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“Pretty Little Liars” recap 3.24: A Psycho By Any Other Name

Previously on Pretty Little Liars, Emily Fields’ girlfriend Alison DiLaurentis was murdered and buried in her backyard and then discovered by her new girlfriend Maya St. Germain who moved into Ali’s house and was then also murdered in the backyard. Because Ali’s backyard wasn’t just any old backyard. Everyone was always in that yard all the time, brandishing hockey sticks and passing out drunk and getting extorted and hollering into the phone and wearing matching outfits with Ali and making sex tapes and rubbing her DNA all over their sweaters and bracelets and digging holes to bury shovels and digging more holes to bury the shovels that dug the holes that buried the shovels. But what was weird was that even though Ali was super dead, she kept showing up places. The hospital to visit Hanna. Aria and Spencer’s bedrooms to steal stuff out of their bags and closets. An abandoned barn to make out with Emily. And sometimes she sent some text messages: “Hey, girl. Miss you.” “I’m still here and I know everything.” But, like, she was for real dead. So dead. I mean, yeah, her ghost seemed to be aging a little bit, getting older, being taller, looking 17 instead of 15. But that’s probably just a thing ghosts do, right? Because Ali was most certainly not alive.

The Liars are enjoying quite a brunch spread at the Hastings’ breakfast bar while waiting for Spencer to make her post-Radley presence known. Hanna is more than slightly worried that Spencer’s psyche may have been broken in a permanent way, and if it hasn’t snapped yet, it probably will when they tell her about the other dead body the park rangers found in the woods, mutilated beyond identification, except for a torso tattoo declaring the corpse’s independence from incest. Emily is like, “Even if the most we can hope for is half-capacity Spencer, I’ll take it. It’s exhausting keeping you lot alive by myself.”

Spencer flits down the stairs dressed like and talking like and wearing make up like and even assuming the posture of her most WASPy self. It’s terrifying. It’s like Radley reset her to pilot episode Spencer. Hells bells, she even quotes her pilot self: “You know how I feel about hope. It breeds eternal misery.” She invites the Liars to the asylum graduation party her parents are throwing in her honor, and of course they accept, because they will do anything for her, which she knows, which is why she stares out the window and breathes, “I’m counting on it.”

In A’s murdermobile, SpencAr does some hacking while wearing the gloves and the hoodie and listening to Satan on the radio and the whole A deal. Mona comes home and kicks off her combat boots, makes a pot of coffee, shares a mug with her companion. SpencAr pulls up a topographic map of the the place where her asylum graduation party is being held: Thornhill Lodge, which is conveniently situated near Thornhill landing strip, for any parents who are flying to or from Out of Town immediately before or after the celebration. Mona says “they” like SpencAr’s plan, and that she will receive her reward on Friday.

At school, the Liars look past a babysitting job flyer and into the cafeteria where Mona is enjoying some delicious snacks and conversation with the Academic Decathlon team. Spencer goes, “So, speaking of babysitting, was Malcolm ever able to identify the perp that stole him from ninja school and lavished him with delicious treats at the carnival? It must have been a gentle soul to have kidnapped him in such a way. A gentle soul with brass balls. I’d say the person in question wanted to get caught, showing her face in the daylight like that.” Aria says they can’t use Malcom as A-bait (BORING!) but after she walks away, Hanna says that yes, actually, they can (YAY!).

Let me tell you something about the state of Pennsylvania: They are crazy about the sport of swimming. Just absolutely crazy. Take for an example the presence of Shana Costumeshop at Rosewood High before homeroom. She is there in her Red Devil’s swim team warm-up because there’s a big meet this afternoon and her coach didn’t want to give the Sharks a home pool advantage. Shana up-downs Spencer with her eyeballs and then practically has to steady herself against some lockers, because: “Forgive me for staring, but I have a thing for unhinged women. I thought I’d hit the jackpot with Paige McCullers over the summer, but then I found this other girl who even made eating cherries looks insane, but now, Spencer Hastings, you are standing here in front of me with crackpot madness radiating off you in waves. I can practically smell the institution on you. I am going to say the word ‘wet’ about 20 times, OK?” The Liars bid Shana adieu and Hanna starts whining immediately about how Shana never flirts with her, even though it is a proven fact that lesbians want to give her their pinkdrinks.

Ezra is at school for like his tenth interview in the substitute teacher hiring process. He and Aria walk down the hallway, side-by-side, pretending to check their phones and whatever while talking out of the sides of their mouths about how he didn’t get the job.

All of the newspapers in all of the land are still piled high on the Cavenaugh’s front porch, but somebody is finally home, and that somebody is Jenna Marshall, and even just the peek we get of her through the curtains is more than my starved heart can handle. She hisses into the phone that things were supposed to be taken care of, and now there’s all these loose ends, and Jenna needs to see this person today, OK, with her actual working eyeballs. Someone creeps up to the front door and texts a meet-up location, and Jenna rushes to the door to scowl outside. But no one is there.

Byron storms into his house of an afternoon, acting like a little bitch. Apparently Rosewood High has all these employee ethics all of a sudden.Yyou can’t date students or kidnap students and lock them in the basement or host formal dance events due to the fact that someone’s always getting clubbed over the head in the chemistry classroom or murdered in the courtyard. And Ezra Fitz-Fitzgerald does not meet those standard. Aria tells Bryon to chill out, that Ezra didn’t get the job, and Byron tells Aria to shut her lying mouth, because yes he did.

Baby-sitter’s Club Interview. Have Hanna and Ezra ever had a scene together before? I don’t think they have. It’s marvelous, really, that they’ve waited so long to meet one-on-one, because we know them both so well but they don’t know each other at all and Ezra’s genuine befuddlement in the presence of Hanna’s glory is a wonder to behold. He asks if she has a resume and she goes, “What for? Aren’t all boys into fast cars and fast women?” Ezra is like, “Well, Malcolm is mostly into, like, trains.” And Hanna legitimately makes a “toot-toot” train noise and says, “All aboard the Hanna Express!” Ezra’s eyes are so wide and uncomfortable. He can’t even look at Hanna.

JennaBot drives to a picnic table in a park very similar to the picnic table she drove to in a park in the season two finale where she gave a mysterious person a mysterious package that I have always thought was Peter Hastings’ gun, but I maybe just made that up the way Spencer made up Peter Hastings. Jenna sits down and stares lovingly into the eyes of a Person, happy to see the Person but sad because her eyeballs are going bad again and so seeing the Person is a luxury she will not have much longer. She tells the Person that the Liars will be meeting together this Friday and that the Person knows what the Person must do.

She pauses and looks up at the sky because a plane is flying overhead, which is so amazing in so many ways because it means that [spoiler alert!] Red Coat just is just flying around Rosewood in circles for two days before she docks her personal aircraft at the Thornhill landing strip. How does she know everything? How is she everywhere? Well, here’s part of the answer at least: Her prefered mode of transportation is a literal spy plane.

Well, but anyway, the Person says that she’ll stand by Jenna’s side even on her darkest days, and the Person’s voice is very familiar, because the Person’s voice belongs to Shana Costumeshop! Oh, but that’s not all. Jenna and Shana aren’t best friends. Jenna and Shana are scissoring friends. Lesbifriends. Homosexual girlfriends. The ShennaBot Thing, is what they are. They caress one another’s hands and make dastardly faces of conniving schemes and lady lust at one another. Bitch is a lesbian!

(Also, for all the ways Ali tried to convince Emily she was just “practicing” things with her, she: blinded Jenna after Emily eye-fucked her at that Halloween party; tortured Paige into exile with Pigskin tactics when she found out she was in love with Emily; and also the A shenanigans really kicked into high gear when Emily “found another friend to kiss” in Maya St. Germain. So, you know, kinda psychotically proprietary behavior for a heterosexual buddy.)

Aria and Ezra meet downtown to break up again. I guess I would feel sad about it if they hadn’t already broken up and gotten back together six hundred million times. Like, it drives me nutsobonkers when shippers go “ENDGAME!!!” like it’s science or math something, but Ezra and Aria are clearly the endgame-est couple in the history of television, so I mean, Lucy and Ian, I hate to see you cry, but I want Aria to earn her Scooby badge and she can’t do it if she’s rushing Malcolm off to the emergency room every ten minutes. So, chins up and eyes forward and tally ho and Aria, what in God’s name are those leggings you are wearing? Did you steal those from the carnival people?

The diner where Dr. Sullivan went to get her payoff after the Tory Burch Booth Incident. That waitress named Marlene is still here, smiling as sweetly as ever, telling a Spencer lookalike to take a seat any old place she wants. The Spencer lookalike is just one in a rapid-fire succession of fake-outs, though. It’s not Spencer. But then someone else comes in – “Pretty Eyes,” also from the Tory Burch Incident – and isn’t Spencer, either. It’s the living, breathing, un-crushed person of Toby Cavenaugh! He and his hair are alive-er than ever! Toby sits down across from A and says that Hanna got the babysitting job and A says she knows because she’s the one that planted that idea in her head in the first place because she is Spencer Hastings!

Awesome.

Awesome, awesome, awesome.

Spencer’s got the full Mona makeover happening with her eyes and her Toby is like, “Spencer.” And Spencer is like, “Well, you’re looking very not dead.” And he’s like, “Spencer.” And she’s like, “Which is weird considering I saw your body hacked to bits on the forest floor.” And he’s like, “Spencer.” And she’s like, “The fact of your death landed my ass in Radley, in case you hadn’t heard, and that was after I stared down every fruit in my house for two weeks and stopped brushing my hair and almost got boiled into noodle soup in my own shower and also after I cried my eyeballs out for a whole night outside your loft door while you sat inside listening to records and eating my Nana’s lasagna.” He says he did all the things he did to protect her, and she says she gets it because she is doing all the things she’s doing to protect the Liars and him. You may have heard he attacked Hanna with some mannequins. You may have heard she kidnapped a seven-year-old.

At Ezra’s Cake and Cuddle Emporium, Malcolm is trying to get his cartoon on while Hanna badgers him about how he’s rotting his brain. He finally acquiesces to her attention and agrees to play a game called “Guess Who Kidnapped Me!” Hanna shows him photos of the usual suspects. No, it wasn’t Aria. No, it wasn’t CeCe. No, it wasn’t Melissa. No, it wasn’t Jenna. No, of course it wasn’t that dude with the chin and the hair. That dude’s a dude! And and the person who kidnapped him was called Alison! Hanna hands over her phone so he can rot his brain playing Angry Birds, and calls to check in with Emily …

… who is out for a run in the dark by herself because she needs to blow off some steam from continuing to have to be Spencer, and also because SHE HASN’T LEARNED ANYTHING ABOUT STAYING ALIVE these last three years. Emily peeps a frazzled Melissa wading through the swamp of newspapers at the Cavenaugh place and banging on the windows, so she drops Hanna and creeps onto the porch, where she spies Jenna and Melissa and Shana having a conversation at Rosewood Pharmacist decibels about incriminating videos and the bitches who bury them and hide them in lakes. Melissa is like, “Well, they’ll all be together at that lodge by that landing stip tomorrow night at a party someone is pretending is being thrown by my parents, but I’m not even worried about the hows and whys of that right now, because my main thing is murder them.” They act like this is their one chance to take out the Liars, while they’re alone together in the woods, when that’s pretty much how they spend every Friday night of their whole entire Lying lives.

At one of the many seedy motels Toby Cavenaugh calls home, he and Spencer debrief one more time how absolutely shitty it was for him to do the things he did, especially the part where Spencer knows he was spying on her while she spiraled into the mentally unstable place where she was decoding pirate ship board game treasure maps and slow dancing with ghosts. He cries, then. That’s all. Just cries. No explanation, really. No processing which tortuous things he did and why he did them and what he hoped to accomplish, both at the time and in the long run. Just tears. Tears dripping down his face and onto his abs. Like the first time she saw him-saw him, that day in the alley when he got his feelings hurt by those adorable little ice cream kids. Spencer crawls to him on her knees and they make out.

Back at Ezra’s, Hanna is running down the list of ways she got herself into a very complicated relationship with food after her dad left. It’s so Hanna. She’s fully just chatting away to a first grader about the most calorie-effective way to eat your feelings while he clicks around on her phone. She’s just getting to the part about peanut butter and whipped cream when Malcolm goes, “Oh, hey! Here’s that Alison who kidnapped me!” He’s looking at a photo A has just texted over, awesomely, of both real Alison and Fake Alison. Hanna is like, “Well, what you are saying is impossible because Alison is dead.” Malcolm just rolls his eyes and reaches for his Oreos: “No, lady. Alison is Spencer.”

The Liars meet to debrief their nightly findings and Aria, who has never actually participated in a finale before, has the look of someone whose mind is getting well and truly blown for the very first time. She’s like, “So, Jenna: a) came back from Out of Town to b) meet up with her c) lesbian girlfriend d) Shana, and e) Melissa to make plans to f) kill all of us? My god, our lives really are a shitshow.” Of course, she can’t maintain that train of thought very long before her brain derails itself back into Ezria territory, and before you know it, she’s screeching about how the most tragic thing of all is that Spencer, as A, is ruining all of their love lives. Hanna and Emily pat her wittle head and hatch a plan to find out the true nature of Spencer’s A-ness, while also drowning out their plot with loud music for the first time ever. Aria, though: “I’m not really in the mood to dance right now, Hanna, can you turn down that down, please?”

At the Motel. (Motel, Motel, Motel) (I know it is a Motel because the camera keeps telling me it’s a capital “M” Motel.) (Mona?) Spencer and Toby do them some sexes. And I mean, Toby’s body is kind of like an Imperius curse, right? Take off that shirt and Obliviate! But I’m both very gay and very skilled at Defense Against the Dark Arts, so I’m not quite ready to forgive his or Spencer’s transgres-oh, hey, it’s Troian’s legs. Hey, legs. Hey.

Lana del Rey sings about how it’s hard not to get into trouble when you’ve got a war in your mind, so just ride, ride, ride. And they do, do, do.

At the Sharks/Red Devils swim meet – which is the hottest ticket in the tri-state area – Aria and Ezra break up AGAIN, but I’m going to forgive it because I am a sucker for nostalgia and this episode has so many delicious pilot throwbacks, including this window scene mirroring the window scene at Ali’s funeral when they decide to stop seeing each other, right down to the song and the walk-away-arm-grab thing Ezra does to signal that they are only slightly on a break, per the usual.

On her way into the swim meet, Spencer spots Red Coat and zooms after her like lightning. The chase music is awesome, especially when it goes cuckoo when Spencer walks into the courtyard and there are like 20 Red Coats milling around because that’s what these Red Devils wear to cheer on their swim team at away meets. Spencer does a frantic search and finds real Red Coat again. She follows her through the cafeteria, down the hallway, into the bathroom, where she just stands there with her back to Spencer and waits. Spencer spins her around and it’s – Hanna Marin!

I was as shocked as a finale Aria by this psych-out. All those weeks of looking at that Red Coat photo ABC Family released, speculating and arguing and enlarging, and I got played just like Spencer got played. TV never surprises me, but this show always gets me so good. Aria and Emily do their patented synchronized launches from the bathroom stalls. Hanna goes, “Well, you Spener-ed right in here, which means you haven’t fully transformed into an A-teamer yet.” And Emily’s little face is like a puppy. She says, “Which means you still love us!” Aria is like, “I broke up with Ezra because it feels so good to be a part of these highjnks! It was the correct decision!”

Spencer tells them the whole deal: That Mona cracked her open like an egg so she could glue her back together like some blind girl craft fair pottery, but Spencer did not wait for her reward, instead she sought it out last night and fucked it, twice, because he reward was Toby, who is alive, and also who is a double agent. Emily claps because she loves him. Aria claps because she’s faking understanding how these things work until she gets the hang of it. But Hanna goes, “Fine, Nikkita, but when were you planning to tell us?” Spencer says she was only going to keep it a secret until tonight, when they were all burning to a crisp in a home explosion.

Another pilot throwback, shot-for-shot: Mr. Fitz shows up for his first day of substitute teaching, and of course he has been assigned to the Liars’ literature class, and of course he is going to insist on actually educating them, and of course he has settled on Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. If he was a real substitute, he’d teach it by showing them Ratatouille and calling it a day. Anyway, Aria is gobsmacked that he is there and also that Spencer didn’t tell her it is Mad Hatter day.

The Liars make quite a show of hanging out in Hanna’s kitchen, twirling around in their party dresses and nattering away about what kind of treats and cute boys will be at the asylum graduation party. Emily looks like the reason swear words were invited, because sometimes regular language cannot properly describe the visceral reaction a person has to a thing.

Thornhill Lodge and Landing Strip:

What happens for the next 20 minutes is so cracked and amazing and carefully constructed that I’m not really sure I can do it justice, but the most important thing is: Red Coat is legit flying a plane around up in the sky, waiting for Mona’s signal to land, so she can … do whatever thing it is she is planning to do. That is the only part that isn’t really made clear. But who cares, because did you hear me? The girl is piloting her own twin-prop around the town, and has, in fact, been doing it for several days in a row, and now she is getting ready to touch down and pull some shit.

Mona squeaks and squawks about how Red Coat is going to be pissed as hell when she gets here and the Liars aren’t here yet, and Toby and Spencer make out for a little while before Toby tells her to come with him outside so he can kill her. The Liars are watching the whole thing from the rafters, where they have traded their fancy clothes for sleuthing clothes. Aria is even wearing a bedazzled beret.

Mona steels herself for Red Coat’s arrival and just as she’s getting ready to walk outside, the Liars pounce on her. They squabble for a minute too long because outside, Team Lezzer Death Eater has started a fire and locked the girls inside the building. What’s amazing, what’s truly amazing about this scene, is that the Liars are so hopped up on the victory of out-hyperadrenalizing Mona that they keep stopping to gloat while the building is burning down around their ears. Three different times, they have to remind themselves, out loud, that they should probably get out of there.

Mona is most upset about the fact that she’s going to die without learning the true identity of Red Coat, a friend-foe so elusive she is both everywhere and nowhere. The Liars are like, “Wait, even you don’t know who she is?” And she’s like, “No, and I never will, because you guys ruin everything!”

Meanwhile, out upon the foggy moors Pennsylvania is so known for, Spencer makes her way to the landing strip to peep the identity of A, while Toby creeps through the trees to uncover the mystery of the other people hanging out in this dark forest in the middle of the night. He gets whacked over the head with a flash light for his effort, and either Shana or Jenna or Melissa throws the lighter that started the fire on the ground beside him. It’s JennaBot’s most poetic revenge. I’m so glad her eyeballs haven’t given out yet so she can see it. But also I’m sad because Toby’s clearly going back to jail. But also I’m happy because at least we know he’s Boo Radley van Cullen again. The Boo Radley-est.

So, I guess what’s going on here is four teams working against each other. There’s the real, true A-team, which includes only Mona and Red Coat. Their plans are still a little murky. We don’t know to what end they’re working. And then there’s double-agent A-team, which is Spencer and Toby trying to work from the inside to keep the Liars safe from the real A-team. And then there are the Liars who are just trying to stay alive. And then there is Shana, Melissa, and Jenna, all of whom want to kill the Liars to cover their own asses, and also because they just hate their guts for various personal reasons. (Together, they blinded Jenna; Spencer stole everyone of Melissa’s fiances. And Emily stole Paige from Shana. My best gues is that Shana and Jenna met after Paige broke up with Shana to be with Emily, and so it was sociopathic serendipity that allowed them to make each other’s acquaintance and seek revenge while getting the bonus lesbian sex stuff.)

The Liars are each pulled from the fire by Red Coat, who deposits them all into a neat little comatosed row, the light from the fire of the A-frame lodge behind her burning a giant “A” into the night. Mona comes running up, shrieking about, “Shit, y’all. Fucking Alison DiLaurentis just pulled our asses out of there.” Spencer also zooms over, corroborating what Mona saw. Hanna, too, looked upon Ali’s face as she regained consciousness, and the weirdest part of all is that Ali looked worried.

The Liars pile into Emily’s car, leaving Toby behind, I guess, and Mona comes clean: Red Coat came to her at Radley, offering her a partner in crime and also freedom from the asylum. Mona thought having a playmate would be fun, but then Red Coat stole the Liars away. Emily is like, “So, are you the one that kidnapped me and roofied me and made me dig up Ali’s grave?” And Mona goes, “I mean, kind of, but also Ali was the one who dug up Ali’s grave. But, actually, now that I think about it, it was Ali wearing an Ali mask on top of another Ali mask that dug up Ali’s grave.”

When the Liars and Mona arrive downtown, they see Wilden’s cop car sitting in the middle of the town square, beat all to hell and covered in fish pond gunk, but totally still playing that video on a loop of Ashley smashing into Wilden with her car. But wait! There’s more! The part Hanna didn’t see before is that two people show up to carry Wilden to safety, and those two people are THE SHENNABOT THING! YES!

Mona senses something spooky in the trunk. The Liars crowd around and are just about to crowbar that sucker open when A texts them. All of them. Including Mona. “You’re mine now,” is what the text says, in red letters, and it’s Mona who closes out the out-loud reading. She goes, “A.” And the Liars just gawk at her. They’re getting threatened by A while standing by A who is also getting threatened by A. They open up the trunk because it’s not like things can get any worse.

Whoops! Yes, they can!

Original Risen Mitten Flashback:

Alison’s zombie hand breaks through the ground in her backyard, just like it did in the Halloween episode – only this time another hand reaches down and starts pulling her out of her grave.

Truly, I have not enjoyed an hour of television more since I became a grown-up. High fives forever, Marlene King. You are a goddess among women.

This season would have been so much less fun if I hadn’t had the help of my hilarious screencapping partner Maggie. I owe her so many beers and so many hugs. Follow her on Twitter and show her some love, will ya? She’s @MargaretRosey.

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