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“Pretty Little Liars” recap (4.22): All the Town’s Shovels

Previously on Pretty Little Liars, Spencer’s parents, who couldn’t have been less fussed when she was waltzin’ with homosexual ghosts in an insane asylum, staged a tag-team intervention to help her kick her Adderall habit. Hanna kept Aria from jumping off a bridge, saved a semi-innocent man from going to jail, and still found time to throw down an inappropriate smooch on Detective Holbrook. Aria went berzerker all over Ezra’s apartment, just a-trashin’ and a-thrashin’ and a cry-cry-cryin’ buckets of tears. And Emily and Paige put each other into super gross, super impossible situations that ultimately resulted in Paige diming out Ali (anonymously) to the most incompetent police department in America.

Spencer returns from rehab, still trippin’ balls on her memory of cracking Ali’s skull open with a shovel, to find that her parents have purchased her a live-in counselor/teacher/rehabologist named Dean Stravos. They take away her phone and her laptop and her keys and she deals with it pretty graciously. She doesn’t say, “Yeah, well I don’t need keys for Mona to climb in my window and teleport us both to another dimension via the portal of her own mind.” Stravos will be living in the barn, which hopefully was cleansed with holy water (scotch, rocks) after Ian moved out.

Anyway, Stravos is wearing a henley and a vest and some eyebrows I refuse to take seriously. He hands Spencer a cup to pee in and she says she will fill it with her dignity.

Aria, also, will not be attending to the other Liars this week as she has decided to take a mental health break slash campus visit to Syracuse University. It takes her about four minutes to find a flannel-wearing, guitar-playing, pretty little dude hair-having guy to romp around town with. They drink, they dance, they canoodle, her level of trust in this fellow she just met is staggering considering the fact that her boyfriend of three years revealed himself as a stalker of little girls not two weeks ago. It is mind-boggling that only Paige and Emily have been roofied on this show. Truly mind-boggling. Aria is dressed in the exact outfit she would wear to cat-burgle and her new boyfriend is dressed like Toby’s secret fashion ideas Pinterest board.

Riley says, “Want to go get some killer pancakes?” And Aria Montgomery, who should know by now that when someone says “killer pancakes” they mean literal poison inside those fluffy pastries two out of three times, she goes with him.

Hanna and Emily are the only two Liars still operating under the delusion that attendance is required to graduate from Rosewood High (and, frankly, that they are going to live long enough to graduate from Rosewood High). At school, they peep Mona and Mike fighting about the under-porch candlelight dinner he was preparing for her and how dare she bail on him when he spent three hours cleaning out empty Cheetos bags and red coats out from under the house. They assume it’s Ezra who orchestrated the breakup and for some reason, this, above all other things, sets Emily off. Like, whatever, spy on them for years, never intervene to save their lives, fuck up Aria’s brain for possibly ever, but break up Mike and Mona? How dare you, sir!

So she marches to Fitz’s classroom and shoves her homework in his face and says, “If you could pass this along to a grown man who doesn’t exploit teenage girls, that’d be grand.” She marches back out as he calls after her, “No such man exists in this town!”

At the Brew, Hanna apologizes for tripping and catching her lips on Holden’s lips. He says it’s cool, he ain’t mad, but he does have a question: Does she know which hoodlum left a note in a police car that claimed Alison DiLaurentis is alive and running a noodle-money laundering scheme just down the road under the guise of A.D. Enterprises? Hanna doesn’t know but when Spencer began cracking good and proper once again, she took it upon herself to become well-versed in every area of sleuthing, handwriting analysis chief among her chosen subjects, so she will definitely get to the bottom of this note.

In her Syracuse hotel room, Aria wakes up in a pile of mini-bar liquor bottles claiming a hangover while looking like one hundred thousand dollars. Which, incidentally, is how much it costs to drink that much from a hotel mini-bar. Riley thinks the best way to cure a hangover is to bang on his guitar and then have sex, which I have found to absolutely not be true, and in fact if someone ever tried that shit with me after a night of breakup drankin’, I would shovel them, I am telling you the truth. Who plays a musical instrument next to a hungover person’s head? A monster, that’s who.

After a nice, hot shower – Hey, remember when Spencer’s shower came to life and attacked her? Hands down one of the best PLL moments ever – Spencer crawls into bed and finds herself lounging in some grave dirt. There’s a note from A talking about, “You dug her grave and here is some dirt from it and so good luck getting to sleep tonight, punk.” Spencer’s face is so grossed out! She has never been so grossed out! One time she almost ate a plate of live worms and she wasn’t so grossed out!

Rosewood High courtyard. Travis and Hanna take turns asking each other on dates until one of them finally agrees that they should go out on a date. Emily, watching from the shadows like a creeper, pounces as soon as Travis walks off, talking about, “Hanna, your boyfriend’s show was just cancelled like a week ago; how about a little sensitivity?” And Hanna is like, “You know what’s weird? You’re like really into saving Mona’s relationship with Mike and my relationship with Caleb but you haven’t done a single thing to salvage your relationship with Paige since you stood her up at the hoedown but last-second danced with her because of mushy squash.” Just kidding, Hanna doesn’t say that. I say that. Hanna says, “Eh, the timing’s weird, but Travis is better than no hobo at all.”

At home, Dean Stravos makes Spencer a spinach smoothie that she glares at like she is so sure vegetables are going to fix what’s wrong with her. Dean is all, “What’s wrong with you?” And she’s like, “Either dreams or hallucinations or memories of … I’m not going to say ‘shovels’ but I’m also not not going to say ‘shovels.'” He tells her he doesn’t know what that’s about. Some drug counselor he is. She says she’s going to take a shower, when really what she is going to do is sneak away and try to call Toby on a land line because desperate times call for desperate measures. Dean Stravos catches her and is a jerk about it.

Detective Holbrook and Detective Roma Maffia(!) accost Hanna on the street with a good cop/bad cop routine about how they know she’s the one who left the Ali tipoff letter in the police car and it won’t be hard to pin it on her and this is very serious business. She shakes her head and rolls her eyes, says, “As usual, you all continue to be adorable and also completely terrible at your jobs. Luckily for you I can be adorable and competent at the same time, so I’m going to do your work for you now, again: as usual. Bye.” After she leaves, Holbrook and Roma Maffia talk about how much they like her even though she’s clearly a criminal mastermind.

Aria continues her whirlwind rebound with Riley, following him into the woods because she still doesn’t have any self-preservation instincts. Her brain is like, “Well, there are no ski lifts around, so I guess I should be OK?” They talk about how her heart is broken and how she shouldn’t be the one to have to live in exile. Modern breakup etiquette dictates that if your ex seduced you knowing you were underage in the interest of writing a true crime novel about your dead best friend whom he was also seducing while she was also underage and then spied on you and your friends with every kind of surveillance technology for years, then he should be the one who has to leave town. That’s the truth bomb Riley drops on Aria in the woods, and yeah, it’s good advice, but also, she’s damn lucky he didn’t drop an actual bomb on her.

Spencer and her mom are washing dishes when Mrs. DiLaurentis comes knocking, asking if they received her invitation to the charity dinner she’s sponsoring for runaways whose best friends tried to break their faces with gardening tools. Veronica scurries off to write a check and Jessica turns to Spencer, all, “Dude, remember when you attacked me in my living room the other night? Your mom said it was an allergic reaction to some Benadryl? It’s weird but totally OK. I mean, it’s not like your Benadryl allergies ever caused you to try to murder anyone else in my family, right?” Spencer smiles and nods. Right. Exactly. She never murdered any DiLaurentises. Probably. Maybe. Fifty-fifty she didn’t murder any of them. OK, thirty-seventy.

Riley stops by Aria’s Syracuse hotel room to tell her goodbye and to follow her dreams and to take his advice about which ex has to give up custody of collective stomping grounds. They smooch on the lips. He doesn’t kidnap her and beat her to death with a baseball bat. We’ll call it a win.

At the Brew, Mike comes zooming in like a whirling dervish demanding to know the location of Aria Montgomery, which is rich coming from a guy who disappeared from literal existence for at least two years. He thinks she broke up him and Mona. He shouts it at Emily. She’s like, “You and Mona broke up? What kind of goddamn world is this we’re living in?” She’ll do him one better than finding Aria. She’ll find Mona.

Spencer and Dean Stravos go for a run in the jungle. She is wearing a hoodie and a messy ponytail, which you know is my all-time favorite combination of Spencer things. She’s good with running three miles, be he tacks on an extra mile because she tried to call her boyfriend earlier, so she runs along behind him for another lap, scowling. She runs and runs and then suddenly, like a panther in the night, a shovel appears. In broad daylight. No permit. No owner. Just as bold as brass, sticking up in some soil. In a neat little bit of editing, Spencer relives the night Ali died, right up to the point where she sees herself whack Ali in the head with that shovel, blood splattering all over her face and everything.

At home, she asks Dean Stravos if he knows anything about hypnotization or memory implantation. Like if you knew a girl who was Graced with omnipotence, like she could speak things into existence, change people’s minds, make them think things about themselves or other people, basic Jedi stuff – if you knew a girl who could do that with her out loud words, could she do it with written words too? Could she fill in your memory gaps with nightmare visions from her diary? Den Stravos doesn’t know that either. Dean Stravos doesn’t know shit. He does, however, have a glorious hand-written letter from Toby, who is in London, which also is where Melissa is, so that cannot be a coincidence.

Travis and Hanna’s date is going really well until Mrs. D slithers up and makes it weird. I hope she never leaves the show, I am so serious, she creeps me out worse than just about anybody. I don’t know who this actress is who plays her but even her posture is aggressive and awkward and menacing and proper. The way she never blinks. I love her. She’s scary as hell. Anyway, she crashes the date for just long enough to make the air 20 degrees cooler and also to say she’s heading on down to the precinct to talk to some detectives about a note they found. After that, Hanna just fully checks out on her date.

Emily, amazingly, has the gonads to stand directly behind Mona while she’s backing up out of her driveway in Jenna’s old car. Mona slams on the breaks and rolls down her window and rolls her eyes when Emily is like, “Going to meet with Ezra Fitz or do you have a second to tell me some shit.” Mona always has a second for Emily. Here’s her deal: When she found out Fitz was writing a True Crime novel, she agreed to tell him stuff if he agreed to edit out the parts that could send her to jail. (In a book in which he details a litany of felonies he perpetrated against underage girls.) Things got complicated when she realized she couldn’t just mess with Mike to spy on Aria, but before she got out, she found out that Fitz knows who stole the game from her when she was in Radley.

(Chrrrriiiist on a cracker, Shay Mitchell is gorgeous.)

Aria finds out too. She goes to his apartment and tells him to get the hell out of Rosewood because she doesn’t want to see his face when she’s running around on this one street with her friends and it’s the fucking least he can do. He actually kind of agrees, and even though he didn’t publish his book and won’t publish his book, he wants her to read his book. She does. She calls an SOS Liars meeting.

When they assemble together for the first time in days (whew! I missed us!) they abide by the rules of Liars club: Whoever sent the SOS gets to go first. And so Aria drops the bomb that Mrs. DiLaurentis has been A ever since Mona went to Radley. Actually, everybody drops bombs. Spencer says Mrs. D and CeCe say they saw her attack Ali and now she’s remembering that she attacked Ali. Emily says Mona broke up with Mike. Even Aria looks at her like, “You might need a refresher on what constitutes a thing we care about.” And Hanna drops a bomb, too.

After one of my all-time favorite Shay Mitchell line deliveries …

Hanna: Hey, Em, can I ask you something? Emily: We don’t have any cheesy puffs; my mom says they have chemicals in them that make your face break out.
… Hanna tells Emily that Paige sent a letter to the police telling them Ali is alive, which she discerned from reading the letter and seeing Paige’s handwriting spelling out the word “EMILY” on Emily’s bulletin board. Lord, Spencer’s going to have to go back to Radley when she realizes what Hanna has accomplished while she’s been down the rabbit hole.

At home, Mike and Aria bond about how they’re not so good at picking out romantic partners.

Also at home, Veronica Hastings comes unglued when she catches Spencer sneaking back in the house. I had to pause the TV I laughed so hard when Veronica goes, “Were you out looking for drugs?!” Like there’s some kind of shady back alley where all the kids go in the middle of the night to buy that hard street drug Adderall. Spencer tries to explain that it was important but her mother has never and will never understand how important clues are. Spencer is like, “Can you tell me what happened that summer I was blanking, the summer Ali disappeared?” But nope. Veronica Hastings will not.

Up in her bedroom, Spencer creeps to the window when she sees Ali’s bedroom light come on and then! Mrs. D appears in the shadows! I thought she was wearing a red coat but it’s just a red(ish) blouse but it was still so scary! And awesome! She’s insane!

The Risen Mitten sews some wedding dresses and stashes them in a body bag because, bitches, there’s another fashion show next week. All fingers crossed that Satan crashes this one too.

My super hugest thanks, always, to my screencapping partner Maggie (@MargaretRosey). You can find all her screencaps here.

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