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“Pretty Little Liars” recap 2.08: Not my lesbian, you bitch!

Hey there, Pookie Bears. Please forgive me for the brevity of this week’s recap. One of my puppies is dealing with some medical issues that require twice-a-day vet visits and on-the-hour wrestling matches in which I am obligated to shove giant pills down her throat. I don’t have as much time as usual to muse and moon over our favorite Little Liars.

Previously on Pretty Little Liars, Jason’s hair Medusa-ed Aria while Jason’s eyes drilled a literal hole in her skull; Toby unearthed an old hockey stick that reduced Spencer to the kind of hysterical absolutism heretofore reserved for relentlessly accusing Toby and Ian, respectively, of murdering Allison; Hanna hated her dad for her mom, then forgave him for both of them; and “A” used one hand to get Emily tangled up in a college admission’s scam, and another hand to POISON HER TO DEATH.

The bookends of PLL are kind of my favorite. I love all four Liars together, kicking things off with their flashbacks and exposition and insane outfits and one-liners. Tonight they’re just kicking it in Spencer’s car, rehashing how she shot Garrett in the balls with his own gun in order to escape from his squad car, and waiting for Emily to help her home’s new tenants work the pesky alarm system.

Hanna’s like, “Probably we don’t even need alarms in this town anymore, now that the most dangerous criminal in Rosewood – known pottery thief, Mike Montgomery – is in the clink.” Aria’s like, “Really?”

When your mom f–ks the entire precinct to get you out of petty theft charges, and murders an elderly lady to steal her life savings, you get desensitized to these kinds of things.

Once Ems is back in the car, Garrett comes creepin’ up the street in his muscle car and parks outside JennaBot’s place. I guess they let you off duty when you get your nuts shot off? What follows are two of the most amazing minutes this show has ever given us. The Liars get speedy-quick-sneaky, ducking in unison to avoid being spotted. And then they tiptoe into JennaBot’s yard – actually, no. Hanna clomp! clomp! clomps! across the street like a circus in those $300 platform pumps she calls her “studying shoes.” Spencer is like, “Are you kidding me right now?” And Hanna literally says, “She can’t hear us, she’s blind!”

OK? And they’re just standing there in the Cavenaugh’s front yard in the dark in the middle of the night and the curtains fly open like magic, and then KABLAM! JennaBot is backlit like the Ghost of Blindness Yet to Come. You have never heard so much gasping in your life. You should watch this scene with headphones so you can get the full effect. Just when you think they’re all going to hyperventilate and die right there and Jason is going to come along with his shovel like that guy in Home Alone and bury them under the sidewalk, Garrett slithers up in there and starts making out with the brother-bonking Cylon!

Spencer’s face is incandescent.

Let’s break it down like this:

Aria. Aria is having a weird couple of weeks. How many episodes of this show have we had so far 30? So for 30 episodes the only thing Aria was capable of thinking/talking/dreaming/writing/singing/praying/hoping/wishing/swooning about was Ezra Fitz. But now there’s a new head of hair in town and also her brother robs blind girls for sport. She’s been drowning in the scent of Gilbert Blythe and his sea of Ezbian feelings for so long that coming up for air is kind of disorienting, probably. So she mostly just stares into space for the whole episode while Ezra tries to engage her in any way possible.

Interested in making out in the art room? Nope. Interested in coming by his house later and talking about her delinquent brother? Nope. Interested in returning his calls? Nope. Interested in hanging out in the hospital waiting room and hashing out the details of the latest murder attempt on one of her friends? Nu uh. Interested in shedding some light – in sonnet form or otherwise – on The Jason Thing? You leave The Jason Thing out of this! Hasn’t he suffered enough? His sister DIED. They replaced his FACE with a whole new FACE.

Poor ol’ Ezra, raging lesbian that he is, has no idea that the best thing to do when a girl is pulling away from you is to pull back also. It’s like there’s a rubberband around the relationship, Gil, and if she’s pulling and you lunge forward, it’ll lose its tautness, but if she pulls back and you do too, it works like a sling-shot, launching her at your face in all her Bedazzled glory! Even Thursday Night Poetry Slam at that one coffee shop isn’t going to cure Mr. Fitz’s blues tonight.

Hanna. After warning Emily about using too much poison cream in one sitting, Hanna says she’s going to start her morning off with a “big-ass bowl of Cocoa-Puffs” and wait for her dad to make his walk of shame downstairs. When he does, there’s something waiting for him and that something is a serving of adulterous justice in the form of a wedding invitation. Hanna’s like, “Oh?” And Ashley’s like, “Ohhhh.” And Emily’s like, “Ooooh.”

Hanna confides in Spencer Hastings, Master of Time and Keeper of Secrets, that someone’s tailing Caleb and she knows she should tell him so he can stay out of jail, but also she doesn’t want to tell him because she doesn’t want him to skip town again. Spencer, who presumably knows a thing or two about prison, goes, “If he goes to jail, it’s going to be like he skipped town anyway. Pretty sure they don’t give conjugal visits to people on death row – and you know that’s where he’s headed if they bust him for hacking cell phones.

So Hanna pulls a full-on Grace Kelly, scarf and sunglasses and everything, and kidnaps Caleb, whisking him away to Spencer’s family’s cabin in some woods somewhere.

Of some importance: Hanna ‘fesses up that someone’s stalking Caleb and they have all the hobo sex.

Of major importance:

Right? Because storytelling 101:

A) If a serialized mystery  takes you to a house you’ve never been to before, there’s probably a reason. The writer needs to get you acquainted with the place so it won’t be abrupt when something crucial happens there later on. I mean, that’s why Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is 3,000 pages long. JK Rowling had to show us a lot of things in those first ten chapters so we’d be like, “Oh! Of course!” when we revisited them in the future.

B) If the camera lingers on an inanimate object, pay attention to that, too. TV is a time game, especially when you’ve got as many subplots as PLL. There’s no time to waste. So probably there’s a reason for it.

Ashley finally realizes she’s twenty-seven levels hotter than Tom, and tells him to f–k off because she’s not into being the Other Lady. When Hanna finds out, she’s like, “But, but, but, you love him!” And Ashley, awesomely, goes, “I know I haven’t been a perfect parent, what with the thieving and hooking, but let me model something for you, darling: Do not stay with a man who doesn’t deserve you.”

That is sofa king correct.

Spencer. Wren’s back, and this time he’s got a giant bouquet of flowers which he purports are a gift of consolation for Melissa, but are, in actual fact, a love confession for Spencer. Never one to miss an opportunity to showcase her mania, Spencer has this exact conversation with Wren.

Wren: Here are some flowers because I love you.

Spencer: Have you ever done an autopsy?

Wren: I understand your confusion. The last time you saw me, I was working in that psychiatric ward from the ’60s, and today when you see me I will be working in outpatient surgery, physical therapy, radiology, neurology, cardiology, and I’ll be dropping by the ER to read the admission’s charts, and making rounds to visit patients who are not my own. But no, I am not a pathologist.

Spencer: But if you were, you’d be able to determine the murder weapon for someone who’d received blunt force trauma to the skull? Wren: I guess?

Spencer: Cool, where would you keep your reports if pathology was a thing you had done on, say, my dead friend?

Garrett visits Spencer at school and tries to get her to talk some more about her sleuthing. He literally says, “The last time we talked, you had a lot of questions and strong ideas about weapons and head wounds.” And Spencer literally says, “I know, I can get like that.”

God, she’s so AMAZING. The FBI’s like, “When we lookrf into your Google history, we saw that you spent a lot of time looking up directions and purchasing materials for making nuclear weapons.” And Spencer’s like, “I know, I can get like that.”

Emily. Emily is Spencer-levels of madness due to a swim meet coming up this afternoon. She’s trying to solve that whole “admissions fraud” thing by doing a million crunches and running a thousand miles and, like, swimming to Portugal. At school, her dad shows up and says, “I just got in from Out of Town! Your mom couldn’t be here because all the planes in North America got stuck in South America because of hurricanes, and so I rode a horse here from Delaware.” These excuses for paternal absence just get better and better every week.

Sgt. Fields is all, “Can’t wait to meet that Danby University scout!” And Emily goes, “God f–king d—it to motherf–king hell! I f–king told mom I didn’t want her crawling up his godd–n a-s every s–tting time he came to see me swim. Jesus f–king Christ with you two and and that bastard!”

And then she collapses in the middle of the hallway.

Emily, as it turns out, has an ulcer. Apparently she’s not as equipped as the other Liars to handle Mystery Machine living. The constant death threats. The perpetual need to commit federal offenses. The murder porn of your first girlfriend that keeps showing up in the most random places. The new girlfriends that disappear into the ether. The poisoning.

Emily’s hospital room isn’t quite as bright and airy as Hanna’s. Maybe because Emily’s parents don’t have a quadrillon dollars in cash stuffed inside a box of Cheez-Its. But Hanna’s there to make everything better. Thrice she explains to passerby that Emily’s got a hole in her stomach. When Emily wakes up in the night, she’s got a little gift from “A” – a tube of IcyHot with a little note hinting that she’s been slowly murdering her for the past few months.

Oh, but wait! She’s not trying to kill her! She’s trying to ‘roid her up! Wren stops by during all his free time to tell Emily that he knows that she knows that she’s using human growth hormone as a performance enhancer. All props for all eternity to Shay Mitchell, who plays the shock and terror and panic to such perfection that I actually felt like I was being slowly murdered. Emily decides to come clean to her dad, but he cuts her off and says to stop swimming for college and start swimming for fun.

I guess Emily can rest a little easier now.

Or, well, maybe not. Here comes Spencer with Allison’s autopsy report, which she and Aria stole from the morgue while dressed like Candy Stipers. Those kind of Candy Stripers that work with the dead bodies. Nothing like an x-ray of your dead girlfriend’s bashed-in skull to help you relax. Spencer has already explained to Aria that Ali was walloped in the head with a curved object and then buried alive. And she explains it again to Emily. “A curved object! Like a hockey stick!”

Or! Like that fireplace poker at your family’s cabin deep in the forests of Pennsylvania, where vagabonds and harlots go to make passionate, star-crossed love.

(Remember when Hanna stole Boo Radley van Cullen’s therapy file and Aria threw it into the river?! This show has had so many amazing moments.)

So anyway, Spencer’s Clue guesses have gone from “TOBY WITH HIS BLOODY SWEATER AT THE KISSING ROCK!” to “IAN WITH HIS PEDOPHILIA JUST OUTSIDE OF HILTON HEAD!” to “Me? With my bare hands? In the woods behind the barn?” to “JASON WITH MY OWN PERSONAL HOCKEY STICK IN MY OWN PERSONAL BACK YARD!”

Down in the morgue, things are looking dead. Except for one of the dead bodies sits straight up like a Risen Mitten and throws its sheet right in our face! My notes say: “JFC!!! this is kindlomgg!!!!”

Next week: I have it on good authority that “some serious s–t is seriously going down.” More seriously serious s–t than normal? I believe it. This show just keeps raising the bar.

No time for #BooRadleyVanCullen tweets this week, you guys. I’m sorry. Next week, I promise. 

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