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“Pretty Little Liars” recap (1.20): Hell hath no fury like a Hanna scorned

Up is down! Black is white! On is off! Dogs and cats, lions and lambs, lying together in a fluffy cuddle pile on opposite day, because: JennaBot cried and I got sad. Spencer and Boo Radley Van Cullen held hands by a fire and I swooned. It’s like my heart has been flipped inside out, but that doesn’t even matter really because it swelled to the point of bursting this morning when I read that ABC Family is launching Pretty Little Liars‘ second season in June. JUNE! It’s like we don’t even have to mourn when it ends in two weeks because it’s coming right back to us.

Another afternoon in Rosewood. Spencer is having a nuclear-level emotional meltdown at Emily because she got one question wrong on an algebra quiz or something. It seems like a big deal until she realizes the Rosewood PD are in her bedroom giving her the full Boo Radley Van Cullen treatment, upending her boxes of love letters from her sister’s ex-boyfriends and thrashing all three of her costume closets. Ian, of course, is watching from the hallway, munching a cookie and looking like Satan’s favorite son.

The next morning JennBot wakes up the town with a flute solo because she killed all the roosters with her bare hands months ago. Aria rises and shines to find that her mom and dad spent the night together. She remains calm and benevolent, totally turning it into a teaching moment, all, “Sometimes you catch two people shagging. Two people you never thought you’d catch shagging. The mature response is the one I am having right now, and I hope if either of you ever find yourself in a similar situation, you will demonstrate the kind of decorum I have modeled for you this morning.”

There’s no literary theme this week, so Spencer’s outfit is just “gondola driver.” She drops by school to tell the PLLs that the cops are probably coming for them next, even though it’s a total waste of taxpayer dollars because every piece of “evidence” in Alison’s “murder” “investigation” is automatically “contaminated.” Hanna is not really feeling the homicide talk so soon after she swiped her V-card; she’d rather chat about how Caleb bought her a bedazzled owl necklace as a symbol of their love and a remembrance of their pants party. Aria is like, “… owls?” And Hanna goes, “Right. Like that Tootsie Roll commercial from the ’50s? How many licks does it take? Ha ha! Just kidding. This is ABC Family. We heard owls while we were doing it.”

Just across the cafeteria, the opposite of doing it is happening: Paige and Sean are engaged in some flirting about how they’re both captains of their sports teams. (Oh, wait – I get it now. This week’s theme is captains. Paige is captain of the swim team; Sean is captain of the football team; Spencer is captain of my heart. That explains the hat.) Emily gawks for a second and mumbles “… too gay to function” under her breath, and then Aria’s like, “Oh, speaking of too gay to function, I’ve got to send a G-rated text to my boyfriend Ella. I mean Ezra.” Only, she sends the actual text – “Thinking of you and how I’d like to stand three feet apart from you and make eye contact” – to her actual mom. Ella catches her in the hallway later and goes, “I think you meant to send this to Spencer, darling.” And Aria’s all, “Please. Like anyone could keep herself three entire feet away from Spencer Hastings.”

Sean wants Emily to hook him up with Paige. Emily wants Sean to die in a fire. But because she’s the heart of this show and the most courageous PLL of all, she doesn’t actually tie him to a stake and burn him alive. She doesn’t even throw a firecracker at his face. She’s like, “I’m sorry, Sean. Paige and I aren’t really friends.” Which is only the sweetest, most Jane Bennet-est thing ever. (“Could there be finer symptoms? Is not general incivility the very essence of love?”)

Emily and Aria meet up in the courtyard so Aria can give Emily the totally innocuous objects of her and Ezra’s courtship for safekeeping. (Chopsticks from that time they got Chinese takeout. A light bulb from that time they turned on a light. A jar of air from that time they breathed.) They don’t have time to catalogue the whole thing, though, because Caleb is having a really loud, really specific conversation on his mobile about, “Evil Overlord, I know I agreed to f–k over Hanna, but that was before she took me in off the street and made me mac and cheese and taught me the ways of the popsicle piggy bank. Also: sex.” Emily and Aria tip-toe behind a pillar and peek around like a couple of actual Scoobys. It’s the first real zoink! moment we’ve had in weeks, and oh, I cherish it.

Emily and Aria try to to explain to Hanna about Caleb being a villain, but Hanna lays down this irrefutable logic: He can’t be a bad guy; I slept with him. And I mean, how are you going to argue with that? Saint Peter said love covers a multitude of sins, and that’s totally true. But equally true (and universally acknowledged) is this fact: Heady, heady hormones cover a canyon of crazy. If there was some kind of scout badge for that principle, I’d have – I don’t even want to tell you how many badges I’d have. Hundreds, probably. Maybe a million. Hanna is like, “Case closed.” And Emily and Aria are like, “Who are we to argue? One of us is in love with a teacher in this very school and the other one of us is in love with a girl who tried to drown us. So.”

Emily catches up with Paige in the hallway and Paige goes, “Sean and I are so totally in love!” And Emily is all, “And I’m the White Queen of Wonderland!”

Hanna, meanwhile, has spied JennaBot wearing her bedazzled owl necklace which is actual a flash drive and so she: a) breaks up with Caleb and makes him homeless again, b) breaks into Caleb’s locker with the Braille code of yore, and c) beats the shit out of JennaBot in the loo like some kind of Moaning Myrtle situation. I mean. Honestly. She walks over to a blind robot and just wallops her in the face. “This is Hanna by the way,” she says. And JennaBot turns on her sympathy sensors and cries and cries and – oh my God, you guys, don’t look into her eyes! That’s what she wants! She’ll prey on your sympathy and kill you like she killed those roosters!

Boo Radley pays a visit to Spencer so they can get their outcast on. He gives her a couple of lessons in being a Person Of Interest, and they talk about running away and maybe joining the circus. Spencer’s like, “I’ve got the costumes.” And Boo’s like, “My face can do many creepy things.” And they hold hands like the most adorable things you’ve ever seen. Like when you see little kittens sleeping on top of each other with their little kitten eyes squeezed tight and their little purrers just a-purring. Actually. Boo’s face isn’t so weird when you think of it as a smooshed kitten face. Oh, Boo. Remember when those kids scowled at you and you cried?

Hanging out in her bedroom not playing footsie is Emily. She gets a text from Paige who shows up ten minutes later dressed like a disco ball because she’s been on a date with Sean. And this is the moment – right this second, right here – when Pretty Little Liars secures it’s place as my favorite ever lesbian show on American television. All those years of The L Word telling me this is the way I live and love. That was bollocks. This is the way I live and love. This fear and grace and quiet courage and hoping and wanting and trying and trying and trying to be brave.

Emily’s thing is grace. From the very beginning, the very first episode, she’s been about giving people permission to be themselves, about looking past the propaganda right into the heart of the thing and going, “That’s you. And that’s beautiful.” She does it repeatedly for the PLLs. She did it for Boo. Good grief, she even did it for Alison, the most heinous girl to ever walk the earth. And it’s exactly what she does for Paige. She doesn’t stomp around railing about her own needs and insecurities. She doesn’t hide behind Paige’s interpretation of her courage. She opens her arms and says, “Bravery looks like a lot of things, like falling out of the closet, like singing karaoke in a dive bar in the desert. You can be brave and afraid. You can do it in the same moment, in the same breath.” And she kisses her to demonstrate the truth.

I wish Lindsey Shaw would stay on this show forever and ever and ever.

In his/her lair, A smashes a heart labeled “Hanna” and mails it to her with some super glue. I have a hope and this is it: That Hanna rises from the ashes of her misery like a dark phoenix. She slapped a blind girl today. Maybe tomorrow she’ll kick Ian in the babymaker. Kneecap Melissa. Thrax Mona. Hell hath no fury? You mean: Hanna hath no fury. Unleash it, Hanna-Banana. Watch it burn.

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