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“Pretty Little Liars” recap 3.16: Girl-on-Girl Talk

Previously on Pretty Little Liars, Spencer accused Hanna’s boyfriend of being A, and Emily’s girlfriend of being A, and Aria’s dad of being A, and her sister’s dead husband of being A, and her boyfriend’s fake blind half-sister of being A, and the guy who runs the pawn shop where she sold her sister’s wedding ring to buy her boyfriend a truck of being A, and the little old lady who weaves beaded friendship bracelets of being A, and Lucas and Noel and Jason and Ezra and Holden and Wesley and Alex and Mike – all of them: A. All the time: A. What she didn’t realize is that A is like Bloody Mary, and if you chant “A, A, A” in the mirror on repeat, A appears! In your bed! Naked! What else? Emily gave Paige PTSD. Meredith gave Aria some very special tea. And Hanna gave Mona a reason to rain down her wrath all over again.

Tea time at Montgomery Manor. Aria is in deathly repose on the couch, counting the minutes until she can enjoy another piping hot cup of Meredith’s special oblivion brew. Emily fills a mug, sniffs it, and makes such a face. “No offense to your dad’s mistress,” she says, “But this smells like that muscle cream I poisoned myself with for about three months back in season two.” Seizing the opportunity to speak freely in the “no offense” zone, Spencer tells Aria she looks like shit.* They talk about Ali’s diary pages, the ones that implicate Byron in her death, and about how they’re hidden safely away. Outside, A lurks around, all, “Say the exact location of the thing I want, bitches, like you always do.” But Aria does not. Because she has learned to exercise caution and common sense when handling evidence. She says she won’t leave it out in the open, give it away, tell anyone else about it, run it through a shredder, smudge the ink, trample it, lose it, compromise it, or set it on fire. That’s a promise. And a lie.

(*Despite the fact that four different people tell Aria how awful she looks this week, she does not look anything other than as gorgeous as she always looks. Lucy Hale doesn’t need makeup to be knock-you-over stunning, yo.)

In the A-Team’s new lair, Mona is processing her breakup with Hanna by blaring Melissa Etheridge tunes and plotting revenge. Standard lesbian stuff. Toby thinks it’s too soon for this plan, but Mona says she’s not calling the shots. A whole other she is in charge and she is ready to bring the pain in ways that are even more creative than locking Emily and Spencer and Hanna in a cupboard with a bloody doll that screams, “Follow me, end up like me!” It gets weird when Mona starts talking about how maybe Spencer will be the new object of her affections, what with her being able to actually keep a secret and also knowing everything on earth except for how to alphabetize former Soviet republics. Toby’s like, “I think maybe sleeping with one A is enough, don’t you?” Mona shrugs: Maybe. We’ll see.

Emily is opening up Rear Window Brew before school, or in lieu of school, maybe. I don’t really know what the requirements are for graduating from Rosewood High, except: Display a grad school level understanding of The Great Gatsby and To Kill a Mockingbird, and stay alive. Well, so she’s got some time to spare before her job before school, so Toby lets her hang out in his apartment so she can let in some plumbers and read Lord of the Flies and contemplate how her life is also like being marooned on an island of monsters during the climax of a nuclear war. Toby is like, “Hey, speaking of teenage savages hunting down their peers, you guys ever hear from Mona or any other As anymore? Spencer says no.” Emily smiles sweetly: “As says Spencer, so say we all.” Toby gives her the keys to his impossibly spacious, well-decorated “loft” apartment, and as soon as he’s gone, Em calls Spencer to say, “We’ve got him cornered … for your anniversary dinner!”

Hanna is psyched on an internship interview with the hottest designer in Philly, so she asks Caleb to help her choose something appropriate to wear. He’s like, “Seriously? Honey, until like two months ago, all of the clothes I own were wrapped in a kerchief and tied to a stick, so I could move from library ventilation system to library ventilation system without any hassle.” He relents because who can say no to that face? They agree on the dress, but decide Hanna should model it for him, just to be sure. As soon as she steps out of the room, he calls up the only other person in the state of Pennsylvania that seems to understand the perpetual shitshow the Liars live inside and makes plans to start a Sane Persons Club. (No Hyperadrenalized Mutants or Fake Cousin Lesbian Stalkers Allowed.) Hanna overhears him, of course, and marches back into the room demanding that he does not do anything as stupid as he did in the winter finale: “We don’t need another ‘lighthouse incident.’ All I want is for you to give me fashion advice, do me right in a tent in a park, and not die, OK?” He agrees to stay out of it while covertly texting Mystery Sane Person about how he’s all up in it.

Toby is naked. He’s just finished showering at Spencer’s place and so he is naked and talking about, “Hey babe, sorry I’m so naked.” Spencer goes, “Just to reiterate the conversation we had last time you were naked, you never need to apologize for being naked.” She also offers to sew up the hole in his pants pocket because she wants to brag about being good at everything and also because she secretly like to be domestic with him. They lament that they won’t be able to see each other tonight, on their one year anniversary, because Spencer has to go to some awards dinner for her dad. Veronica pops her head in, gives Toby’s nakedness an appreciative once-over, and corroborates Spencer’s dinner story.

Man, that is the most high-stakes set up PLL has ever given us, which is saying something since it’s a show based around the perpetual murder of teenage girls. You’ve got Toby lying to Spencer and Spencer lying to Toby and Caleb lying to Hanna and Meredith lying to Ella (while murdering Aria) and Big A getting ready to bring the heat and Mona getting ready to deliver a new brand of vengeance.

Meanwhile, for breakfast over at Ezra Fitzgerald’s Cake N’ Cuddle Emporium:

Emily is feeling bad about the way she keeps almost getting Paige butchered every time they leave the house, so she has prepared a full picnic lunch for the two of them to share in the school courtyard. There’s even this little specialized condiment umbrella. “I prepared you a lesbian feast,” Emily says. “Kale salad and gluten-free fairtrade cookies in shape of Chuck Taylors.” Paige tilts her head to the side like a puppy just trying to understand a language she’s just learning to hear, then sighs like she wishes she had a time machine so she could go back and wrap up her 12-year-old self in the It Gets Better-est hug the world has ever known.

Emily makes it ever so slightly more queer by asking if Paige has decided to see a therapist. Paige is like, “Someone to talk to who can truly understand my anxiety and help me create a plan of action to vanquish my fears once and for all? Yeah, I found someone.”

Hannah interrupts with a plea for girl talk – “Not girl-on-girl talk; just girl talk” – and even though Emily tries to shoo her away with meaningful looks, she will not be deterred. Since Aria is in the process of being poisoned to death and Spencer is in the process of having her heart shattered and Hanna has that job interview in Philly, she needs someone to tail Caleb and make sure he doesn’t do anything to make Mona angrier than she is about the fact that he exists and gets to second base with Hanna on the regular. She’s like, “Please, Emily, I need this.” And Emily goes, “Well, I need to feel the weight of an adorably neurotic, slightly socially awkward, coconut-loving bicycle mechanic on top of me, Hanna. So, you’ll just have to wait.” Hanna makes that face that she makes and Emily caves. It’s unfortunate. It’s understandable.

Aria awakes to the familiar sound of someone ransacking her house looking for clues. She rubs at her eyes, says, “Meredith? Is that you? What are you looking for? How come there’s an axe strapped to your back? Where’s my phone? Why am I in a straight jacket? What’s this lump on my head? Why are you wearing a Briarcliff Mental Institution lacrosse team t-shirt? Why does the inside of my mouth taste like sleeping potion?” Meredith strokes her face and tells her to go upstairs and stop asking questions. Aria is like, “Oh, OK. Thanks for stopping by to check on me.”

At school, Mer tells Ella that she looked in on Aria and she’s doing as well as can be expected for a tiny, tiny girl who is being force-fed a full liter of Imbecile Elixir every four hours. Ella trusts Meredith about as far as she could throw a BEAUTIFUL TOYOTA, so she calls Aria’s cell phone right away, and – surprise! – Meredith already pocketed and silenced that bitch.

After school, Emily sleuths in the cutest way possible, bobbing and weaving and ducking and diving in her driver’s seat like anyone would think it’s weird she’s sitting in her car in the school parking lot. Mona walks outside, stops, clicks through several personalities before landing on “mathlete,” and joins a group of model students at a picnic table to do some homework. Caleb finally leaves school in his mom’s Mercedes and Emily follows behind at a safe distance.

At Toby’s “loft,” Spencer prepares everything just so for her surprise anniversary dinner. There’s lasagna, her Nana’s special recipe. There’s a scrabble board, engraved: “For T, my safe place to land. Always your girl, S.” And there’s a junk drawer, with Toby’s Radley visitation badge inside.

When I watched this episode last night, I thought that Toby believed Spencer about the dinner with her dad and that Spencer found Toby’s Radley visitation badge while waiting for Toby to drive home in the rain. But when I watched it again this morning, I decided that they were locked in a heartbreaking game of chicken for almost the whole episode. Toby begging for someone, anyone to tell him about the A stuff starting up again, and probably he was convinced Spencer was blowing him off for sleuthing and not her dad’s dumb work thing. I mean, does Spencer even have a dad? (Answer: No.) But now I think Spencer found his Radley visitation badge when she put that pen back in the desk drawer, right now, and so everything after this is about laying a trap for Toby and praying he’ll prove her wrong. Right? Why else would she leave A’s lair key lying around? She’s way too on her game for that. So, it’s like he’s daring her to lie and she’s doing it and she’s daring him to lie and he’s doing it and he’s daring and she’s daring and he’s lying and she’s lying and it’s all so sad!

Hanna stops outside the Philadelphia Mannequin Factory – where she’s interviewing for her internship – to check out her reflection in the window. She looks amazing but what she sees is Vivian Darkbloom’s red coat over her shoulder. She flips around but the coat disappears. Inside, Hanna calls out for Coraline, but no one answers. That’s because the whole place is filled with naked, faceless mannequins, and pretty soon they’re attacking Hanna like an ivory mob. She screams and runs and tries to hide, but the mannequins just keep on coming. That’s because A is there, hurling them at Hanna. Finally, the mannequins take her down and A rushes out the door, too busy gloating over his clever text about “Next time you’ll be faceless” to even notice that he lost the key to his lair because he didn’t let Spencer sew up the hole in his pocket.

(Why is it one thousand times more awful to know it really is Toby doing and saying stuff like this? Mona’s nuts and also she is a god so she can do what she wants without having her motives questioned, but what did Hanna ever do to Toby besides take him to that boring church dance?)

Anyway, things are dicey all around. Emily very nearly catches the first meeting of Caleb and Paige’s Confederation of Concerned Lezzers & Lesbros, but she stops just short of seeing her girlfriend in the coffee shop where she’s tailed Caleb because Spencer texts to alert her to Hanna’s attack.

Obviously, things are capricious back at Ezra’s as well.

Confederation of Concerned Lezzers & Lesbros. Paige says she has decided that she’s not scared for her own life – after all, what horrible tragedy has ever befallen one of Emily’s girlfriends? – but that she’s scared, instead, for Emily. That’s how come she keeps freaking out so bad. She and Caleb size-up one another to determine whether or not they’re compatible allies.

Paige: I was kidnapped for Emily. Bound, gagged, held at knifepoint.

Caleb: I was shot for Hanna.

Paige: Wellll. I mean. You kinda shot yourself, so.

Caleb: Didn’t you one time drown Emily?

Paige: Didn’t Hanna one time drown Lucas? It happens, Caleb. And I rode my bike seven miles in the rain in the middle of the night to apologize. Listen, me and you, we’re the same. We love our girlfriends. We’ve both had weird hair.

Caleb: We both have these magical scars on our foreheads that make us even more gorgeous.

Paige: We both look good in suits.

Caleb: I’m an orphan.

Paige: I am too now, apparently.

Caleb: And we both hate Mona and want to spend less time watching our girlfriends die and more time making out with them.

Paige: Exactly. So, how do we do that? I’m thinking we find her lair and steal all her stalker shit, and rather than that putting us on her radar for immediate annihilation, it’ll probably just make her stop being a psycho.

Caleb: You’re pretty, you know?

Paige: So are you, girl. So are you.

Oh, Lord. You two will be dead by morning.

Since Aria is still dying on her couch, Hanna and Spencer and Emily meetup to talk about the attack and the A-key. Emily confirms that Mona was actually at school while Hanna was in Philly, so it must have been one of A’s minions that did necromancy on those mannequins. Spencer suggests that they hold onto that A-key until they can discuss it with Aria because Aria is always so intimately involved in these meetings and near-death experiences. Besides, when has keeping evidence for an extra day come back to bite them in the ass?

Nothing helps Hanna recover from threats of having her face sliced off like giving fashion advice, so she tells Spencer to celebrate her anniversary in nothing but five-inch heels. Emily actually blushes and her face goes, “Hanna! Are you for real right now?!” And Hanna’s face goes, “What? It’s just something I heard from a hobo one time.” (Gosh, I wonder what it would be like to see Shay Mitchell crushing it in some five-inch heels).

While Aria drifts ever closer toward heaven – where, make no mistake, she will account for the life of every baby bird she slaughtered in pursuit of “fashion” – a blondie burglarizes her room. You think it’s Meredith until she pulls open a hidden panel in the back of Aria’s closet to reveal a porcelain doll. The only person who would know to look inside a doll skull inside a secret compartment is the person who taught Aria that shit to begin with: Alison DiLaurentis.

It’s always fun to watch these actresses play their pre-Ali’s death selves, all timid and awkward and naive, and that’s exactly the place Aria lands when she wakes up and realizes the ghost of her dead best friend is in her bedroom. It works because Lucy Hale is a fine actress, indeed, and also she isn’t wearing any makeup, so she looks about seven years younger. She wants to know what heaven is like, what Ali knows about “A,” whether or not her dad actually offed Ali. Ali gives her the look she always gives all the Liars, like she loves them even though they’re the most pathetic, and then she goes, “Do I look dead to you?”

I’ve never bought into all those theories that Ali is still alive and running the show, but I have never wanted it to be more true that I do in this episode. Maybe No One [Had] To Save Ali From Evil; maybe she saved herself!

She advises Aria to stop drinking Meredith’s poison, wonders aloud how come Spencer, of all people, hasn’t figured out yet who A is, and tosses out a riddle about why she chose Aria. She smiles, she winks, she vanishes into the night.

When Aria wakes up, her room is not bathed in Ali’s ethereal glow, but her shit has been pillaged. She reaches for the tea, thinks better of it, tries to leave her room, realizes Meredith has locked her inside. Aria may not have spent much time getting harassed by A, but she certainly has been paying attention to Spencer’s lessons. The first thing she does is smash her mirror to make a shiv, which she, of course, wraps up in a doily.

At Rosewood Pharmacy, Hanna and Emily overhead THE LOUDEST PHARMACIST IN THE WORLD telling Meredith that the prescription she is trying to refill is a CLASS A NON-TRADABLE NARCOTIC that cannot be refilled because WICKED WITCHES USE IT TO POISON LITTLE GIRLS. So Meredith just loads up on 200 boxes of antihistamines and gets the hell out of there. After a quick Wackopedia consult, Emily realizes that she is rather familiar with the CLASS A NON-TRADABLE NARCOTIC in question. “We’ve got to get Aria’s quick,” she says, “before she starts time-traveling and ends up in a graveyard holding a shovel.”

Toby’s face stops by Spencer’s to give her some anniversary flowers. She’s like, “Oh, Toby. They’re beautiful. Almost as beautiful as your saintly, forthright, eternally honest heart.” On the kitchen counter is the A-key, about which Spencer weaves an effortless lie. She drops it in a drawer and kisses Toby on the mouth.

Aria wakes up again, this time with Meredith hovering over her, clutching Aria’s mirror-shiv in her hand – doily-free; rookie mistake – and growling about how she’s searched all over the house, even in Mike’s room, which wasn’t a picnic, let her tell you, with all those blind girl craft fair knickknacks littering every surface, and Ali’s diary pages are nowhere to be found. Aria is like, “My brain is still a little fuzzy, but, like, you’ve been drugging me, yeah?” Meredith barks at her not to be so dramatic. OK, Meredith, who is squeezing a shiv so hard she’s bleeding all over Aria’s bed, would like Aria to stop being so dramatic. And so Aria does the only thing she can do: She makes a run for it, around and around and around the house in circles, trying to dial 911 for about ten minutes on the landline instead of running out into the yard and out into the street and on down the road, just punching those buttons on that dead phone over and over and over until Meredith clocks her over the head and knocks her ass right out.

Over at Ezra’s:

 

Hanna and Emily arrive at the Montgomery’s and dance around on the porch discussing the horrific ways Aria is probably being tortured inside. They try to call her phone for the one zillionth time, and then fuck it, they’re going in after her. She’s not on her couch deathbed. Or her bedroom deathbed. Lightning and thunder illuminate Meredith’s entrance as she appears in Aria’s bedroom doorway and offers to escort them to Aria’s basement deathbed. Thank you, you’re too kind, much obliged, etc.

“I’ll just be up here figuring out how much Sudafed I need to shove down y’all’s throats to shut you up for good,” Meredith sing-songs and she shoves them into the basement with the corpse of their best friend.

I don’t know. I guess if I ever realized I’d slept with Byron Montgomery, I’d have a psychotic break too.

Spencer calls Toby and asks if he’s on his way home in that truck she bought him. He says that yes, he’s on his way home. She tells him to be safe on his way home. And he says the real storm won’t even have broken by the time he gets home. “Enjoy your trip home, to the place where you are obviously going,” Spencer says. “I’ll be there soon,” Toby replies. “You can count on me to tell the truth.”

Hanna and Emily have managed to revive Aria. The three of them stand in the darkness and listen to Meredith click-clacking around on the hardwood floors. Season one Emily would have been in the corner crying and rocking back and forth. Season three Emily checks the possible escape routes, calculates the trajectory and force it would take for her and Hanna to hurl Aria through one of the windows, runs through a mental inventory of paralyzing pressure points just in case Meredith comes back down the stairs, and lunges for a golf club when she hears Byron pull up outside. Hanna’s like, “70/30 Byron kills us.” Emily is like, “75/25, and if we live, I get to borrow your five-inch Louboutins.” They flank Aria because even though it’s her dad, she’s the smallest and also is still stoned as hell.

Truth time! The basement door opens. Byron is lit up by the storm. He calls out to Aria and asks if she’s OK. By the time he gets down the stairs, Hanna has armed herself too. Byron sighs sadly. “Girls,” he says. “Oh, girls. I know I am the worst goddamn thing, but I didn’t kill Alison.”

Flashback: Ali calls Byron “Mr. Montgomery” and tells him he’s got one last chance to pay up or she’s going to Ella with evidence of his affair. Byron wishes she wouldn’t, but he says an asshole has got to do what an asshole has got to do (trust him, he knows), and so he bids her a good evening. On his way out of the yard, he sees Melissa Hastings storm outside and start shouting into her phone, probably about, “What do you mean demon semen is on backorder? Your website said it was in stock! How am I supposed to give birth to a devil without any of Satan’s sperm? …oh, wait. I might know a guy.”

Hastings House of Broken Dreams and Sinister Stir-Fry. A lets himself into the house, walks purposefully to the Hastings’ junk drawer, rifles around. Over his shoulder, an angelic figure appears. “Is this what you’re looking for?” she asks, holding up the A-key. The hoodie lifts its head. The head belongs to Toby.

What happens next is like if someone punched your soul in the face. Toby turns around slowly and asks how long Spencer has known and she shows him the Radley badge, before slapping him with the fury of a thousand A-ccusations and a dozen cups of coffee. Toby’s face bounces back like he knows he deserves so much more. Veronica appears, Toby vanishes, Spencer collapses into her mother’s arms. Veronica doesn’t know exactly what happened, but she strokes Spencer’s hair anyway and tries to sooth her: “Oh, sweetheart, I told you to stay away from the proletariat.”

In the five minutes it took Byron to tell his tale and contact the authorities, Meredith cleaned out her apartment and skipped town. Byron wants to know if Aria still thinks he’s a murderer, and she proves that she does not/is a dummy by throwing Ali’s diary pages in the fire.

Spencer goes to Toby’s apartment and collapses against the door, begging for an explanation, pleading for it to be a misunderstanding. I was talking to someone earlier this week about what Hogwarts house Spencer would be in. I keep saying Ravenclaw, but my buddy said she thinks Spencer falls on the Slytherin side of a Slytherin/Gryffindor spectrum, which is valid because Spencer might be a little too manic to really go Ravenclaw. Spencer’s whole deal is: Justice and Being Right, which makes me think Slytherin, because even though Hermione Granger hated being wrong, she was just about the most grace-giving person to ever wear a wizard’s robe. And on her very worst day, what did she ever do? Conjure a couple of birds to attack a guy who deserved it? But Spencer’s darker than that by a mile or two with craftiness and ambition to spare. But now she’s leaning against Toby’s door and crying and praying and saying the two things you thought you’d never hear her say: Tell me how I can show you mercy. Tell me that I’m wrong. Yeah, she’s smart, and she’s cunning too. But that’s the sound of a Gryffindor heart breaking.

Inside Toby’s loft, Mona is helping herself to some anniversary wine. She sips, she smiles, she swoons at her own self. Someone else may be calling the shots, but Mona Vanderwaal is still pulling the trigger.

Marlene King, writer/producer/director, you are a true magician. And we honor you.

A Toby pecs-sized thank you to my screencapping partner Maggie (@margaretrosey), who had to get drunk to make it through last night’s episode. Maggie, you are my hero.

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