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“Pretty Little Liars” recap 3.13: The Dark Knight Rises

Previously on Pretty Little Liars, Hanna flashed back to the time when Alison flashed back to the time when she murdered her twin sister because she was tired of sharing a Barbie Glam Convertible with her. Later, Alison was murdered by everyone in the greater Philadelphia area who possessed the ability to grasp a field hockey stick. Emily fell in love with Paige, who was summarily kidnapped, bound, gagged, re-closeted, and almost knifed to death by Maya’s former drug camp stalker, Cousin Nate. But Emily killed him instead, so that score, at least, was settled. Hanna tried to stay away from Caleb because her lot in life is to either hit or be hit with a car once every moon cycle, but his hobo hair is like a siren song, and she continued to crash herself against him. Ezra and Aria watched black and white films and took naps and played Yahtzee with Ezra’s neighbors and their main worry was whether or not the produce they were buying from the Rosewood Farmer’s Market was really local and organic. And Spencer was in such hysterics, accusing everyone of everything all the time, that she forgot to notice that A was sticking his P in her V.

It is thundering and lightning at Radley Sanatorium where Mona is singing “Teddy Bear Picnic” and painting a paper mache face and talking about how Halloween is better than Christmas because of the makeup and the monsters. Other A is there wearing his black hoodie and gloves, swaying back and forth to the dulcet tones of Mona’s beautiful singing voice and terrifying monologue. She drips, drips, drips lip-colored paint all over her insane people shoes and remembers her first Halloween costume and the realization she had that dressing up as other people literally transformed her into other people. “Method acting” is what she called it when she was three years old and her parents found her in the backyard in her baby tiger costume eating a dead deer she’d slain with her bare hands. Other A holds out his gloved hand into which Mona deposits some bullets and pills, humming all the while about There’s lots of marvelous things to eat and wonderful games to play / Beneath the trees where nobody sees they’ll hide and seek as long as they please / That’s the way the teddy bears have their picnic.

When a show has been on hiatus, one way to reintroduce your audience to the main characters and previous plots is with clunky expository dialogue about what everyone did over the summer. But because PLL doesn’t bow to convention, their way of immersing us once again into Rosewood’s universe is the Mona melody plus cloaking the Liars in the most Liars-y outfits you’ve ever seen – Aria, just for an example, is dressed like if Lord Licorice quit his life of Candy Land villainy to become a London cabbie – and setting them down in the middle of the road and having a masked menace jump out of a coffin and scare the Vanderweisen out of them. If you’ve never even seen this show, these first three minutes tell you everything you need to know.

Garrett drops off a bouquet of autumnal flowers for his former lawyer and only friend, Veronica Hastings, Esq., which is the first clue that he’s going to die in this episode. Another clue: He looks handsomer and more showered than ever before, and you know PLL has never killed an ugly person. Six episodes ago, he would have dropped off like a potted cactus accented with nightshade and asked Spencer to remind her mom to water it with the blood of dead pixies. He says he wants to talk to Spencer about some Alison things and possibly touch her face/breasts now that there’s no bulletproof glass between them, but Toby shuts that right down when he lets himself in the back door with a scowl on his face and some bullets in his pocket. He cracks his knuckles and clears his throat and Garrett excuses himself. Spencer says she’s having quite a time reconciling her postmodern feminism with Toby’s new alpha male-ism, but that sometimes you don’t know what gets you going until it gets you going, so she’s willing to ride this one out for a minute.

Hanna and Caleb make out in the supply closet at the dentist’s office, which is where they hide from A now. He asks if she’s still going on the Ghost Train without him, and she’s like, “Yes, duh. It’s like the only night of the year when it’s OK for non-children to wear costumes in Rosewood.” Which is, of course, patently false. They canoodle some more and their brains are so clouded by their hormones they convince themselves that this night will be the one night when no Liars die.

At Ezra’s, Aria stares at her costume jewelry-ed reflection for like ten minutes, proving, inexplicably, that she knows how to use a mirror. Apparently, she and Ezra have been keeping their costumes a secret from one another, which seems silly because if you’re telling me he’s never asked her to dress up like Daisy Buchanan, you are a damn liar. You know these two have a rotating repertoire that includes Daisy, Jane Bennet, Lady Galadriel, and Helen of Troy for Aria; and Mr. Darcy, Rhett Butler, Gilbert Blythe and Logan from The Baby-Sitters Club for Ezra. Their secrets come to naught, though, because Ezra’s got a hot tip on ghost-writing an autobiography and the interview can only take place on this hallowed eve. They try to do some sexes, but are interrupted by preschoolers screaming for candy, which: get used to it, Montgomery; you’re a mama now. Aria tends to the trick-or-treaters and Ezra touches his perfect nose on his perfect face and hopes it’s not growing like a Pinocchio due to all the lying lies he’s telling.

Rear Window Brew is the staging ground for the Ghost Train, which is to say that Rear Window Brew is the place where every Liar gets to make a grand entrance in her Halloween costume like an NFL player running out of a foggy tunnel onto a football field to the roar of a million screaming fans. Lucas is dressed like Jimmy Olsen, with the old-fashioned camera and everything, and I have never felt more fond of him than I do right now. When Hanna walks in dressed like Marilyn Monroe, his flashbulbs go off if you know what I mean and I think you do. She, of course, thinks she’s fully incognito, and also of course, when Lucas tells her she looks beautiful, she’s like, “Right?” and whizzes past him to borrow Aria’s lipstick. Aria, as I mentioned, is dressed as Daisy Buchanan. It’s frankly a little insensitive given Hanna’s history of getting mowed down by cars, but that’s so Aria.

Toby and Spencer are channeling Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and if you didn’t start gasping for air when you saw Spencer walk into the room, then surely to Mona, your heart stopped in your chest when she did the full Marie “Slim” Browning from To Have and Have Not, talking about, “If you need me, just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you?” (The rest of that line is: “You just put your lips together and blow.”) (Here.) (Also, no, Spencer. I don’t know how to whistle. I don’t even know my own name when you make your voice even huskier like that.) Spencer extricates herself from Toby’s death grasp on her waist to shriek at Aria, “How could you possibly think that we would be wearing the same thing?” Uh, because sometimes you dress like The Great Gatsby characters on random Tuesdays, Hastings. Come on.

There’s a burlap baby-face zombie in the corner and a Noel Kahn dressed like Prince Harry, I think, in the middle of the room. They are each making that one terrifying face they always make. Jenna is dressed like a pirate, eye patch and everything, because it’s never too soon to be ironic about that time the Liars threw a bottle rocket at your face and destroyed your eyeballs. Noel smarms about how his parties usually have a better spread and also homeless teenage lesbians living in secret compartments behind the bookcases, and then he chokes on a grape. Spencer and Toby sort of awkwardly hug him and tackle him to the ground, which  does not stop him from choking, surprisingly enough. But it’s OK because he’s just horsing around. A fake devil bursts forth from his chest and he and Jenna laugh like a warm up for when a real such thing springs forth from Jenna’s uterus one of these days.

Emily and Paige make their entrance and I realize, for the first time ever, why swearing was invented. Emily is Barbarella* (weapon: space gun). Paige is Marlene Dietrich (weapon: swagger). And, listen, I have believed everything this show has ever asked me to believe. Alison DiLaurentis can bend time, fly a plane, shapeshift, and run a 4.12 40-yard dash while filming a homemade porno and baking brownies. Fine, no problem. Mona Vanderwaal can break every physical barrier in the universe because she’s got adrenalized hyperreality. Absolutely, she can. Parents don’t exist some days. Fax machines are still a viable means of communication. Byron Montgomery could seal the deal with someone like Ella. OK, cool. Tell me more. But when you ask me to believe that Emily Fields walks into a room doing the full Fonda on the arm of Paige McCullers doing the whole Dietrich and the entire place doesn’t go totally silent except for the sound of so many lesbians fainting dead away, I call shenanigans.

*(I mentioned on Twitter that Barbarella is streaming on Netflix, and you really should do yourself the favor of at least watching Jane Fonda’s legendary weightless striptease in the title credits. The whole movie really is like if the 1960s Batman TV show and modern day Pretty Little Liars had sex in a TARDIS and gave birth to a Time Lord who looks like Jane Fonda.)

Two things strike me about Emily and Paige in this scene: 1) Contrast their entrance here to their conversation at last season’s masked ball. Paige was suited up there too, but disguised in a mask, and when she reached out for Emily, it was awkward and unsure and so very apologetic. This time, Paige is proudly gender-bending – chest out, head high – with Emily Fields latched securely onto her arm. It’s just such a lovely juxtaposition. 2) It should go without saying by now that PLL treats its lesbians just like everyone else, but I would be remiss not to mention how remarkable it is that they don’t shy away from sexualizing Emily in this episode without glorifying the male gaze and sexualizing Paige in this episode without any butch panic. Like, you know Caleb and Hanna are doing it in that dentist supply closet and you know Emily and Paige are doing it in that train car in a little while, but there’s no winking and nodding and hand-wringing to/about the coveted dude advertising demographic. Sex positive, queer positive, female empowered TV, guys. High five, you classy, forward-thinking writers!

Hanna says Paige and Emily look like a wedding cake from outer space, and if I didn’t already have “Hogwarts” picked out as the theme of my wedding, that would be a real contender. Jason shows up dressed like James Dean, but Spencer doesn’t have time to make us feel gross about how she has so much chemistry with her brother because it’s time to board the shuttle to the Ghost Train.

First stop: Adam Lambert’s performance car. He sings and sings and the Liars dance and dance. Remember when Adam Lambert was on American Idol and the producers were like, “Feel free to clothe yourself in a skintight catsuit made of hell demon hide and set yourself on fire and rearrange Johnny Cash’s entire musical catalogue so it sounds like the soundtrack for snake charming on Mars, but please don’t tell anyone you’re gay because Americans aren’t ready for anything weird“? Anyway, this is one of his tamer performances and it’s catchy and everything, and who doesn’t want to see Paige act like the best kind of dork with a top hat, but I wish it were a little shorter. The Phantom of the Opera creeps on Hanna and gropes her ass and she promises she’ll chop of his hand if he does it again.

At Radley, Mona’s nurse checks on her through the window. She’s sound asleep. Just kidding! That paper mache head is on her pillow and she has flown the crazy coop!

In the food car, Toby is enjoying a refreshing bottle of water from the coffin-shaped cooler. Jenna wanders in and asks him to pass her a beverage. She also asks how she looks and he goes, “I liked you better when you were blind so you couldn’t see where to incest me.” Spencer goes looking for Toby in the food car but finds Jason, who was in Out of Town again, I guess, but he’s back now and still convinced Garrett killed Alison, but he doesn’t have too much time to talk to Spencer about it because he spots Lucas and they go outside to trade Pokemon cards.

The Phantom of the Opera returns to the performance car to grope Hanna some more, drags her outside, and reveals himself as just another straight guy who loves Andrew Lloyd-Webber. Caleb, is what I mean. It is Caleb. They kiss while their hair flaps around gloriously in the wind. Inside, Adam Lambert tries to chat up Aria because he senses an immediate fashion-based kinship with her. The train horn is blowing like nobody’s business, though, so he can’t hear her name. She writes “Aria” on the window, that last “A” looking like the “A” ABC Family always uses in its “A” promos. Because she still has not seen an episode of her own show, Aria looks away from her drink for like two seconds and the Queen of Hearts walks past and drops some cyanide in her cup.

Paige and Emily lock themselves inside an empty compartment and lez it up. Maybe it’s the way Paige is gazing at her, maybe it is the clear-headedness that comes from not being poisoned by your own sports cream or stalked by your dead girlfriend’s stalker or having to brush GLASS OUT OF YOUR HAIR, maybe it’s realization that she’s really really really in love, maybe it’s just Paige’s hat, but for whatever reason, Emily is the first Liar ever to (correctly!) suggest she and her partner should get the hell out of Rosewood and never look back. Just take this train all the way to Park Slope. Speaking of looking, Paige is looking, and she says as much when Emily asks what’s up. Verbatim: “I’m just looking at you. You’ve seen you, right?” She takes off that top hat and drops it on a table and marvels at the fact that they are so goddamn motherfucking sexy together. Emily accidentally says the most truthful thing: Sometimes things really do work out, when no one’s looking.

Paige asks Emily to tell her about love on her planet, and having watched Barbarella about a million times, I’ll just go ahead and answer that one for you, McCullers: Naked. Naked is what love is like on Barbarella’s planet. And so they kiss a lot more, while “A” lurks around outside the compartment.

What I love about these Halloween episodes is that, sure, they’re a creeptastic way to catch-up with the story during with the Pretty Little Hiatus. But also, the structure is so great. With one arm they reach all the way back to the beginning of the show’s mythology and with the other arm they reach all the way to the end of the story, and then they squeeze those two things together in a terrifying hug of doom and romance. Joseph Dougherty wrote this episode and he hit all the sweet spots Marlene King did in her Halloween episode last year, and he gave us some really lovely dialogue and one-liners and visual stunners and goosebumps and “Tell me about love on your planet.” Swooooon.

Spencer emerges from the food car and gets dragged outside by a burlap baby-face zombie who turns out to be Garrett. He wants to make a full confession and that’s when you know for sure that he’s a goner. He starts to tell Spencer about that bazillion-hour night when Ali was murdered but Spencer is like, “No shit, that video plays on the inside of the eyelids every time I shut my eyes. I created an open-world RPG called ‘DiLaurentis Creed’ to try to get it out of my brain, but it won’t go anywhere.” But he’s got more information than the video. For one thing, after Ali found the NAT Club rooting around in her room, Garrett took Jenna outside so Ian and Melissa could talk privately. Garrett flashes back to:

Finding Ali in her backyard staring at the stars. The ground is all dug up and the outline of the DiLaurentis gazebo is there. When Ali sees Garrett and Jenna marching across the yard, she goes, “I thought I heard animal noises.” She and Jenna get into a super tame slap fight when you think about the fact that one of them blinded the other one of them ten minutes ago. Garrett pretends to beat Ali to death with a field hockey stick and Jenna hopefully goes “Did you kill her?” in the way that makes you know she had been part of more than one conversation about killing her. Garrett says he took care of it and pulls Jenna away from the yard.

Back in real life, Spencer goes, “Seriously? That’s all you’ve got?” But no, there’s more. When Garrett went back to talk to Ali, she already had a visitor in the form of – waaaaaaait for it – Byron Montgomery. Of course. Of course she did. Of course he was standing way too close to her and making threatening motions with his hands at her and saying threatening things with his mouth near her. I hear what you’re saying to me. You’re saying, “Wait, was he sleeping with her? Is that why she wanted to rip up his office when she found out about his affair with Meredith?” Or you’re saying, “Was she blackmailing him about the affair and threatening to destroy his family?” And I say to you: Neither. Instead, I postulate that Byron had already formed a Virginity Task Force of one, and his sole mission was to enforce True Love Waits marshall law on the entire town of Rosewood, ensuring that fathers were in charge of their daughters’ sexuality and husbands were in charge of their wives’ sexuality and that women never found out about the power they could possess when they demanded their autonomy and took charge of their own vaginas. Byron could see that Ali was a danger to the future of his patriarchal supremacy and so he sought her out to destroy her.

Spencer is like, “I’m going to get Aria so you can say that shit to her face. Wait here in the dark on the ledge of this train that is moving along at about 100 miles per hour.”

Inside, Spencer steals Hanna away from all the conspicuous kisses she’s blowing at Caleb and recruits her to help find Aria. The task isn’t quite as easy as they hoped because two seconds into their search they get a text from “A” saying that someone isn’t going to make it to the end of the line. Hint: “A” is talking about Aria. In fact, s/he’s already duct taped Aria up and shoved her inside a wooden box with Garrett’s corpse. Yes, that Garrett. The Garrett who was speaking to Spencer literally seconds ago and has now been murdered and succumbed to like two weeks’ worth of rigor mortis.

The Liars convene to discuss their situation: “A” is on board the train as well as all of their lovers, which means the body count could feasibly total eight before the night is up. Emily is like, “But to what end is ‘A’ pulling these shenanigans right now? And why is Garrett confessing after all this time?” Hanna throws down the best line of the night: “To mess with us! Everyone is messing with us! You can get a varsity letter messing with us!” They split up to look for Aria because they seriously have not learned a single lesson this entire time.

Hanna finds Caleb and tries to bring him up to speed on this current danger to their livelihood but he mostly wants to feel her up and grind all over her. She lets him for a second and then sees the real Caleb drinking Gatorade from the coffin cooler. She whips around and pulls off fake Caleb’s mask to find another mask! An Ali mask! (Guys, it is Mona dressed as Ali dressed as Caleb. Girl is employing three layers of identities just to cop a feel of Hanna! What in the world!)

Spencer finds Garrett’s burlap baby-face zombie mask, but the Queen of Hearts strips it from her hands and forces her outside and holds her over the edge of the train, trying to choke the life and Ravenclaw spirit right out of her. Spencer escapes and makes a break for it, but the Queen of Hearts catches her. They scuffle and shuffle and wrassle and groan. “A little fight in you. I like that,” says the Queen of Hearts. And from the shadows, a voice: “Then you’re gonna love me.” The Dark Knight descends in a flash of triumph and feminine energy. She is clad in a tuxedo. A field hockey penalty was created in her name. She pulls the Queen of Hearts of off Spencer Hastings and throws her across the room like a sack of fluff, like any old pillow. “You can never escape me,” she says, pushing the Queen to the ground again. “Bullets don’t harm me. Nothing harms me. But I know pain. Oh, I know pain. And sometimes I share it – with someone like you.” The Queen of Hearts realizes she is way out of her depth, so she bounces right the hell out of there. Paige rushes to Spencer’s side, holds her, comforts her, finds a giant red fingernail attached to her hair.

Emily decides it’s time to tell Paige every “A” thing, which takes like ten hours during which Spencer and Hanna talk about how bummed out Hanna is that she and Caleb are going to have to be more careful with their sneaking around. Meanwhile Aria is trapped inside that box with Garrett’s body, having a justifiable panic attack (unlike that time she got locked in the bathroom stall at school) and trying to break free from her duct tape handcuffs with a rusty nail. When the “A” story has been told in all its glorious fullness, Paige agrees to join the Boyfriend Legion on one end of the train while the Liars work from the other end of the train to find Aria. As they are going their separate ways, Spencer looks back, flips her hair, says, “Paige McCullers, I honor you.” Paige tips her top hat in Spencer’s direction, smiles gently, says, “Sometimes it’s only madness that makes us what we are. You can’t fight fate and you can’t survive alone. Trust me, there was a time when I, too, tried to do both.”

On her quest to find Aria, Paige runs into JennaBot, who not only eye-f–ks her right into the ground, but also drops the second best line of the night: “[If you’re looking for Aria], she has a thing for authority figures, so she’s probably up with the engineer.”

One guy and one gal work together to try to push Aria and Garrett from the train. It is the most harrowing three minutes this show has ever put us though and I’m including Aria’s feather phase. They shove and pull and push and bicker with each other while Aria tries and tries to free herself. Finally, she cuts herself loose on the nail and uses a screwdriver to stab whomever is hovering over the box. She hits her target and her foes flee, but not before the box tips toward the ground. The Liars find her just in time. They free her and pull her close and nearly vomit when they see Garrett’s body.

The police pile all of the usual suspects in one car. The Boyfriend Legion shuffles their feet and looks on helplessly as their girlfriends run down the day’s clues: Garrett was murdered, definitely by “A.” So was Ian. Two members of the NAT Club are now dead. Two people who were in Ali’s room the night she died are now dead. “A” wanted the Liars to free Garrett last season so s/he could kill Garrett. Their unusually adept problem-solving session is cut short when Ezra shows up saying some malarkey about how he was waiting in Philly for Aria, but when he heard someone was hurt he drove along the tracks until he found her. The camera wants us to believe he was doing some “A” things, but it’s probably something as innocuous as, like, he was sneaking a visit to his lesbian boy-child.

Noel has had just about enough of not being the center of attention, so he picks a fight with Spencer, which leads to a fight with Toby, which leads to the coffin cooler getting knocked over, which leads to Ali’s body bag spilling out onto the floor. It was on ice in the drink bin the whole entire time. Ali’s corpse in the drink bin the whole entire time. 

Mona’s nurse peeks in on her through the window of her padded room, and there she is, snug as a bug in a Radley rug, with that Ali mask that was under the Phantom of the Opera mask resting beside her bed.

OK, and now for the B-story, which was the scariest friggin part of this episode, real quick: Ashley Marin is dressed like a sexy (yet, not slutty!) nurse and Pastor Ted is dressed like a surgeon, and they are handing out candy to the children who are – ridiculously – allowed not only to trick-or-treat in the children’s murder capital of the world, but also allowed to just walk into anyone’s house to get their hands on some candy. Ashley finds an ethereal blonde child floating around in her kitchen. The girl says she’s lost and can she please call her mom, and so Ashley is like, “Sure, of course, creeper.” Later, Ashley finds the little girl just hanging around in one of the spare bedrooms. She’s asks if the girl got in touch with her mom, and the girl says that she did, but her mom freaked out, probably because her twin sister told her mom something that upset her. Her twin sister, see, is always trying to get her in trouble and pick fights and basically she’s been trying to kill her since she fashioned a shiv out of amino acids in the womb. Ashley tries to comfort the little girl, but she is as cold as ice. (Ice! Like how Ali’s body was also as cold as ice!) The girl disappears and Ashley doesn’t know what she doesn’t know, but what she does know is that she saw a ghost.

And she’s right, because that little girl is the girl who was killed at the beginning of last year’s Halloween episode.

Flashback: Ali’s yard. The gazebo outline is in place. And from the middle of the impending structure, the earth begins to move. First a little, then a lot. Something is digging a hole from inside the ground. It is a hand. A hand that has come back from the dead. It is … THE ORIGINAL RISEN MITTEN.

An enormous thank you, as always, to my wonderful screencapping partner Maggie. Follow her on Twitter (@margaretrosey) and give her some love.

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