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“Pretty Little Liars” recap (2.16) — Hanna Marin and the Chamber of Secrets

Previously on Pretty Little Liars, Spencer discovered that A has been hanging around her family’s lake house, doing who knows what all on her Nana’s antique furniture and carving demon dolls out of wood like some kind of Geppetto. Emily developed late-onset X-Men-caliber mutations. Aria and Ezra came out to her parents and they reacted exactly how you knew they’d react – Ella was firm aplomb, Byron with wild-eyed hysteria. And during a midnight schooner trip down Lake Hastings, Hanna started to wonder if Lucas was maybe a little creepy, so she just went ahead and murdered him.

The Liars are sitting ’round a campfire, singing songs about prairies and playing their harmonicas and cooking up some s’mores. Emily casually mentions that boy Lucas they used to know five minutes ago, and wonders if A has been blackmailing him the way s/he’s been blackmailing them. Maybe that’s the reason he attacked her that night in the greenhouse. Hanna’s like, “I get that it’s your thing to give every person on earth the benefit of the doubt, and I usually appreciate your grace – God knows I need it. Remember that time I shoplifted a stealth bomber? – but this isn’t Lucas’ first offense. He also bashed up Alison’s memorial the way he wanted to bash up her skull.” The two of them continue to discuss Lucas’ fate, washing down their roasted marshmallow-y treats with lake sludge while Spencer and Aria pretend to listen to anything the other one is saying, but instead just shout, “DOLLS IN MY NANA’S ATTIC!” And “EZBIAN IN MY PANTS!” at each other until the sun comes up.

The next morning Ashley confronts Emily and Hanna over breakfast about some strange voicemails she received last night from a family in The Shire. She’s like, “The calls came in after I’d passed out in my bubble bath after eleven or twelve glasses of wine. You know how I do.” She wants to know if Hanna hosted some kind of murder party without permission. Luckily a fax comes ringing through, so Hanna and Emily are able to sneak out during the commotion.

At Spencer’s house, the Liars gather for their morning debrief. As usual, Spencer takes the reins and hollers clues at them until it’s time to go to school. Today’s clues are: RECEIPTS FROM SMITTTY’S IN PHILLY! PREPAID CELL PHONES! ATTIC WALLPAPER! And not that it’s really a clue, but since she’s already worked herself into a tizzy, Spencer goes ahead and shouts, “FORNICATION UPON MY NANA’S PERSONAL EFFECTS!” hoping to shame Hanna into shagging her hobo elsewhere. Spence wants to take the train to Philly this afternoon and track down this Smitty fellow and dangle him by his ankles off of a rooftop until he offers up additional clues. Aria is game for the day trip; Emily and Hanna, not so much. Emily has crisis hotline work to do, and Hanna has plans with Caleb. He’s going to come over and shine a spotlight in her face and scream Lucas’ name over and over like a police interrogation, and then they’re going to work on their Carson McCullers essay.

At school, Aria is explaining the wonder of Holden Strauss to Spencer – “He’s gorgeous, which makes it believable that I’d be into him. I’ve known him since preschool, which means my parents trust him. And he’s even tinier than me, which means it should be easy enough to stuff him into a cupboard and use him for an alibi.” – when the wonder of Holden Strauss wanders up to Aria and makes some inside jokes and asks her on a date. Spencer thinks Holden and Aria are sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g, but Aria rolls her eyes at the accusation. First of all, Ezra has more plaid button-ups than a lumberjack, so clearly he’s better at tree-based tomfoolery. And second of all, I am so sure Holden could reach even the lowest branch of any tree.

Noel Kahn has broken up with Mona. Do you know how I know? Because Mona’s mascara is smudged and her eyeballs are red and her fingernails are chewed to bits and she’s wearing a sandwich board around her neck that says: Noel Kahn broke up with me. Hanna hasn’t noticed, though, because Hanna is too busy trying to wash the taste of murder and lake glop out of her mouth. Mona is like, “Hanna, do you even remember the time that I thought you had liposuction so I told the whole school and uninvited you to my birthday party, which you crashed anyway, and so I was forced to run over you with my car and then I came to the hospital while you were in traction and did your makeup? That’s what friends do. But you’re too busy worrying about your homicidal tendencies to even listen to my boy problems. You’re a selfish cow, Hanna. I never let my homicidal tendencies get in the way of our friendship.” It’s a fair point. The fact that she has so far restrained herself from making a suit out of Hanna’s skin and wearing it around like a Hanna coat speaks volumes about her affection for her bestie.

During the lovers’ quarrel, a random dude skips by holding a billboard-sized photo of Hanna in a tiara. It’s going into storage because Hanna is a delinquent now. Like, all those times the police kept coming to school and accusing Hanna and her friends of throwing a bomb at Jenna’s face/chopping Alison to bits? Whatevs. But she’s forced to pick up trash on the side of the road for a few weeks after being caught red-handed in the company of a shovel, and suddenly there’s a zero-tolerance royalty party. 

Hanna rushes off to the bathroom for a cry and while she’s hiding out in the stall, someone comes in and opens the Chamber of Secrets. Hanna notices that water is pooling up around her feet and when she opens the door, she sees Jackie Molina slumped against the well, Petrified as all get out. So, I guess that’s that mystery solved. Alison planted one of her Horcruxes inside a diary, which somehow ended up in Ezra Fitz’s hands. We know how that Ezbian pours his soul into his ballads, and so Alison wrote back: “Oh, I know all of Aria’s secrets.” Ezbian’s weakness was Alison’s strength. It wasn’t long until she possessed his body. And that’s why he’s been going around slaughtering chickens and also why, just now, he opened the Chamber and set the dreaded Basilisk free upon the innocent students of Rosewood High. Hanna checks her lipstick. Looks good. And off she goes to Algebra.

Out in the courtyard, Emily gets a call from a blocked number. Why shouldn’t I answer this call from a blocked number? she wonders. Nothing has ever gone wrong when I accept text messages and phone calls from unknown persons! The caller is like, “Is this the crime-fighting ninja that also looks like a luxurious hair model? The one from the crisis center?” Emily thinks this is A’s weirdest trick yet, because: Yes to all of those things, especially the part where her hair looks like it was fashioned at God’s own spinning-wheel. But what’s the game? “The game,” the caller says, “is truth or dare.” Emily chooses truth for a change and so the caller goes, “OK, true or false: You want to makeout with Maya St. Germain’s fa – oh, hang on, Ems. I’ve got another call coming in.” Maya flips over, flips back, acts weird, hangs up. Emily is, once again, clit-blocked by Mystery!

Spencer and Aria working by themselves together again reminds me of Shaggy and Scooby days gone by. If only they were taking the Mystery Machine to Philly instead of a train!

Aria is buying tickets for her and Holden to see an Arthur Miller play – let it be The Crucible (“I told him everything; he knows now! He knows every-” “You drank blood, Abby! You didn’t tell him that!”) – she knows Ezra will be attending because he already bought tickets for the two of them back before they broke up due to Byron after they’d gotten back together due to Jackie Molina’s blackmail after they’d broken up due to Alison’s murder weapon after they’d gotten back together due to Jason’s pornography shed after they’d broken up due to Jason’s obsession with Aria’s pink hair after they’d gotten back together due to parking lot sunsets after they’d broken up due to … I can’t remember, but I’m guessing murder, etc. again.

“Murder, etc.”: That should be the name of Ezra’s first screenplay.

Caleb stops by Hanna’s house to do that cross-examination I mentioned earlier. This is their conversation, verbatim:

Caleb: So, Lucas-

Hanna: Nope.

Caleb: And then Lucas’ parents-

Hanna: Nope.

Caleb: Lucas-

Hanna: Nope.

Caleb: Lucas-

Hanna: Nope.

Caleb: Lucas-

Hanna: Nope.

It’s productive. Hanna’s having a productive afternoon.

In Philly, Shaggy and Scooby stand in front of Smitty’s Newstand and bellow, “SMIIIIITY’S! YOOOO HOOOO, SMITTTY’S!” Finally their eyeballs start functioning properly and they realize Smitty’s is literally seven inches in front of them, and also it isn’t a nuclear warhead supply store like they suspected. Aria’s like, “Huh, I just realized: Your sister lives a few blocks from here, right? Your sister who hates us all and was married for a while to Alison’s murderer and is incubating the Devil’s fetus inside her uterus. That sister. Melissa. She probably passes by Smitty’s every day. Smitty’s. That place that issued the receipts for the stockpile of weaponry you found in your family’s lake house.” Spencer’s like, “Eh, you’re right. This trip was a bust. Enjoy your play, I’m going to follow this trail of blind people, walking like cartoon ants to a picnic basket.”

At the crisis center, Maya and Emily rub their hands all over each other’s hands the way the used to rub their feet all over each other’s feet before Pam threw Maya out the window and had her shipped off to marijuana prison. Emily is explaining how sometimes people call looking for help or advice or consolation, and sometimes they call confessing to be the minion of a serial killer, and those times you just run them through the FBI’s voice recognition software and then Hanna snipes them from a rooftop. Speaking of calls from serial killers, Maya’s phone rings and she answers it and gets weird again like earlier and bounces out of the crisis center like a lunatic.

It is a testament to the Apocolyptic nature of Emily’s life that she doesn’t just assume Maya is cheating on her. No, she assumes Maya’s parents are slowly being lowered into a vat of boiling oil and the only way Maya can save them is if she employs her cartography skills to decode the map that she found in a garbage bin after working out a clue about the map’s location after the mysterious caller rattled off some GPS coordinates at her. Emily’s like, “Girl, I feel you. Psychopaths, right? See you later tonight!”

Back at home, though, Emily starts to wonder if maybe her stalker is also Maya’s stalker. She’s like, “Hanna, how many A’s can there really be in one town?” And Hanna’s like, “That’s the million dollar question, sister!”

The trail of blind people leads Spencer to the Eyeless Emporium, where every unseeing person in the greater tri-state area is click-clacking around with their blind people sticks and pausing occasionally to bow down and worship at the foot of a bronze statue that looks alarmingly like Jenna Marshall. Spencer wanders on inside and asks the receptionist if she’ll please hand over any information pertaining to one of her old pals from grade school, but the receptionist will not. What does Spencer think this is, Rosewood General Hospital, where all medical records are housed in the lobby for public consumption? Luckily, a blind guy wearing a Josh Groban wig takes pity on Spencer and explains that yes, Jenna did reside at the Eyeless Emporium for a time. Her pottery classes infused her fellow students with purpose. Her determination infected her classmates with confidence. And her rousing speeches about returning home one day to seek vengeance against the Gretchen Weiners(es) who threw those firecrackers at her head? Well, those are the stuff of legend.

On a lark, Spencer steals the visitor registration book from that one day when Alison was murdered repeatedly.

What happens at Hanna’s house is that it starts to rain. We’re going to go to various locations with other Liars in just a few minutes and it will not be raining in any of those places. Only at Hanna’s house, OK? Because she’s like a comic strip character, or a Bronte sisters’ heroine, with her own personal raincloud. Aria and Emily are like, “If we go on our respective dates, you’re going to get murdered here on your own. You cool with that?” Hanna’s like, “Sure, OK.” And so Aria and Emily leave her there. But not before Emily can swipe Aria’s fake ID for Maya.

At the Rosewood Center for Performing Arts and Mayhem, Aria tries to get excited about being there with Holden, but then Ezbian arrives on the scene in, I think, a limo. When he gets out, the whole world goes slow-mo and then Air Supply starts singing “All Out of Love” and then:

Aria’s brain telepathically communicateswith Ezra’s brain, all, “Your nose!” And Ezra’s brain goes, “Your nose!” It’s intense. 

While walking home from the train station, Spencer gets clubbed over the head. When she finally regains consciousness, Mona Vanderwaal is standing over her body wearing fifty brand new cashmere twin-sets and the grin of an unhinged hyena. Mona’s like, “Did Hanna tell you Noel and I broke up?” Spencer feels the back of her head; she’ll have a lump there tomorrow, but it’s not bleeding. When she doesn’t answer, Mona goes, “Listen, Spencer, Hanna and Noel have both dumped me today, and I know it’s been all boys, boys, boys for you in the past, but there’s something about you that just howls homosexual. The tenor of your voice, maybe? The costumes? Your swagger? Your drive to obtain a variety of useless advanced degrees? I don’t know, but I do know I’m in the market for someone new to cling to, and I think it just might be you!” Spencer points to a queue of lesbians that literally wraps around the town square a dozen times. “Line starts back there,” she says, and hobbles home.

Why isn’t there more Mona on this show, though? Seriously? She’s the tops.

Speaking of tops, Maya receives another mysterious call from her mysterious stalker outside a mysterious club where Aria and Maya apparently look enough alike that their IDs are interchangeable. Emily is like, “Maya, I’m breezy, OK? That’s my new thing: Breeziness. But if the ghost of my first girlfriend is blackmailing you into various acts of voodoo and witchcraft, you can tell me. Or not. It’s up to you.” Maya is like, “Oh, Emily, it’s nothing like that! It’s just this dude from marijuana prison I hooked up with while I was dodging your calls!” Emily’s mouth goes, “OK.” But her face goes, “DUDE?”

After the play, Aria crawls around on the sidewalk, sniffing here and there, tyring to pick up the scent of Ezra Fitz. Holden’s like, “Hey, I know you’re boning that Gilbert Blythe-looking guy from earlier. It was obvious when you started humping his leg when he got out of the car. But look, maybe you can be my beard and we can both get what we need from this relationship.” He doesn’t say beard, but I bet you sixty billion dollars he’s gay. Watching Lucas and Caleb mud wrestle over him is going to be a delight.

Lucas breaks into Hanna’s house and tracks mud all over the kitchen floor and then corners her in her room and tackles her to the ground and holds a knife to her throat and hisses, “Don’t worry! I’m not going to murder you!” Caleb busts in right then and there’s all this scuffling and Lucas is like, “Let’s take off our clothes and wrestle like we’re Greek” and they do and Hanna watches that for a little while and then finally demands an explanation for the one time she noticed Lucas was acting weird (out of the ten zillion times Lucas has acted weird). Lucas explains that before Caleb went to California, he withdrew all of his money from Air Conditioning Ventilation Savings & Loan and left it in Lucas’ hands for safe-keeping, but Lucas lost all of it betting on basketball.

This scene is weird anyway because with the exception of that one quick shot of Lucas’ laptop screen from three episodes ago we haven’t had a clue that he’s been up to actual shadiness. But also, God bless the person who wrote this episode, it’s got some brilliant stuff in it, especially that little scene with Mona and Spencer from earlier, but I don’t think the writer has ever gambled/seen a basketball game in his/her life. The dialogue is so weird. Lucas is like, “Statistical sure thing dribble dribble fractional equations Spring Madness.” Anyway, that’s his story and he’s been running his comic book collectibles up and down the eastern seaboard today trying to recoup Caleb’s cash. Caleb’s like, “It’s cool, bro.” And Hanna is like, “I need a mint. That goddamn lake water taste is still in my mouth. Thanks a lot for making me swallow that shit when I was trying to murder you, Lucas.”

At Spencer’s house, she produces the visitor’s log from the Eyeless Emporium. On the day Allison was killed all those times, Garrett checked Jenna out of the hospital. Aria is like, “Is there anywhere they could have gone together to hide out? Could someone have been in cahoots with them? Someone who loathed Allison due to her boyfriend cheating? Someone who lives exactly ten blocks from Smitty’s?” Spencer goes, “You’re right, Aria. Another dead end. Man, I’m zero for two today.”

The girls have ordered Chinese takeout, but what has been delivered to them are several containers of writhing baby Basilisks. Hanna’s like, “Oh, um. Guys. I forgot to tell you something. Remember that rumor about the Chamber of Secrets…”

Y’all were on last night with your #BooRadleyVanCullen tweets!

You guys, I’ve never asked you for any Pretty Little Thing before, but I am begging you not to get bi-phobic about Maya. Bisexual ladies aren’t like the mythical creatures on this show, OK? They actually exist. This show is way too good for us to get dragged down with phobias and flame wars, right? RIGHT!

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