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“Pretty Little Liars” recap (4.02): One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Previously on Pretty Little Liars, Mona left the A-Team to join the P-Team, and I mean that in every way you think I do. Paige took Emily’s Nightmare Express declaration to heart and began planning a U-Haul life for them as far away from Rosewood as the borders of the continental United States will allow. Spencer permitted herself exactly 24 hours of romantic bliss with Toby before popping open a casket and robbing a dead body. Hanna wore a real bad wig. And Aria had a waking fever dream that made her realize Ezra wouldn’t last ten minutes in the clink, so she broke up with him for good for today. Oh, and as soon as her spirit was reunited with her body, Ali cloned five children that look like five Liars and then gave the Liar clones Liar dolls to play with.

Rear Window Brew. After Wilden’s funeral the Liars popped some Adderall, I guess, because all four of them are about to crawl right out of their skin – the better for Mona to make the skin suits she’s been jonesing for? – as they debrief the latest chapter in their collective biography, My Life is a Teenage Shitshow. Where’s Melissa? (D.C.) Who was the lady in the black veil at the funeral? (Who knows?) Did Ali really rise from the grave, fly a plane around Rosewood all day, parachute out of it while also staying behind to pilot it, and rescue the Liars from a fire that she herself set with her mind? (Yes, duh.) While they’re bitching at each other about how Ali is definitely not alive but also is totally alive, Spencer constructs an architectural model of the lodge and its surrounding airfield with baby carrots and cherry tomatoes and french fries and mozzarella sticks.

Mona shows up late for the debrief and everyone hops up from the table and crosses their arms and stares at her with accusation and contempt in their eyes. She’s like, “Fine, whatever, let’s just drive the hell out into the Forbidden Forest and you can rifle through the shit in my mobile lair again.” Her incredulity is amazing. Like, How many times are you going to have to look through all the weapons I used to murder you these the past three years before you accept the fact that I’m not going to murder you anymore? God.

Spencer gets an eyebrow boner when Mona offers up her lair again.

Out in the woods, the lair has gone missing, of course, because Toby stole it and sobbed all the way down the highway in it last week as he drove to meet A. Hanna and Spencer bounce in a righteously indignant huff, but Aria and Emily stay behind to watch Mona get strangled by Red Coat. Mona dives out of her car and then Red Coat tries to run them all under, but Emily pulls everyone to safety, using her own body as a cushion to keep her pocket-sized pals from getting concussed.

So, just to recap the recap, before the theme song even plays: Four friends explore the possibility that their omniscient torturer is actually a zombie while one best friend makes a physical matrix out of a salad and then they take a midnight drive into the woods to root around in a RV covered in photos of their zombie friend’s face with the eyeballs poked out and then either their zombie friend or someone wearing a mask that looks like the face of their zombie friend or their zombie friend wearing a mask of her own zombie face tries to gun them down with a stolen car.

If you’re not watching this show, I guess your soul is kind of lame?

Ashley Marin(!) is home from New York(?), so Hanna tries as diplomatically as possible to ask her if she maybe possibly conceivably shot a bunch of holes in Det. Wilden’s head and then stuffed his dead body in the trunk of his own police car underneath the body of a literal pig. Ashley’s like, “Did I hate him like the flames of hell licking at my insides? Yes. Did I hit him with a car and drive off and leave his limp body in the middle of the woods? Yes, I did that also. But did I murder him? Hanna, be serious.” Hanna sighs and produces her mom’s phone. She goes, “Mona and Spencer either pried this from Wilden’s embalmed fingers, or someone left it in the mailbox.” Ashley snatches it up, grins, and marvels about how many good people are left in the world.

Spencer gets a rejection letter from UPenn, which shocks and saddens her, even though the way she applied to that college was to hand-deliver a physical application to CeCe Drake at a teenage rager in a cabin in the woods where homeless lesbians live in the walls and games of truth or dare end in carnage.

I have given Aria Montgomery a lot of shit for a lot of seasons on this show, but this week, she is a marvel. She and Hanna meet up to walk to school and shout at each other about their continued doom spiral. Aria goes, “Look, Hanna, I get that moving vehicles just bounce right off of you at this point, but if we’re a herd of cattle, I’m the veal. Now that A has realized I exist, I’m not sure I’ll live through the week.” Hanna shouts, “BLACK VEIL RED COAT MELISSA HASTINGS NEFARIOUS LESBIANS!” And then, when she spots Shana enjoying a donut al fresco, she stomps her ass right over there starts dropping truth torpedos like an impeccably dressed tactical bomber: “Don’t pretend you don’t see me, girl! I know you saw me seeing you scrape up Wilden off the ground after my mom mowed him down in her Lexus! I know you’re one half of The ShennaBot Thing!” Aria drags Hanna away and the whole time she’s still screaming about, “… making monkey with a Cylon!” Shana’s is really really really pretty. I mean, stay away from Emily, evilness, but hello also.

In the school computer lab, Paige* has taken U-Hauling to a whole new level. She’s constructed a Sims situation with a dorm room, complete with “puffy drapes.” Emily takes one look at it and goes, “Well, for starters, let’s not pretend we’re going to sleep in twin beds. But also, my precious eager beaver, Stanford still hasn’t come knocking on my door.” Paige, who has never had a single second of experience in not wanting Emily, assures Emily that Stanford also is going to want her. She kisses** her and tries to scoop her up into a hug and ends up re-injuring the shoulder Emily injured when she was whisking Veal and Vandercalf to safety last night. Emily tells Paige she slept funny and it’s no big deal and also maybe she can’t swim in the meet today, except she knows she has to swim because she knows Stanford is riding on it which means her future with Paige is riding on it and she wants it so badly. Too badly. They’re too happy. This is only going to end in heartbreak for all of us.

(*Paige is wearing the same plaid Spencer was wearing when she was making that salad matrix in the cold open, which leads me to believe that Paige is still carrying on a secret competition with Spencer in her own mind, and probably knew she owned the same shirt as Spencer but wore it to school anyway and awarded herself ten gay points for kissing her girlfriend in it.)

(**Paige must have taken a masterclass in kissing techniques over the winter hiatus or something because the way she caresses Emily’s head and face when she’s kissing her this week is fucking legend.)

Spencer tries to get Toby to hang out with her today because if she can’t get into UPenn she’s not going to high school again ever, but the work of Pennsylvania’s most successful teenage carpenter is never done. He has to get to a job. His phone rings; he denies the call. Spencer stares at him like she does; his own eyeballs dart around the room like a squirrel in a hyena pit. Spencer tells him about Mona nearly getting strangled to death last night; he kind of shrugs. Spencer is finally like, “What is going on here? Are you A again or what, Toby?” Toby says he can’t answer any of her questions or accusations because HE HAS TO GO. And so he goes.

In Grad School Lit for the Average Teenager, Mr. Fitz is like, “And if you think Joad’s dog getting run over by a car in The Grapes of Wrath is a bummer, wait’ll you check out Kate and Aron’s doomed love affair in East of Eden. Basically, we’re going to keep binging on Steinbeck until we all want to die.” After class, Spencer stays behind to get some advice about getting into UPenn. Ezra goes, “Well, just off the top of my head, I’d say maybe you shouldn’t focus your personal essay on the perpetual emotional terrorism you’ve suffered at the hands of a zombie, all of which lead you to the basement of an insane asylum where you conversed with some dolls and slow-danced with your dead best friend’s ghost. And, you know, maybe leave out the part where you tried to murder the captain of the academic decathlon team.” Spencer is at a loss, because if she doesn’t write about that stuff, she’s got literally nothing. Her whole life is one poltergeist hunt after another.

That’s the essay she writes – the one about being tortured/swaying to the tune of “I’m Your Puppet” with Ali’s ghost in a mental institution – and when Ezra tries to very gently explain that the admissions board at UPenn is going to think she’s insane if she submits it, she comes out of the frame. She starts wailing at Ezra about how lies and the pretty little liars who tell them are what has caused all of her life’s problems and all of his life’s problems and there is honestly a very scary moment where I think she’s going to kiss him, but she doesn’t, thank God, because Toby would smash in Ezra’s beautiful face for one thing, and I really don’t think I could stomach these two together.

One of the best thing about this episode is that the Liars are all coming unglued individually, which is making them act so bitchy toward each other. Everybody snaps at everybody else in the most hilarious and sarcastic ways, and even when they’re being nice, they’re not listening to anything anyone else is aaying. Like right now on the phone, Emily is explaining that her shoulder is probably broken but she’s got to swim anyway and Paige is on the way over and why aren’t the opiates more easily accessible in her house, and Hanna is flipping out about finding some Manolos in the recycle bin, both of them just covered in mud like they tromped down into a swamp to pull out a police car. If you’re new to this show, you think those shoes mean Ashley murdered Wilden. If you’re an old pro, you know those shoes mean that Lucas is cross-dressing. Hanna tries to confront Ashley about them later but she’s like, “Learn to fold your own laundry before you start accusing my Manolos of murder, Hanna!”

Aria is so freaked out about becoming a part of this show that she visits the dojo where her old pal Holden learned his street fighting stuff and meets a sensei that looks startlingly like Garrett Reynolds’ brother from like Santa Monica. She asks for some private lessons and Sensei Garrett hears an invitation to her pants party, so they agree to spend some time alone clutching at each other. It goes exactly the way you think it’s going to go. For some very obvious reasons (their stature, their obsession with their respective lesbian love interests) and some suspect reasons (their A-ness?), Aria is completely co-opting Mona’s near-death thing and it’s making her jumpier than that time she accidentally ended up in pottery class with Jenna. Sensei Garrett wears a man-tank and touches his skin to her skin and lets her push him around and says, “How do you feel? In control?” And so she kisses him right on the mouth before bolting to her car and smashing the steering wheel with her fist and shouting, “Teachers! What is wrong with me?!?” (Answer: Byron. Since you asked.)

Hanna spends her Saturday morning banging on the entrance gate at Hastings Manor and leaving angry voicemails on Spencer’s phone. Mrs. DiLaurentis spies her acting like a crazy person and invites her over so they can act like crazy people together. Mrs. D is like, “Well, I’ve been trying to plant roses in the yard, but every time I start digging, I find holes and holes full of evidence. And you wouldn’t believe all the whiskey bottles that were stacked on this porch like some kind of joke Ali would have played on her brother.” And then, like the call of a siren, a parrot named Tippi starts hollering from the porch.

Tippi belonged to Grandma DiLaurentis and apparently Ali programmed him while she was down in Hilton Head renewing her pilot’s license and preparing for her death. Tippi keeps singing the same tune over and over and also saying a lot of inane bird shit about sweet potatoes. The important thing is that Tippi causes Mrs. D to remember this one time when Ali held her breath for like 20 minutes in public because she wanted her mom to agree she could invite her friends to Cape May. Mrs. D goes, “She’d been practicing that trick her whole miserable goddamn life. It’s like she knew she was going to be buried alive or something, the little cocksucker.” The next thing you know like you know your own name: Hanna absolutely adopts the parrot.

As Aria is fleeing the scene of her most recent foray into pedophiloa, she spots Mona chatting up a police officer, so she screeches on over there and hollers at her to get into the car because they’re late for their tiny conference on tiny tininess. Lucy and Janel have ridiculous chemistry together. I can’t believe it’s taken them so long to get alone like this. I haven’t felt this invested in Aria since she was cozied up to Spencer talking about Nana Hastings’ hatred of sideburns. Obviously, Mona was using her adrenalized hyperreality to talk to one cop while listening to some different ones. What she learned is that they found Wilden’s footprints and also some high-heeled lady shoe footprints down by the swamp where his car was buried. Mona goes, “Heels, do you hear me? And high ones, too. Not those medium-tall heels like you see most girls wearing. These Ones were high. Like Alison DiLaurentis high.”

Spencer and Toby try to out-baggage each other in Spencer’s kitchen. She’s pissed that Ezra said UPenn won’t like her essay about her slow descent into madness, and he’s pissed that she’s pissed that he stole the mobile lair. He did it in exchange for some records from Radley that say his mom was coming around to sanity because she loved Toby so much, but then she threw herself out of a window anyway. Spencer is like, “Yikes, your thing wins today.” They hug and he cries and also he’s ashamed of crying so he runs right out of the house when Aria drops by. Oh Toby, you tender pup. How did we ever thing you were a bad guy? Forgive us.

At the (Gay) Sharks vs. (Gay) Devils swim meet, Shana tracks down Emily in the locker room and says the word “scholarship” about sixty times. Like, there’s one scholarship up for grabs. She’s worked hard for that scholarship. She deserves that scholarship. She’s going to fight Emily to the death for that scholarship. Only one person can scissor with that scholarship for as long as they both shall live. The scholarship is Paige McCullers’ puffy drapes, by the way, and Shana’s threat leads Emily to take a zillion more pain pills and crash her perfect skull right into the side of the pool. It’s terrible. It’s one of the most terrible visuals this show has ever thrown at us and we’ve seen a corpse fall out of a soda cooler.

Paige reaches into the water and pulls her out, which is the perfect metaphorical counterpoint to that drowning thing from eons ago when Paige had Lego man bangs and internalized homophobia. Paige tries to follow Emily – who, let the record show, is once again in the throes of pure misery but being as Canadian as ever about it: “Please, may I please return to the pool and finish my race, please?” – to the ambulance, but NOT-CoachPrah shuts Paige down and makes her watch her girlfriend almost die from behind a window.

The directing in this episode is top shelf. Joanna Kerns is the one who directed it and also she directed “Single Fright Female,” which, you’ll remember, involved the greatest moment of all our lives (CeCe Drake/Snake/Mannequin leg). The pool scene edits and angles actually made me nauseous and when Emily crashed into the wall, even though I knew it was coming because I saw those promo photos months ago, I jumped out of my chair and made a noise like an angry cat. The scene in the Marin’s kitchen in a minute is amazing also. The way the camera is tilted just enough to make you woozy and uncomfortable, the way Ashley is in half-shadows the whole time. The PLL writing team is so talented we sometimes forget to talk about how visually stunning this show is. So, kudos to you, Joanna Kerns.

OK, so Hanna totally brings Tippi over to Spencer’s and it’s one of the best scenes we’ve ever seen:

Aria: I kissed that ninja right on the mouth because he smelled like cinnamon which smelled like Ezra who smells like cake.

Spencer: What are you ever even talking about, Aria?

Hanna: Hello! Here is Ali’s pre-death roommate, a bird. I stole it from Ms. DiLaurentis. By the way, Aria, I think your brother lives under her porch now.

Spencer: I was in Radley at one point with the biggest hair you have ever seen, and even I think this is nuts.

Aria: What’s nuts is that Wilden’s murderer was wearing high heels! High heels! Even I, Aria Montgomery of the skeleton t-shirt collection, think that is a crazy item of clothing.

Hanna: Spencer, a word? My mother owns a pair of that rare footwear, high heels. In your expert opinion, is there any chance she will be implicated in Wilden’s murder?

Spencer: She has already killed an elderly widow and her fake architect nephew with no repercussions. I wouldn’t worry about it.

Aria: Hey, what’s this song? I think this bird is giving us a clue.

Spencer and Hanna: [Roll their eyes like they are so sure Aria knows what a “clue” is.]

Hanna rushes home and flat out asks if her mom murdered Wilden and Ashley goes, “Yes, but it’s none of your business. Do you want Thai for dinner? Maybe I should teach you about boxed wine. Would you like that? Get a glass, honey. Get five glasses.” Later, she pulls her muddy Minolas from the recycle bin and crumbles them up in the garbage disposal in the sink, so that’s definitely the last we’ll hear about that.

Spencer holds onto Tippi at her house for some reason, but it keeps on singing that song so loud that she calls Hanna a hundred times and screams at her to come get her goddamn parrot. But then, on one fateful redial, she realizes that Tippi isn’t singing a song at all. Tippi is singing a phone number. The Liars reconvene and grouch at each other some more and finally decide to let Tippi dial the phone number with her own talons. But Tippi cannot. Because Tippi has flown the coop! Or, well, someone has crawled into Spencer’s second story window and set Tippi free. There’s one feather left, though, so at least Aria will get an earring out of it.

And finally. Siiiigh. I almost can’t even write about this. Paige and Emily are too in love. They mean too much to each other. It is actually physically painful to see them so happy because this is Rosewood and this is TV and there is no way on Joss Whedon’s green earth that they are going to make it out of this season in tact or alive but they make me hope in miracles as I have scarcely hoped before. They’ve fought for this happiness, together and by themselves, for four seasons. Oh, run away now, you lambs! Run for your lives!

Right. So. Paige comes over to take care of Emily when she gets home from the hospital and Emily confesses that she smashed her head into the pool wall because she lost count of her strokes because she was doped up on pain pills on purpose. Paige asks for the zillionth time why Emily insists on keeping this stuff from her, and Emily is as desperate and as heartbroken as she has ever been. She says, verbatim, “Because I don’t want to live in that space anymore. And I don’t want you to live there either. I want to live in that room on your computer, and I want to be with you, only you. Away from this town. Just you and me together. Safe and starting a real life.”

Paige brushes Emily’s hair out of her eyes, tells her they’ve already started their real life together, and gently pulls her in for a kiss that is really a promise. Emily has never wanted anything the way she wants Paige. And Paige has never fought for anything the way she’s fought for Emily. If I had a time machine, the first stop I’d make is my 15-year-old self’s bedroom. I’d give her all four seasons of this show and say, “This is everything you need to know.” And then I’d get back in my time machine and travel to four years ago and find the version of myself who scoffed at Trish Bendix and said, “I’m so sure I’ll ever find a reason to put my heart into this silly show” and punch myself right in the face.

Anyway, speaking of destroying your own, the Risen Mitten has baked herself a delicious roasted parrot, which she then feeds to her own parrot, Tippi DiLaurentis.

Next week: Somebody else will be recapping this show because I’ll be in Radley clutching a photo of Paige McCullers to my chest and whistling the Paily love theme.

As always, the most enormous thanks to my screencapping partner Maggie (@MargaretRosey) who sent me a poster-sized photo of Ali’s parrot this morning with the caption, “Tippi want a lawyer!”

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