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“Pretty Little Liars” recap 3.14: Pinky and the Brain

Previously on Pretty Little Liars, the Harbinger of the End Times and Defender of Our Unworthy Souls boarded the Rosewood Express (departing daily from the ninth circle of Hell), where she: a) danced with Hanna, while b) stashing Alison’s dead body in the drink cooler, while c) murdering Garrett Reynolds, while d) creeping on Paige and Emily making out, while e) kidnapping, drugging, and boxing up Aria, while f) trying to hurl said boxed-up Aria to her death, while g) chatting merrily with her companion before he was stabbed with a rusty screwdriver, while h) writing notes in the steam on the windows. She wore a mask, a second mask, a third mask, a fourth. Her coat was one of many colors. In her omnipotence, she spoke turmoil into existence. In her omniscience, she quieted the storm before the train derailed. In her omnipresence, she ran, she jumped, she twisted, she twirled, she flipped and zoomed and zigged and zagged and delighted in her mid-air pirouettes. Her name was Mona Vanderwaal. Adrenalized Hyperreality was hers to command.

Present day:

The church where Hanna ruined her dad’s wedding, where Ian tried to murder Spencer but Mona murdered him instead, where the thumb drive of limitless information lay hidden beneath a pew for many an unswept month. The street where the Liars and their kin slumber, where houses are stacked upon other houses, where backyards are strewn with the broken field hockey sticks of a thousand murdered teenage girls, and also more houses. The barn where Ian and Melissa conceived a fetal demon, where the Liars held a slumber party to honor their friend who returned from that foreign land of Hilton Head, where Ali accused Emily of liking Beyonce a little too much. Looks like Stars Hollow, smells like homicide. It’s Rosewood, bitches. Welcome home.

A (surprisingly!) athletic member of the A-team is skateboarding around town looking to start a fist fight or maybe a late-evening genocide when an SUV appears on the horizon and tries to mow him/her down. The driver is another member of the A-team. The dueling As whip through the city with no regard for pedestrians or other drivers. It seems sinister, but probably this is just a fire drill. The first thing they teach you in Basic A Training is how to survive getting plowed into by an automobile. Frankly, it’s something they should teach in kindergarten in this town. Skateboard A is finally forced to abandon his/her steed and dart into an ally. SUV A is Toby. He is mad.

Hanna is sleeping soundly until Mona makes her presence known. Hanna’s like, “Mona, what in the world are you doing in my room in the middle of the night?” And Mona’s all, “What do you mean? I’m always in your room in the middle of the – er, I mean, I have to go back to school tomorrow and I’m scared. Hold me?” Mamaw Marin (Betty Buckley! Yes!) is looking after Hanna this week, so she hollers through the door to make sure Hanna isn’t getting murdered or waterboarded or extorted or whatever other thing usually happens to her grandbaby on Tuesday nights, but Hanna assures her that she’s just reading out loud. Anyway, Mona’s like, “P-p-p-pwease pwotect me, Hanna?” Hanna’s mouth says no, but her face says, “I’ll keep you as safe as my Hufflepuff powers will allow.”

Emily is getting ready for school when a ladder smashes against her window and she jumps right out of her shoes. Is there no end to these “cousins” and their assassination machinations, she wonders? But really it’s just a guy installing an alarm system because Emily’s parents have finally cottoned on to the fact that Emily is in a perpetual cycle of murdering the murderers who murder her girlfriends. Emily’s dad is home from Army and his second order of business, after imprisoning Emily, is to seek justice for Garrett’s death because his mom is very upset. But he wants to seek justice through official channels, like the “police” and the “courts.” Emsy can’t get psyched on such vanilla reform; she dates a winged vigilante. Papa Fields tells Emily she can’t do the charity run she signed up for because a 5K is just the right amount of distance for her to get roofied and kidnapped and trapped in a time machine with a shovel and a blind girl, but she can have Paige over, which sounds like just the right amount of exercise to me.

Rear Window Brew. Hanna and Spencer debrief the happenings of season 3A, which I will sum up for you as succinctly as possible: Byron Montgomery is the worst motherfucking person on earth. Spencer says it gently, in that voice she has that could diffuse a bomb, just by virtue of its heavenliness, but Aria is not charmed into hearing the truth. She is also wearing a cacophony of all the monochrome patterns known to man. Stripes and stars and animal prints and plaids and I don’t even know. She looks amazing, like always. But also: like a headache.

Over at the Marin’s, Hanna is offered a bountiful buffet of breakfast delicacies. Mona dropped by with a basket of muffins, the innuendo of which seems to escape Hanna’s notice. But Mamaw is also cooking up a feast of huevos rancheros and hashbrowns. I guess Hanna is still full from that truckload of pig-shaped cupcakes she ate back in season one or something because she refuses all the treats. She asks Mamaw if lunatics can really change their ways, and Mamaw weaves a yarn about some relative named Heshy who tried to feed his parents rusty nails one time, but he went away to an asylum for four months and now he eats Cheerios like a regular person.

Man, my dream life is eating huevos rancheros in the perfect light of the Marin’s kitchen while Mamaw Marin just sings and tells me stories and says stuff like “wipe the dew from my lily” all day long.

Hanna goes to school because Mamaw tells her to, and even as she’s walking out the door, you can tell she’s not sure whether or not to take a chance on Mona again. On the one hand, Mona is the kind of friend who will give you a makeover while you’re in traction in the hospital. On the other hand, Mona is the kind of friend who will hit you with her car so that you end up in traction in the hospital.

At school, none of the other students are sure what to make of Mona’s re-entrance into society either. She’s dressed like if season one Blair Waldorf and season one Rachel Berry had a litter of puppies and the runt was shipped off to boarding school because of seven puppies and only six teats. Emily is pushing Paige’s bike, or either Paige bought Emily her own bike so they could race around in the rain, and she says she thinks they should give Mona another chance. Hanna is leaning toward Emily’s way of thinking when Spencer snaps that they are officially a zero mercy club starting right now. “No leniency!” she says, stomping her foot and opening her eyes real wide like she does. “No grace, no do-overs, no second chances! A is an A and that’s all we need to know! It’s black and white! It’s wrong or right! There’s no way this myopic hard line is ever going to come back and bite me in the ass because I, for one, know better than to let an A fondle my breasts!”

The Liars fall into line and decide to ignore Mona completely.

Their talk turns to Byron and whether or not Garrett was telling the truth on the terror train when he said he saw him talking to Ali the night she was murdered. Aria is like, “Oh, ho! And I’ll bet you think my dad drugged me and stuffed me in a box, too?” And yes, Aria, if he thought it would keep you from exercising your autonomy as a powerful young woman with a right to control her own vagina, I think that’s exactly what he’d do. Aria storms into school, which, in those shoes(?) is an athletic achievement on par with those Cirque du Soleil performers who frolick around on top of the wheel of death.

By the way, the whole time she’s clomping around town defending the honor of her awful father, she keeps telling everyone how guilty she feels for not confessing to Ezra he has a kid, and everyone she talks to is like, “Duh, you ass. You should feel guilty.”

There’s a new teacher in town and it is Meredith. The only thing you need to know about Meredith is that she was once a patron to Byron Montgomery’s pants party, and so now you can adjust your judgment meter accordingly. Aria is squicked out, having now been confronted with her dad’s grossness half a dozen times before 8:30 a.m., but Meredith is nothing less than professional. She talks about checks and balances in the U.S. government, which is obviously an A-team hint, and takes away Aria’s cell phone when she starts texting during class. Afterward, she asks to speak to Aria privately, but the Liars flank her on every side, so Meredith cowers – quite rightly – and gives Aria her phone back.

Mona watches the whole thing with her puppy dog/laser eyes and then excuses herself out into the hallway and over to her locker, into which someone has deposited a cow brain. Are you listening to me? There is a brain, a real brain, covered in brain juice, sliced in half, held in place with a knife, pinned inside Mona’s locker. A BRAIN. OK, and so while Hanna shrieks and throws up a little bit, Mona pulls the knife free, marches down the hall, dumps the brain into the trash can, and then brandishes the knife for a good long time, a lot longer than necessary, before she decides to toss it in the trash as well. Everyone in the school is gathered around and mumbling and filming the whole thing on their cell phones and, I mean, even if you one time saw a girl beat a snake to death with a mannequin leg, this is still quite a pageant of glory.

Mona slowly returns to her locker, stopping to either whisper something in Lucas’ ear or sniff him to see if he smells guilty. I can’t tell which. After she gathers her books and makes her way to her next class, Hanna accosts Lucas about their little post-brain exchange, but he’s not talking. Instead, he is limping.

The Liars assemble in the bathroom to debrief the brain thing. Their straw poll indicates that three of the four of them are actually feeling pretty bad for Mona right now, but Spencer punches the brick wall with her fist and shouts, “NO MERCY!” just as Mona tip-toes in to attend to her headband. Emily is like, “Hey, uh, you don’t think we put that brain in your locker, right?” And Mona’s like, “No, why would you? If I remember correctly, I’m the one who stroked a porcelain doll face while speaking in code to point you toward Maya’s website so you could track down her murderer and stab him to death with a pocketknife in a lighthouse. That doesn’t seem like the kind of good deed that gets punished with a cow carcass.”

Emily doesn’t say anything about the poisoned sports cream or the fake scholarship letter or the photobooth portraits of her and Maya kissing that circulated around the whole damn town or the carbon monoxide poisoning in that barn or the absolute militia of dolls that have tried to murder her, all thanks to Mona. She just mumbles, “Maya’s Away, Sleeping Sweet. Until Garrett’s All Rosy, Count On Me,” to herself and feels more confused than ever.

At lunch, Hanna accosts Caleb in the courtyard and asks him to ask Lucas if he’s limping around because he’s got a rusty screwdriver stab wound left over from around Halloween time. Spencer shares some sandwiches with Toby, who wants to talk about literally anything on earth that is not A-related, but Spencer sees Jason hugging Mona, so her sleuthy senses ratchet to eleven. And Emily spends her lunch break explaining to her dad that she can’t pop out of class and answer the phone every ten minutes when Pam calls to see if she’s still alive. It probably doesn’t do much to put his mind at ease when she just flat hangs up on him because she spots the new janitor talking to Mona and realizes the new janitor was also the owner/proprietor of the Lost Wood Resort where Mona kept her lair and chewed her bubble gum and stored her cardigans.

Because they have never seen an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Hanna and Emily go traipsing into the school’s basement to look for clues. In the janitor’s office, they find a whole sack of Mona’s lair stuff, including, inexplicably, one of those burlap baby-face zombie masks that mark the arrival of October in Rosewood every year. They whisper-bicker about whether or not Mona is playing this janitor or this janitor is playing Mona, but they don’t get any answers because the janitor comes a-callin’ and they have to duck behind a cabinet.

At Ezbian’s Lesbian Emporium, Ezra presents Aria with a lucky necklace to wear while she’s running this Rosewood charity race. It seems like a throwaway thing, but it kind of made me wonder: what if Ezra’s lucky necklace is actually like a moon amulet or something and the reason nothing bad ever happens to him is because he is in possession of actual protective magic? I mean, you remember the 3A finale, right? Toby revealing himself as A, Caleb getting shot in the gut with his own gun, Paige getting kidnapped and bound and gagged and very nearly knifed to death, and meanwhile, Ezra was at his house playing Connect Four with his little old lady neighbor and eating homemade cake and wearing a hoodie and a milk mustache.

And I do believe part of it is that Ezra looks like Ian Harding who looks like what would happen if, while God’s elves were just cranking out normal looking humans in the people factory, God himself gathered together some rare ingredients he’d been saving for a special day and sat down in his workroom in front of the fireplace and had a delicious mug of warm cocoa and decided to stitch together a person by hand, like he does with baby polar bears and baby giraffes and baby elephants and baby deer and whatever it is that’s inside the soul of a Golden Retriever. Life is different when God made your face with his own hands, but also, maybe Ezra really does have a protective spell on him. Maybe it’ll be broken because he gave Aria the amulet. Maybe someone should steal that amulet and wrap it around Paige’s whole entire body.

Well, so anyway, Ezra gives Aria the necklace, and in return, Aria bails because she doesn’t have the guts to tell him he’s got a kid. Also, Hanna texts to let her know about Mona’s latest minion. Out in the hallway, A has planted a gift basket with a balloon that says, “It’s A boy!” with the A all flashy and red. Rather than scooping that thing up and getting the hell out of there, Aria takes about thirty minutes to read the gift card.

Aria zooms over to Rear Window Brew to talk about Mona’s janitor with Emily and Hanna, but mostly to talk about Ezra’s full-grown child. Hanna puts a weird twist on her guilt trip that Emily and Spencer couldn’t manage. She looks across the room at Caleb and says, “I get that you’re scared, Aria, and every day that goes by is another day you’re destroying, perhaps forever, the trust you share with Ezra. But more importantly, that little lesbian child is going to grow up and live in the ventilation system of his school library and eat mice for snacks and say “hot spot” over and over again like it’s a real thing. That’s the actual reason you have to come clean. For the hobos.”

Oh, and also, Caleb found the “transcript” of Mona’s “parents” meeting with the school “administrators,” and unlike the sad sack story she told Hanna about how they were forcing her to come back, the truth is that she begged to get back up in Rosewood High School’s shit.

Spencer and Toby race along the road to her house. It’s been a long time since we saw them together here. Like probably the last time was when he was trying to make her feel shitty by giving her that rocking chair he whittled for her. They giggle about how unbelievably sexy they are when they’re all sweaty like this. Toby takes of his shirt, which: impressive, and nice try, but nothing – and I mean nothing in all this life – beats Spencer in a t-shirt and messy ponytail. Looking at her looking like that, listening to her voice do what it does, it’s practically obscene. (In a good way.) Jason is moving back into his house for the seven millionth time, I guess, so Spencer runs over to welcome him home and also to give him some brotherly advice about staying the away from Mona. Jason goes, “I believe in second chances.” And Spencer is like, “I unequivocally do not.” Jason winks at Toby, kind of.

Toby fires up the hot tub because maybe if he and Spencer are doing it she will shut up about A for like ten goddamn minutes, but that is incorrect. Fully clothed or scantily clad, Spencer Hastings will not be denied a chance to brood. Toby tries to get her to do some sexes. Five times he tries. But she hears someone creeping around in the bushes and runs inside.

Aria is stroking Ezra’s moon amulet alone in her room when Byron interrupts her reverie to thank her for not being a total dick to the woman with whom he cheated and destroyed their family and also whose side he takes over Aria’s at every possible opportunity. He says it was the “grown-up” thing to do, like he knows a single thing about acting like a grown-up, and Aria smiles wanly and blurts out a half-question/half-accusation about his relationship with Alison. He’s like, “You want to get stuffed back in a crate and tossed from a train? Huh? Is that what you want? Because I’ll do it, you asshole. Keep asking questions.”

Mona has made an It Gets Better for Lunatics video and the thing has gone viral in the course of an afternoon. It’s just her talking to the camera about how she was a loser when she was in middle school but then she found out she was blessed with adrenalized hyperreality and the combination of rage/pain and her superpower caused her to go on a murder spree. She’s sorry, though, and she wants a second chance to be popular again. Mamaw Marin watches with Hanna and is like, “Psh, what a tryhard. Forget what I said about letting her re-win your love.” Lucas stops by to drop off the rest of the money he owes Caleb and also to tell Hanna that Mona was sneaking out of Radley for the whole entire time she was there. Hanna’s like, “What happened to your leg, though?” And he’s all, “Old injury from the night this girl I love drowned me in a canoe.” And he limps away.

Charity run! Aria and Caleb set up the water table and Aria figures since she’s had one, maybe two conversations with Caleb, like, ever that it’s totally appropriate to ask him if he has any deep-seated issues about his father abandoning him. Caleb’s like, “This is weirder than that time Toby took Hanna to that church dance.” However, all manner of weirdness is covered by perfection, and that is exactly what Mamaw Marin displays when she takes it upon herself to perform the national anthem, simply because there is a microphone and an audience. Fake Coachprah tries to shut her down, but Mamaw will not be denied this opportunity to perform. She sings. Oh, she sings. And it is amazing from every angle.

The Liars go over their plan as Mamaw heads into the second verse of the Star Spangled Banner: They’re going to hop out of the race at mile 2 and sneak into the janitor’s closet at school where they hope to gather some clues and solve some crimes.

Mamaw is just a-wailin’ up there, but Fake Coachprah has had enough, so she fires the starting gun, and the race is on.

Betty Buckley is a national treasure, you guys. I’m serious. I wish she was on every episode of this show. I’d even sacrifice the immense pyrotechnics budget to see her face every week.

Emily’s dad has synched up the house’s alarm system to his iPhone and if Emily even tries to crack a window to get some fresh air, he’ll know about it. So she pickpockets his phone and trades it with hers. As soon as he’s gone, she disarms the alarm and races out of her house to meet the Liars in the janitor’s closet. Unfortunately, she was not paying attention during Spencer’s most recent slumber party lecture, “Locks and the Tools That Pick Them,” so she’s trying to get in with a paper clip when what she really needs is a bobby pin. Spencer shows up and cracks the lock in less than a second.

Inside the janitor’s closet they find a flashback of Ali meeting with Byron. She wants some dollar dollar bills in exchange for her continued silence about his affair with Meredith and he wants her to bow before his patriarchal superiority. She whips out a vintage flip phone – it’s a shame Ali didn’t live to see the invention of the iPhone; oh, the havoc she would have unleashed with such a thing – and dials up Ella. Byron cuts her off and she tells him to have the money ready when she gets back from holidaying with her grandma in Hilton Head and getting a complete Vivian Darkbloom makeover and taking flying lessons and visiting Jenna in blind camp and and watching Ian’s golf tournament and making a sex tape and threatening Spencer and stashing a key inside a doll’s head and giving it to Emily and buying a storage locker and filling it with a thumb drive inside a lunch box and borrowing Toby’s sweater and attending a slumber party in the Hastings’ barn. So, like, he has 24 hours.

The flashback is interrupted by Toby, who is creeping on the janitor who is creeping on the Liars.

Outside the school, Mona is arranging the charity race medals and eyeballing Meredith and doing some calculations about dynamite. Next thing you know: KABOOM! Someone screams Mona’s name and the Liars come running and a charity run shed is going up in flames.

Post-explosion, it’s family time. Emily’s dad wants to know why she won’t let him into her heart space. Aria’s dad wants to know if she blew up his mistress. Hanna’s Mamaw wants her to stop watching that video of Mona because she’s as twisted as her toes. And Spencer’s brother says he finally hears her about Mona.

Only, that is a lie, because as soon as Spencer scampers off, Mona wanders onto the porch to bandage up the screwdriver hole in Jason’s torso. They smile like a couple of psychos and dude, Jason, you’ll be dead by the winter finale, I’ll bet you ten billion dollars.

The Risen Mitten dicks around with some random ginger kid’s bike. Like, at first, I think they’re setting up a thing where Paige is going to get hurt because biking is kind of her thing. But the ginger kid comes outside and A huddles in the corner and the ginger kid takes off on the bike and OOOF! is the sound he makes off-camera when he wrecks. “A” is just menacing townspeople for fun now. Here’s hoping Byron is next!

An enormous thanks, as always, to my beautiful screencapping partner Maggie (@margaretrosey) without whom I would be lost, and also without whom abusing Byron Montgomery would not be nearly as much fun. It’s so good to work with someone who knows how important it is to capture Spencer’s messy ponytail from every angle.

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