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“Pretty Little Liars” recap 4.09: Lesbian Bed Death

Previously on Pretty Little Liars, Emily tore her shoulder off the hinges recusing Mona and Aria from Red Coat, and then swam her face right into a pool wall because she sneaked one too many Vicodins out from under Pam’s pill-counting dominion. Shana took Emily’s spot on the swim team and played her violin up in Emily’s grill and dated JennaBot and also probably got to at least second base with Paige back during Ems’ Habitat for Haiti days, so she became Enemy Number One. After brainwashing Hanna into thinking she killed Det. Wilden – at Hanna’s own behest, by the way – Mona confessed to killing Det. Wilden for who even knows how many reasons, but definitely among them was the fact that is in love with Hanna. And Spencer tried so hard to give a single crap about Toby’s dead mom, but just couldn’t do it.

I know I’ve mentioned it lots of times before, but lots of times is still not enough: Janel Parrish is a magician, dudes. In any given episode, she is playing three to five characters (who are sometimes characters wearing masks of the faces of other characters). So, like, right now she’s playing Mona playing Fake Mona who is confused and intimidated by the police who are taking her murder confession. She’s getting some of the facts right and some of the facts wrong, on purpose, one presumes. She keeps her Regular Human Teenager face on for most of the time, before grinning that Adrenalized Hyperreality Half-Smirk at the wall. Why’d she do it? “I just couldn’t let my best friend’s mom go to prison for a crime she didn’t commit!” (Translation: “This shit is getting me one step closer to gay marrying Hanna Marin.”)

The best part, though:

RPD Detective: You sneaked out of Radley Institute for the Criminally Insane?!?? Mona: Seriously? I sneaked to both of Pluto’s moons when you stepped out for a cup of coffee a second ago.

Hanna and Spencer are curled up on the couch like some kittens when Veronica Hastings interrupts their mid-morning nap to ask if they put Mona up to this confessional business. They say that they did not, but Spencer’s face says she wishes she’d thought to put Mona up to it and Hanna’s face says she accidentally probably put Mona up to it just by nature of being so PinkDrinkable.

Spencer calls Aria to fill her in on Mona’s confession, but Kung Fu Jake is changing shirts behind an open window and it’s driving Aria to absolute distraction. One of the reasons I love #BRVC so much is because watching TV with people who are like me is such a comfort and a relief. For example, #BRVC goes bananas if Troian’s voice drops even one half of a notch, but no one even noticed Jake was half-naked in this scene. My sister pointed it out to me after the episode and upon rewatch I can confirm that yes, Jake’s abs and shoulder and biceps were the things making Aria even less interested than usual in the perpetual murders of her best friends. She’s all, “…niiiippples.” And Spencer goes, “What? Did you just say nipples? What are you doing right now?” And Aria’s like, “Uh, no. Nippy. Nippy, is what I said. It’s nippy in prison. Mona should take a sweater.”

Paige and Emily are on a little hike which is a thing they like to do sometimes as a reminder that one time they went on a walk in the woods and found out they’d gotten trapped in a poisoned flask roofie loop, and they survived that, didn’t they? So they can survive anything! Paige is anti-Mona because she’s not really happy right now with people who hit other people with cars, on account of it putting a real damper on the next step in her 50-year plan with Emily. Speaking of which, Paige has set up a meeting for Emily with an Olympic swimming coach as an early birthday present so she can explore the various ways she can make a future of doing what she loves in the pool and doing who she loves in their shared dorm room.

And then Paige does the worst thing she has ever done. In all of her life. She one time held Emily’s head under water in the pool, but that is nothing compared to this thing. She invites Emily to her aunt’s lake house for quiet evening alone, but it is a lie! She is really inviting her there for a surprise party of like six thousand people! Paige, no! No! I mean, maybe I’m just projecting here, but I hate surprises and I hate big groups and if Paige McCullers says we can have a quiet evening free of tampering with evidence and without cars driving through the walls, I am going to consider that actual heaven, so don’t dangle it in front of my face and then snatch it away and replace it with six thousand random not-Paiges!

When Jake and Aria show up at the Brew, Aria’s vision is still blurry from Jake’s naked deltoids so she doesn’t even notice Ezra over there in the corner ignoring Maggie, who is very excited to have gotten into grad school somewhere a million miles away from this murder pit. Jake flirts with Aria and Aria flirts with Jake and Maggie’s just “and the best part about this grad school is that it’s in village in Austria with that famed Donut Castle!” And the whole time Ezra’s eyes just get wider and wider and wider, not because his son is moving to Europe in a second but because Jake’s hair totally looks like he slept on Aria’s couch, and finally Ezra’s his eyeballs pop right out of his skull and roll across the coffee shop floor and out the door and through the town and down the 295 to the Delaware river where they float out to sea.

What those eyeballs don’t see before they land in the Atlantic is Aria blowing off Jake with a lie about having family movie night when clearly she is one of the six thousand people who will be ruining Paige’s puffy drape time with Emily.

Hanna and Veronica go to visit Ashley in the slammer-jammer to tell her the news that Mona confessed to killing Wilden. Hanna is like, “So, anyway, get those cuffs off, lady, we’re going home!” You can’t blame Hanna for being confused about how the law works, because actual law only started being practiced in this town when Roma Maffia rolled in a couple of weeks ago. The cops haven’t fully bought into Mona’s confession just yet, so until they decide to charge her with Wilden’s murder and drop Ashley’s charges, they’re just going to set bail at one million lasagna boxes.

Emily loves Olympic swimming school. There are so many pools and so many people swimming in them, and the dorm rooms have actual blinds on the windows and locks on the doors and the sports cream is administered by trained professionals and there’s nary a Shana Costumeshop in sight. Unfortunately, Paige failed to mention to the swim coach that Emily is landlocked for a while. Coach is like, “A torn rotator cuff? Are you serious? When one of my swimmers tears a rotator cuff, I just take her out into the yard and put her down.”

Hanna goes to the park to scream at her dad on the phone. Or, well, to scream at his voicemail. She needs him to bring her one hundred thousand dollars from the thousand dollar tree he planted in the garden for that bitch-ass Kate Randall, and she needs that shit right now, so stop fucking around and ignoring her calls, and it’s just like him to run when they need him and only show back up when he can clomp around like a patronizing dick. She lets loose with a few more swear words, just to drive home the goddamn point, and shows exactly zero remorse when Pastor Ted wanders up at the end of her conversation. He’s like, “Man, I miss your mom. Did she ever tell you about last Halloween when we babysat that ghost?” Hanna slaps him in the face, pickpockets him, and runs for it. Sadly, there are no noodles or dollars in Pastor Ted’s wallet. Only a BOGO coupon for the Pancake Shoppe.

Ezbian’s Cake and Cuddle Emporium.

Ezra: Blah blah blah? Maggie: Blah blah. Ezra: Blah blah blah blah! Maggie: Blah?! Ezra: BLAH BLAH BLAH. Maggie: BLAH? BLAH! BLAH! Ezra: BLAH! BLAH! BLAH!
And then Ezra runs off to talk to Veronica about suing Maggie for full custody of Malcolm. And why shouldn’t a judge grant him such a thing? Malcolm has known Ezra for four entire minutes, two of which he spent in the ER after Ezra’s underage girlfriend shoved him off a bed and broke his jaw, and one of which he spent at a Faustian puppet show when Ezra’s underage girlfriend’s Radley-bound best friend kidnapped him from karate class. Dick move, Fitzgerald.

Aria and Spencer tip-toe around the hallways of Rosewood high to see if there are any bitches they can eavesdrop on, and as luck would have it, two bitches are in the courtyard having a whispered conversation! It is the bitches Shana Costumeshop and JennaBot Marshall! And Jenna is pregnant with Shana’s baby! They try to hide it, but she is very clearly great with child. (Can you even imagine a baby made of this combined DNA? That thing would pop right out playing hymns to the devil on the zither and eating cherries like a menace and it would be the most beautiful child this earth has ever seen.) Anyway, Jenna and Shana talk about how Jenna’s going to be getting killed soon because of how she was in cahoots with Jason Thing, Garrett Thing, and Melissa Thing, all of whom are dead or dying. Jenna wants to go to the police, but Shana tells her she’ll protect her from all the bad things. She’s already absorbed 75 percent of Emily’s powers, and Spencer is next. Soon, she’ll be able to keep Jenna safe from literally anything. But get this: for right now Shana has to help Jenna get where she’s going because she’s blind again. (OR IS SHE?) (Yes, she is.)

Someone posted her bail and so Ashley comes home from prison. She’s hugs Hanna so hard and Hanna hands her a glass of pinot, which Veronica slaps out of her hand due to the ankle monitor she’s wearing, and that’s when Ashley asks to go back to prison. Because what’s the point of freedom without libations?

Paige wants everything about Emily’s surprise party to be perfect. She’s bought all the balloons and all the streamers and baked the most delicious coconut cupcakes and made very, very sure to invite Shana in a way that indicated she should only show up at the party if she wants to die. But Spencer and Aria have a whole other idea. After eavesdropping on their courtyard conversation, they decide Shana should come to the party because she’s Jenna-wrangling this week, and if Jenna really is going blind and they can separate her from her herd like a couple of hyenas, they can get her to confess to them that she knows Ali is alive and also knows who killed Ali. Paige rolls her eyes and agrees because she’s kind of just back on speaking terms with Spencer and you don’t want to cross her when she’s got that sleuthing spark in her eye, but also, she knows this is now just another party that is going to end up with someone getting mowed over by a car.

Anyway, the party looks beautiful and all six thousand randoms are there and when they jump out and yell “SURPRISE!” at Emily, she kills every single one of them. Because you know what happens when Emily goes places in the dark? GLASS IN HER HAIR, for starters. Dudes stealing her face. The ghost of her dead girlfriend dragging her out of a carbon monoxide-filled barn and making out with her. The ghost of her dead girlfriend dragging her out of a burning cabin and flying away in her plane. An entire store full of dolls coming to life and brandishing shovels and chanting “Follow me, end up like me!”

Paige, you are perfect, but when in the hell were you thinking with this party?!

Actually, before anyone hollers surprise and gets a pocket knife in the gut, Emily starts yelling at Paige for sending her to swim school without telling the Aquatic Headmaster that she’s got shoulder poisoning.

There are a couple of party stragglers that wander in after Emily has opened fire on everyone else in the room. Shana and JennaBot are there because Shana heard Coachprah is stopping by and she really wants to make a good impression on her. Also, Jake is the arm candy of some girl we don’t know but who I thought was Samara for a hot second, and I was shocked by how much I wanted to see Paige throw down on her earing-crafting ass. Aria is the one who does the honors, though, on not-Samara, because when she told Jake she had family game night tonight, she thought he’d just go Out of Town like Holden and wait for her to call for whatever Tang Soo Do thing.

Paige and Emily wander out to the dock to have a little chat about Olympic swimming school, and this conversation is a little too close to home for me, if you want to know the truth. I’m forever a Paige McCullers: juuust this side of socially awkward, tripping over my own good intentions, weirdly intense about pretty much everything I love, trying and trying and trying to figure out my most authentic life, and always the knowledge that the only reason the darkness didn’t get me is because I fucking hate to lose. But in this one instance, I am an Emily Fields. That thing where you put all of the pressure of the universe onto your own shoulders and when you start buckling underneath it, projecting that pressure onto the people closest to you, like they’re the ones who are going to be disappointed if you fail, when all they want is for you to be happy because that’s how love works.

Emily: You get why I’m pissed, right? You gave me hope, Paige. Actual hope. So the fall back to reality hurt even worse than if I’d just kept on believing I was broken. Paige: OK, but in all fairness, I thought there was hope. I can’t imagine what it would be like for a person to say no to you. I want you to be happy. Emily: You want you to be happy. Paige: I don’t understand why those things have to be mutually exclusive. Emily: I’m just going to say it out loud: What’s going to happen to us when you go to college next year on the west coast and I stay here getting murdered at some state school?

Paige: It depends on whether or not you believe the truth of me and you, or the truths everyone else will lay on you like the law because they think their experiences are universal. Emily: We’re not going to be together when we go to college. Paige: Clearly you saying that thing to me has been coming since the beginning of the season, but that doesn’t make it any less like a pocket knife to my soul. But I’ll tell you one thing that might ease your suffering: This show is never graduating any of us. Emily: Maybe later we can celebrate your perfection with a hoe-down, but for now I just need to wallow in my misery, OK? Paige: That’s cool. Go on inside and get some cake. I’m going to hang around out here with Jake and probably one of us will murder Jenna.

Spencer and Aria split up: Spencer to just straight up ask Jenna why the hell she’s blind again and who killed Alison DiLaurentis and where is the very clearly still-alive person of Alison DiLaurentis? And Aria to mess with Jake’s head. She’s jealous that he’s there with some blonde swimmer that’s not her and she bets he even took her to see Insidious 2 and did he tell her it was Aria’s couch where he slept last night? Jake says her jealousy indicates true love, and she’s like, “Sure, whatever, let’s just see that bare chest again, mister.” After Spencer questions Jenna, who basically tells her to go fuck herself, she and Shana get separated by the six thousand party-goers all clamoring for coconut cupcakes – and she end up face down in Torch Lake, just staring into the abyss at the shrapnel of a thousand Melissa masks.

Was she pushed? Did you fall? Who’s to say?

Emily is the one who discovers her and just like the night Lucas tipped overboard out of Hanna’s canoe, that world champion swimmer just stands at the edge of the water and hollers for help. Eventually she does hop in and rescue Jenna, but only because she kind of thinks it’s Spencer. If she knew for sure it was Jenna, she would have been like, “It’s my party, and what I say goes! Everyone back inside!” As the ambulance wheels Jenna away to the hospital, where hopefully Dr. Wren can get her a new set of eyes, Shana rounds on the Liars and glares at them like sex. Er, no. Evil. Glares at them like Evil. (I didn’t realize Shana was so tall until this episode. Like really, really tall. Reaaaally tall.)

Paige and Jake come wandering out of the woods, whistling all innocently and ringing the water out of their clothes. Paige is like, “Hey, you saved another person’s life, Emsy! That’s three this season!” And Emily rolls her eyes, all, “This is why we don’t throw parties, Paige. Thanks for the worst day ever.”

Paige kicks everyone out and washes up and locks the door and turns off the light and then finally, finally retires to the bedroom to engage in some of that solo time she promised Emily. Only Emily totally fakes being asleep, snoring, twitching, the whole thing. Paige sighs and bites her fist and turns out the lights.

Over at the Marin’s, Pastor Ted brings Ashley a pie because he watched Orange Is the New Black while she was in prison so he knows it means true love. He also casually lets it slip that he posted bail for her, so it’d be cool if she didn’t abscond to Uncle Jaime’s Bean Farm with Hanna and Caleb.

And finally, at the hospital, Shana tells Spencer once and for all that the Liars need to back the hell up off of Jenna. But Spencer just can’t let it go. She’s all, “Who do you think drowned Jenna, though? Alison? Do you think Alison drowned her because Jenna knows who killed Alison?” Shana shakes her head and explains that the only person Jenna was ever really afraid of was CeCe Drake.

Spencer shakes her fist at the sky and cries “AMERRRRICAAAANO!”

Mona checks herself into her old room at Radley. Red coat checks in on Mike under the DiLaurentis’ porch. And The Risen Mitten sends Toby some piano sheet music that is presumably a song his mother used to sing to him before she jumped/was thrown from her Radley window.

Guys, guys, guys, I’m sorry this recap was so late. Maggie, Maggie, Maggie (@margaretrosey), thank you for being the greatest screencapping partner in all the lands.

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