurentis in the noggin with a shovel and drops her dead ass in that hole where everyone in town gets buried at one time or another. Poor ol’ Maya. The only one of Emily’s girlfriends to never roofie her, buried in that same spot.

One gazillion bardrillion thanks to my screencapping partner Maggie who stuck with me this whole season despite thousands of miles of travel and exciting life changes. Maggie, I owe you so many coconut cupcakes. If you ever get buried alive in your backyard, me and my parrot will dig you up. I promise. And a million thank yous to you guys for sticking with me for another season. We’ll meet again on June 10. You bring the chickpeas. Just kidding, I already have the chickpeas. OR DO I?

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