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“Pretty Little Liars” recap (5.4): Chaos is what killed the dinosaurs, darling!

Previously on Pretty Little Liars, the Liars got themselves wrapped up in a new lie about how Ali was abducted and held hostage for two years. Through a series of shiveringly sapphic flashbacks, Hanna discovered that Mona made her in Ali’s image. Paige was like “fuck this noise” and ramped up her hotness to fifty-eleven, making no sorries about protecting Emily but making a lot of sad faces about how it means Emily hates her now. Spencer shouted from the top of the belfry (you know the one) that Mrs. D sent an email about how she couldn’t protect someone anymore for being a murderer before she was murdered. And Pepe the Dog and Tippi the Bird were married in a small ceremony in the park before setting sail on a cruise around the world.

Here’s what you know about Aria Montgomery: If she kills a girl, she’s going to start playing it out in real life like a classic film, and since Spence has the noir hallucinations well and fully covered, Aria decides to go the route of Heathers. She’s got the hat, she finds meaningful passages underlined in Shana’s old copy of The Scarlet Letter, and you 100 percent know she’s writing in her feelings journal about: “Dear Diary, my teen-angst bullshit now has a body count.” Mona appears beside her and Hanna at a book fair, like Apparates right onto the scene, sing-songing about how she loves the The Scarlet Letter, the themes of identities thrust upon us by society, the subjective nature of evil. And that giant red A. Mmm boy, does she ever love that A.

She encourages the Liars to buy a copy for Ali since she’ll be returning to school soon, and smiles about the sweet interchangeability of all the teenage girls in this town. “One goes in the hole, another one pops out of the ground like the spring of tender flesh.” (SYDNEY DRISCOLL, RUN!) Mona’s all “nice hair” to Hanna before she bounces away to whatever underground bunker she’s using to store all her dolls and masks and cardigans these days. Hanna’s new hair is awesome, p.s.

At home, Alison is manically cleaning out her closet and presenting her dad with a list of school supplies she needs to return to Rosewood High and shaking and refusing to make eye contact and generally just about to come out of the frame. Her dad wants her to calm down and eat some waffles and never leave the house again, but she points out that sitting in her room thinking about how her mom was found dead in the hole she used to bury her only(?) daughter two summers ago isn’t doing much for her mental health. Mr. D thinks the best possible thing is to move the heck away from their cursed backyard, but Alison won’t hear it. She needs Emily’s heart and Spencer’s brain and Hanna’s courage and Aria’s … um … well … Ali just needs her friends right now, OK?

You think that’s the most frantic thing happening on the block this morning, but whoo boy, no. Veronica Hastings has been hitting Spencer’s Adderall hard core. No sleeping. Just drinking coffee and popping pills and staring out the window at the graveyard they share with the DiLaurentises. She keeps saying how surreal it is that they found that body back there and like – why is everyone getting so butt-town bonkers about all the dead bodies lying around in the Hastinges backyard? They’re acting like it’s the first corpse anyone has ever dug up in their hydrangea bushes. It’s not. It’s the third corpse. What it’s the first of is: The first time one of Emily’s girlfriends wasn’t in that hole.

Even Aria is teetering near the edge of the rails about dead bodies, which is a little more understandable because she’s Aria, but also: She spent a full night almost getting tossed from a train in a box with Officer Garrett’s wide-eyed corpse, so she’s not exactly a noob re: cadavers.

Veronica wants Toby to come do some yard work this weekend and Spencer laughs at that because he is the most successful teenage handyman in the United States of America, and he’s got a job booked at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue this weekend, maybe you’ve heard of it. But Spencer doesn’t want to talk about that. She wants to talk about how Melissa and Peter have the same secret and only two can keep a secret if one of them is dead and that’s not good odds for this family, mathematically. Peter comes downstairs and tells them both to calm down, which is like trying to sing a rattlesnake to sleep, so sure thing, buddy.

Mona and Lucas meet up in the computer lab to try to decide whether or not to move forward with Operation Crack Gretchen Weiners. Lucas is feeling a little uneasy about launching a full scale attack on a girl who was kidnapped and tied up in someone’s basement for two years, a thing that makes Mona even more determined to destroy Alison because Mona knows she’s lying and she’s got proof. What kind of proof? Well, for starters, if you don’t think Mona implanted a tracking chip in Ali’s skull the night she kissed her and tucked her in at Lost Woods resort, the night she was pulled from her own grave by the steady hand of The Grunwald, you don’t know shit about Mona Vanderwall. Plus with her hyperadrenalized superpowers, you can be sure she’s uncovered two years’ worth of photos and videos and audio recordings and flight logs of Ali traipsing up and down the eastern seaboard, pulling people from lodge fires and carbon monoxide-filled barns, visiting people in hospitals, trying on new souls with Cece Drake. #MonaKnows, folks. #MonaKnows.

Emily Fields is spending her morning doing the opposite thing: building people up (instead of blowing people up). She’s training Sydney Driscoll to be a better swimmer. Partly Emily is doing it because she is a precious unicorn in a world of wolves. Partly Emily is doing it because helping out with the swim team any way at all feels familiar and reassuring. Partly Emily is doing it because Pam is driving her nucking futs. I mean, Pam Fields is a woman who makes a habit of counting the pills in the pill bottles in the medicine cabinet just to make sure no one is abusing pain meds to compensate for muscle injuries sustained while rescuing people from being plowed over by cars being driven by maniacs wearing masks of dead girls’ faces, OK? That’s like a Tuesday afternoon for her. And that was before a Chevy drove right into her living room. You better believe the return of Alison DiLaurentis from the grave has got her mama bear senses tingling like some kind of nuclear threat alert.

Emily is like, “Anyway, what a drag, right?” And Sydney, new to this whole town-on-a-Hellmouth thing, is like, “I mean, that seems kind of normal, in terms of parents.”

On the way out of the locker room, Emily almost bumps into Paige. Emily goes, “Sorry.” And Paige is like, “It’s no problem.” And Emily’s face is like, “Eat a dick.” And Paige’s face is like, “So much for modeling how to accept an apology.” And Emily’s eyes roll so big and Paige’s mouth frowns so hard and Sydney Driscoll is like, “…does anyone know if this ‘Shana Fring’ is going to want any of the stuff she left in her locker?”

Outside, the Liars eat some lunch and talk about how everybody’s gawking at them and whispering about how they’re friends with a zombie and asking intrusive questions. Spencer is dealing with it by drinking as much caffeine as she can get her hands on and reciting pi to the 57th decimal and strategizing a way to literally crawl into Melissa’s ear and extract information from her brain. Hanna is handling it by bonking people on the heads with dodgeballs. Aria is handling it by – just kidding, Aria is not handling anything. She’s a mess and she’s still wearing Winona Ryder’s hat. Emily is handling it it by blaming everything on Paige. They peep Mona peeping them and feel scared about what voodoo she’s cooking up.

They agree vehemently that no one in Spencer’s family killed Jessica D., which of course means it was Veronica, and then their phones ding at the same time. Just when you start to get your hopes up that they’re going to read a threatening text message aloud in unison, it’s just Ali saying they’ve got to wait for her mom’s toxicology report to determine her cause of death. Hanna says it was “murder, duh” and in all my heart I wish that’s what the missing page of Ali’s autopsy report said. Just 72pt font, all: MURDER, DUH.

Ali’s dad tells her she has to go in for a medical exam and she panics full-force about it. I’ve spent a lot of time walking around in circles in my living room and staring at a blank page and trying to figure out what to make of the fact that PLL brings rape into the conversation twice this week – once when Lucas suggests to Mona that Ali must have been raped when she was kidnapped, and once when Ali’s dad suggests the same thing to her right now – and I do want to talk about it because this is a show, at its core, about female agency vs. female victimization, but I don’t have my mindgrapes wrapped around what to say just yet. Plus, the way they’re walking back the Ezra thing is really complicating the show’s ethos, so I need some time to think about it and see how stuff plays out. But know it’s in my thinky-thoughts and know it’s a thing we’ll speak about later, yeah? I think it’s super important.

Andrew Studypills slides up to Spencer’s locker looking for some friendly banter about drug addiction, so she invites him to come plant flowers on the never-ending grave in her backyard. On one hand he’s got to be thinking that’s creepy as shit but on the other hand he’s got to be thinking Spencer took off her bra in front of him for no actual reason one random afternoon, so he’s all in. Whatever, get out of the way, Studypills! Who is this Kyla and what did she do to achieve “best” status in Spencer’s eyes? TELL ME.

Spencer and Andrew don’t find anymore human bodies in the Hastingses yard, but they do find a dead opossum in the shed. He’s been murdered to death by some rat poison, a type of poison that kills rodents and also humans. Add that to Veronica saying to Spencer in one of their whispered conversations about What is Melissa even doing with her life right now? that “Your dad’s a psycho, dude” and Spencer’s brain is about to do its seasonal snap!

I mean, let’s be real here. Veronica just straight up lays out the reason why she killed Jessica DiLaurentis. Back when Ali got murdered the first time, Jessica swore she saw Spencer do it and she was going to go to the police, but Peter stopped her by saying he was going to tell the truth about being Jason’s dad, but then Ali came back and Mr. D was divorcing her anyway, so what was preventing her from telling the cops Spencer murdered whatever blonde girl they did find in that hole? Amazingly, Veronica turns on Peter and plants that seed in Spencer’s head, but I’m convinced she did the killin’. Wait, or was it Melissa? Tag-team maybe? Veronica did the rat poison, Melissa did the rock? Hastinges, y’all are some Lanisters for real.

Aria is checking her email in the computer lab when she decides to do a website page search for Shana, which leads her to a video of Shana’s funeral – you heard me – and so she of course clicks on it. At first it’s just a recording of a funeral (“just” a recording of a funeral, from like 12 different camera angles), and then! Shana sits right the hell up in her casket! And turns her head to the side and stares Aria’s ass right down through the camera! Like, “Follow me, end up like me” or something. Like, “Dead girls can smile.” Like, “Mona played with dolls; I play with body parts.” It’s amazing.

Sadly, Aria is only hallucinating.

Emily and Paige spend their weekend training sweet little Sydney Driscoll. It starts with Paige and Emily bumping into each other in the locker room again, more civilly this time:

Paige: It’s cool you’re spending your weekend helping Sydney. People think Spencer has the market cornered on Being Hermione Granger, but you’re the best parts of her. Emily: I don’t know. Hermione never got pissy being the best friend of The Boy Who Lived. Paige: Speaking of which Voldemorts … just kidding. How’s Alison? Emily: I dunno. We’re all dodging her for reasons we can’t quantity. Sydney Driscoll: Sorry I’m late. The mirror was throwing me this morning. Usually it’s like half-Jaime Murray/half-Jennifer Garner, but there’s something Hathaway about the way I’m holding my mouth today. Paige: Cool, well, I’ll let you guys get to it. Emily: You could train with us if you want. Paige’s face: I guess this is what it feels like to be poisoned by your sports cream. Paige mouth: Yeah, OK, let me get some water.
After running sprints they end up at a pizza place and Emily and Paige laugh together about something for the first time I can ever remember in all of history. Have y’all ever seen Emily laugh? It’s like the goddamn sunrise.

Paige thinks so too, and then a different light catches her eye: the holy glow of The Vanderjesus. Mona’s eyes narrow and Paige tries to get back to the business of eating her buffalo ranch chicken pizza (girl, no!) but she can’t quite shake the feeling that before this day is done she is going to come face-to-face with her reckoning.

Emily’s bitching about it with Aria and Spencer at an afternoon meet-up where they all take turns accusing each other of not doing right by Ali. Emily’s like, “It was like joke-joke-joke and then she shut down.” And Aria is all, “I’m not taking sides, but didn’t you, like, break-up her heart into ten billion pieces? Maybe she’s just a little bit afraid to get close to you again.” Emily stops folding laundry long enough to realize that maybe she oversimplified a situation involving multiple tortures of girls she loved and took the chickenshit way out by breaking up with Paige so she didn’t have to sort through how deeply, darkly complicated it was going to be for everyone if Alison came home. I’m just kidding, Emily keeps folding laundry, but hear me out:

One thing the Liars say out loud this week is: How are things still so borked up when we got exactly what we wanted? A is gone and Alison is alive and home. And it makes sense that of all the Liars, Hanna and Emily would have the hugest existential crises about it. Hanna’s is being explored a little more overtly (and it’s truly awesome to watch), but Emily’s is super internal. Right because Ali was the first girl she ever loved and also the genesis of Emily understanding her sexuality and she never knew if Ali reciprocated her feelings – in a legitimately gay way – or if she was just messing with her.

The only closure she got on that whole situation was Alison’s death, which hit her harder than it hit anyone because she was the one person on the planet who was truly, wholly in love with Alison. And also because she was the only person on earth who ever got to see Alison roll over and expose her softness. So Ali coming back rips open all those old wounds, the most gaping, bleeding one of which is: Did/does Alison love me (again: in a legit gay way)? To complicate that to infinity, Emily knows that despite the goodness she sees in Ali, the girl has the capacity to wound people in their actual souls. And the proof of that keeps popping up and staring at her with the saddest love eyes. Emily loved Alison, Alison hurt Paige, Alison hurt Emily, Paige hurt Emily, Emily loved Paige, Paige dimed out Alison, Emily broke up with Paige. Emily’s capacity for love and forgiveness is bigger than the oceans. I’ve been too hard on her. Love is a bloodbath.

But Emily can’t deal with that right now. She just keeps folding and folding and folding laundry, until Aria is like, “Hey, do you have feelings for our dead friend who’s not dead anymore? Oh, never mind. Let’s talk about how you killed the guy that killed your girlfriend who actually is dead.” Somehow Emily does talk about it instead of punching that hat off of Aria’s head.

Hanna accompanies Ali to her checkup where the doctor pokes around on her skull where she got smashed with that shovel and asks a lot of questions about her kidnapping. He also finds a stab wound on Alison’s inner thigh that she gets very weird about, like so weird that Hanna tries to melt into the wall. Ali finally loses it on the doctor and he takes her to his office to ask her a million more questions, all of which she records and distributes to the Liars with a mask of her face so they can corroborate her testimony or present testimony on her behalf, as her, at any time. The best part of the exam is the doctor goes, “Girl, you’ve got some powerful lungs!” The scariest part is Hanna wants to know where she got that stab scar and Ali says, “Once you know something, you can’t unknow it.”

Mona appears out of thin air as Paige is walking to her car alone at night like someone who hasn’t been kidnapped and stuffed in a trunk! Paige! What are you doing! She jumps about ten feet in the air and covers her vital organs with her hands in case Mona does some kung fu or hexes her or something.

Mona: Here’s a thing I heard that might interest you. Alison’s dad wants her to move away from Rosewood, which makes my army’s war half-won already. Paige: I’d be lying if I said my life wouldn’t be sixty times easier if she left town, but I’m not going to force that reality into existence. Mona: I am so sure you’ve got what it takes to weave realities from the fabric of space and time. Paige: Huh? Mona: Nothing. Switzerland claimed to be neutral during World War II, you know, but it harbored more Nazi gold than any other country on earth. Paige: Fine, I’ll be Portugal. Mona: Second most Nazi gold after Switzerland. Paige: Damn your academic decathlon prowess! Mona: Look, if you don’t join my army, I’m going to assume you’re in bed with the enemy. Paige: I’m not in bed with anyone. Mona: You wish you were – but Emily is in bed with Alison. Paige: BRB, vomiting up everything I have ever eaten.
Then Paige says the thing. The thing: Do you ever wonder when you became the thing you were most afraid of?

This is everything I wanted for Paige McCullers. Like sure, it’d be great to see her get the girl or whatever, but what I said last season is as true as it ever was: I just wanted to see her be the real Paige McCullers again. I get that supporting characters are around to be the scratching posts of main characters. I understand how stories work. But they gave Paige so much more than a couple of strawman supporting traits. The writers gave her more. Lindsey Shaw gave her more. Paige is polarizing because Paige is real.

If there is a person on this show who actually did wonder when she became the thing she was most afraid of, it is Paige McCullers. The day she shoved Emily’s head underwater was the day she let her torture make her a torturer. I know people like to say Paige came out because she loved Emily, but I think Paige came out because she saw herself becoming Alison. Bullies don’t bully because they actually think they’re superior; bullies bully because they are fucking terrified. Alison bullied because she was afraid of the stuff on the outside getting in; Paige bullied because she was afraid of the stuff on the inside getting out. Say what you want about the sinners in Rosewood, but show me someone else who has faced the darkness inside of them – really, fully cracked themselves open and sifted through their motives and their fears and their pain – and owned the damage it has caused to other people. Show me someone else who was so broken about their own brokenness that they rode their bike through a thunderstorm in the middle of the night to stand on their victim’s porch and say, “I hurt you. I was wrong. I’m sorry.”

Mona loves The Scarlet Letter because she knows the power of cataloguing other people’s hidden sins. Paige may be the only person on this show who knows the only thing more powerful than lies is wholehearted repentance.

(Just FYI, I did, in fact, meet with a group of trusted advisers, including AfterEllen’s best and brightest and my brilliant buddy Jacob Clifton and some of my smartest TV besties for third, fourth, fifth and sixth opinions about Paige’s storyline this season, just to make sure the hearts in my eyeballs weren’t blinding my brain.)

Spencer and Ali meet up and bring it with some Medicis and Borgias realness. Ali is facing the demons she left behind in the form of YouTube comments about her after she died. Her heart is broken for who she thought she had to be. (Or is it?) (Yes.) (Or no!) (Sasha Pieterse is just a wonder.) But then Ali and Spencer engage in a conversation that they alone are capable of having: “My mom was poisoned.” “My dad did it.” “She buried me alive.” “He forced her to do it. I’m so tired. The monsters under my bed have been keeping me awake since you disappeared.” “The monsters aren’t just under your bed.”

Spencer and Ali’s relationship is my favorite [Whoever and Ali] relationship. Hanna accidentally became Alison. Emily was in love with Alison. But Spencer and Alison are sisters. Spencer and Alison are like What if Draco Malfoy had a brother? Not in the early days, but in the Half-Blood Prince days, when the price for his privilege was laid out before him and he was the only one in his family without a Dark Mark. Their bond is intense and fraught and charismatic as everything. Oh, they’re Slytherins, but that’s not all they are.

Paige goes over to Emily’s to warn her about the Alipocalypse that’s coming. At first Emily is like, “Oh, get over me already” but then Paige peels the sugarcoating off a truth bomb and drops it at Emily’s feet: “Ali hurt a lot of people and while I’m not interested in perpetuating that cycle of abuse – because, baby, I did not know the weight of it until I’d felt the freedom – I’m also not going to out the people who feel like a proactive offense is their best defense.” It’s the first time Paige has mentioned the way Ali fucked her up since she found out Emily was going to bring her home, and it’s the first time she hasn’t looked at Emily with open want and affection (for the first time possibly ever), and it startles Emily worse than if Mona jumped out of the bushes waving a shovel. She tries to get Paige to stay, but Paige just walks away and (again, for the first time possibly ever) doesn’t look back.

Aria goes to Ezra’s to play cards and chess but mostly to keep herself from watching Shana’s funeral video anymore. Hanna goes shopping and steals a crushed velvet birthday present for Aria. Spencer finds some – no joke – Coughman’s Pharmacy pills in the cabinet that are the same prescription as the prescription that killed Jessica DiLaurentis. And Emily goes to Ali’s to try to coax her somewhere safer. Ali’s like, “OK, number one, you have never ever asked me to go away from you, and number two, you specifically told me to stay in Rosewood.” Emily tells Ali she’ll memorize her examination recording, but this is the last lie she’s going to tell for her, for real.

Aria shows up at Spencer’s for some Spraria QT, but their cuddles are put on hold when Peter arrives with the news that he’s checked Veronica into a “spa” and no one should try to call her for at least 72 hours.

Ali stays awake all night reading and rereading the mean posts on her website page wall. There are some sweet ones that make her kind of smile and some awful ones that make her feel like butt. Finally she scrolls back far enough that she sees a picture of two assholes wearing paper bag masks in their profile photos. “At least I’m not the worst person on earth,” she says before closing her laptop and drifting off to sleep.

Next week: The return of Jenna Marshall sets everybody to slappin’!

Hey, guess what? Nicole of @PLLBigA is screencapping PLL for me now! Follow her on Twitter for all the most delicious Rosewood goodies, including spoilers and promo photos and links to fan sites and so much more!

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