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“Pretty Little Liars” recap 3.23: I Solemnly Swear I Am Up To No Good

Previously on Pretty Little Liars, we met the world’s most fearsome fighting team. They’re heroes in some outfits and they’re queens. When the evil hoodies attacked, those fibbing gals didn’t cut ’em no slack. Ali taught them to be ninja teens. (She’s a radical rat!) Spencer leads, Hanna does machines. (Hey, Ctrl+A!) Aria is cool but rude. Emily is a party dude. Pretty Little Lying Liars. Pretty Little Lying Liars. Pretty Little Lying Liars. Liars in some outfits. TOYOTA POWER.

Spencer is folded up in a chair at Radley Institute for the Criminally Insane, staring out the window at a storm, contemplating a good many of her life decisions. Why, for example, did she not take an extra two seconds to lift up the mask on “Toby’s” dead body to confirm his identity lo, those many days ago in the deep, dark forest? Why does she not carry around a Lois Lane-type recording device to collect actual proof of the various murder confessions she hears on a daily basis? Whatever happened to that early admissions application she sent off to UPenn with CeCe Drake in the middle of the night? Is it normal for her to still get tingly feelings in unmentionable places when she thinks about Mona spanking her at Academic Decathlon? How old was she when she first started questioning the existence of Santa Claus and her parents?

Or maybe she has mentally checked into that three-dimensional A-Lair matrix she digitally constructed last season. Maybe she’s in that Shady Pines hotel room trying on wigs and clown masks and setting Bratz-Aria’s clothes on fire.

A familiar Radley nurse announces the arrival of Spencer’s friends, and she might not be happy to see them there, but I sure am. Emily, of course, just wants to confirm that they’re not catching her at a bad time, that her mother relayed their plans for this visit, and thank you for having us over. In fact, Emily’s empathy knows no bounds, and she sweetly listens to Spencer mock and deride them for thinking she’s getting out of here any time soon. And, I mean, you know how much I love Spencer Hastings, but when Emily’s girlfriend was murdered (the most recent time), she flew to Haiti and spent months building houses for those less fortunate than her. On her absolute angriest day, she threatened to show A her boobs and got caught in an accidental roofie loop with Paige McCullers. So the fact that she can extend such compassion to Spencer when she’s acting out like this is frankly a marvel of self-restraint.

Hanna, on the other hand, has a different set of life experiences to draw from, and in her estimation, Radley does exactly nothing to cure people of insanity. She drops the truth like a hot potato: “Look, they found a body in the woods, but it was nowhere near where you said it would be and it wasn’t Toby Cavanaugh – so come here and let me brush your hair so we can get you out of this place before it makes you crazy. Also, roaches.”

Spencer says Radley doesn’t just keep the wackadoodles in, it also keeps the murderers out. It’s quite a bluff. Obviously, she needs to stay at Radley for the subterfuge she’s working, but suggesting it’s an impenetrable fortress is manically laughable on account of every person on the show has broken into this place at least once. But I guess seeing Spencer act scared is enough to mess with the Liars heads enough to buy her a couple of extra days.

She skulks off to her room and the nurse comes banging on the door asking if she wants to say goodbye to her little friends, but Spencer’s too busy messing around with the secret stash of stuff in her pillow to be bothered.

We don’t usually get to see the part of Emily’s personality that comes from being in a military family because she’s spent so much time learning to live outside the conventional ideas she was raised on, but Hanna has moved in and made herself at home by scattering everything she owns, willy-nilly, all over Emily’s bedroom, and the mess is making Emily’s eye twitch. But, most importantly: “Hanna, what are you thinking about, right now?” Hanna is staring out the window looking for any signs of Detective Wilden or his sentient police car. “WRONG!” is what Emily snaps at her, before explaining that today’s thing is not attempted murder or destruction of evidence or thieving uncle-dads or whatever cake-and-baby thing Aria and Ezra will be pulling later on. Today’s thing is Spencer. Getting Spencer home. Getting Spencer healed.

Once she has explained the agenda to Hanna, she explains it to her mother, asking also for Pam to hook her up with some top secret information about the dead body RPD found in the woods. Pam agrees, if it will help Emily get on with her life, and also if she will teach Hanna how to fold clothes.

Aria and Ezra are enjoying an al fresco breakfast downtown, right in front of the carnival that is setting up on the square. They’re sharing a cruller, which: I feel like when you get to a point in your relationship where you’re splitting one single donut between the two of you, it’s time to think about doing some codependency counseling. If a girl I was dating suggested we share one donut, we’d be broken up so fast. Aria’s skittish about them being seen together, socially, after the whopper she told to Principal Haskins last week, but Ezra’s like, “Honey, we did that storyline for two full seasons; I don’t think the audience can bear to return to the tediousness of such a thing.” Maggie calls to ask Ezra to pick up Malcolm from ninja school tomorrow, but he can’t because he has a job interview, so Aria says she’ll do it because her friends are being real downers lately, what with their spirals into madness and incessant talk of dead lovers and Emily even raised her voice yesterday. They’re all so grumpy.

At school, Caleb can’t stop talking about much he and his uncle-dad have in common, including matching knee scars. How can he ever repay Hanna for forcing him to let Uncle Jamie back into his life? Why, if it hadn’t been for her, he never would have known he had an uncle-dad. He never would have bonded with him. He never would have poked at his own scars and cut open his own heart and allowed himself to hope again. Hanna is like, “Emily told me I can’t prioritize this one today, so let’s make out instead.” They do. Ella stares at them like a Spencer. It’s weird. Real weird. She looks and looks for many seconds past what is an appropriate amount of time to watch your daughter’s best friend do kissy things with her boyfriend.

Emily is still noodling on how to get Spencer to come on home from Radley, when she gets a [lecherous?!] text from Shana Costumeshop. Aria is like, “Girl, no. I know it feels safe to flirt with a spare lesbian while your true love is in Out of Town, but it is a slippery slope.” Hanna wanders up and asks why Emily is blushing – “Are you thinking about that Halloween when you eye-fucked Jenna Marshall again?” – but Emily shuts them down with a new plan: They’ll break into the morgue and take a photo of John Doe to prove it’s not Toby, and then maybe Spencer will come back and take over the job of being Spencer, because, honestly, it’s friggin’ exhausting.

Handsomest Handsome in Handsome Town, Eddie Lamb, invites Spener to play an pirate explorer board game with him, but before Spencer can accept his invitation, Wren shows up to apologize for not visiting her sooner, and also to shoot British hate daggers at Eddie with his eyeballs. After Eddie reluctantly leaves them alone, Wren is all, “Darling, you know my kink is hot messes, and this -” he waves his hand in a circle to encompass her entire person “- is doing it for me in ways you’ve never even imagined, but I have actual medial business to attend to, so sit tight and think of things that make you even more bananas and I’ll be back soon.”

I guess you can’t expect to be married to Byron Montgomery for almost two decades and come out completely unscatthed, but heavens, Ella is channeling him hard today. After staring down Caleb and Hanna in the hallway, she calls Hanna into her classroom to tell her that Caleb’s dad stole the fancy bronze bell from the church belfry and replaced it with one made out of aluminum foil. She knows because she’s on the church restoration committee and they’re trying to decide who to blame besides Pastor Ted for hiring a contractor who also is a burglar. Oh, and don’t tell Caleb. Or the other Liars. Or Uncle Jamie.

At Radley, Spencer has discovered a treasure map in the pirate explorer game. The game board is a grid with oceans and continents and shipwrecks and things, but someone has drawn little Radley map keys all over the place. The unbroken circle piano. A murder room. The doll hospital. Spencer follows the map down an empty corridor and finds a clearly marked escape route out of an unhinged door. Outside is a garden, and freedom also. Lucas is hiding in the bushes, grooming himself and stopping occasionally to sniff the air. Mike Montgomery is there, trying to hawk some blind girl craft fair pottery to Holden, who is practicing his krav maga on that guy Alex who broke up with Spencer when he thought she wanted him to go to tennis camp in Switzerland. Noel Kahn is playing truth or dare with a garden gnome. Jackie Molina and Meredith are trying to get Sean to prove he doesn’t have Ken doll genitals. And ol’ Ben Coogan flips through photos of Ali, Maya, Paige, Samara, Horrible Quin, and Shana on his phone, working out what he did to make Emily gay.

Spencer smirks. Jackpot.

Uncle Jamie takes Hanna and Caleb out for a delicious meal, sponsored by the tithing box of Rosewood Presbyterian Church. Also, he bought Hanna an angel necklace as a metaphor for her being an angel. Their friendly hobo banter is interrupted by a call from Pastor Ted, who just wants to let Uncle Jamie know that he is fired for stealing the church bell. Apparently Rosewood’s foundry is in the same neighborhood as Red Coat’s 24-hour sawmill, because Uncle Jamie rushes out the door at like 10:00 p.m. to go talk to them about straightening out the mix-up.

Veronica Hastings has brought to Radley all sorts of blazer/blouse pairings, hoping to coax Spencer into herself by coaxing her out of her cuckoo lady slippers. But Spencer smacks that shit out of her mother’s hands and tells her to get lost in that tesseract vortex between Madrid and London. Veronica sighs, takes a seat, says, “I’m gonna level with you here, sweetheart, I haven’t seen a person acting this crazy since two weeks before Ali was murdered when I caught her sneaking in the back door of our house one night, her face busted all to hell, honest-to-god tear stains on her cheeks, begging me not to tell anyone that someone in our yard or her yard had worked her over. I, of course, agreed to keep silent because obviously it was your sister Melissa who did it. Lordy, I gave birth to some psychos.” Far be it for Spencer to judge the latency of another person’s flashbacks, but her face is like, for real? Veronica shrugs, packs up the blazers, bounces up out of there.

Rosewood General. Ever wonder what the Liars did with their candy striper outfits after Wilden busted them for sneaking around in the morgue looking for page five of Ali’s autopsy report? They just hung onto those things, for a rainy day. It was a good decision, I guess, because they’ve donned them once more to break into the morgue to rifle through the dead bodies to find John Doe. Aria stands guard at the door. Hanna stands inside and has an existential meltdown about how no matter how much you exercise or how careful you are about tan lines or how many fistfuls of M&Ms you put back in the candy dish after a bullying text from A, everyone ends up dead as a loaf. Emily, literally: “Well, can you help me with this loaf? I can’t find the ID tag.” They find the John Doe, carefully unzip his bodybag, and are greeted by that mask that Mona wore under that other mask like the one Caleb wore that time on the Halloween train when she wanted to grind up on Hanna. They screech, and so does Aria, because Red Coat hops off the elevator on the morgue floor and then hops right back on the elevator after Aria spots her.

Eddie Lamb stops by Spencer’s room to administer her meds and also some advice about Wren, namely to “trust her instincts” where he is concerned, which is a funny thing to tell a person whose instincts: a) are what landed her in this very sanitarium, and b) have drunkenly led her into the arms of that shadester on multiple occasions. Eddie Lamb says Wren is not in the mental or physical health care profession for the right reasons, which, in my estimation, means that both of Rosewood’s psychiatrists are dirty doers. Spencer pretends to take her meds, but then spits up the pill and stuff it into a plastic bag along with other unconsumed pills. She hides the tiny package in her pillow.

Caleb tracks down Hanna at school and he knows for sure something is wrong with her because she’s been ignoring his texts to “study.” Really, she just doesn’t want to have to tell him that Uncle Jamie maybe stole that bell like he stole her lucky dice fiver. $8,000 worth of bronze would buy a lot of pizza. But she does tell him and he immediately believes her because Caleb is, and always has been, the very best boyfriend on this show.

When Aria Montgomery arrives to pick up Malcolm from ninja practice, she discovers that he has already left … with Aria Montgomery. She whips out her cell phone and calls the police and reports the kidnapping. Just kidding! She wanders over to his ninja cubby and finds two tickets to the Faustian puppet show happening at the hell carnival. Only in Rosewood is a story about a guy making a soul pact with the Devil considered family-friendly entertainment. But Malcolm is enjoying the hell out of it, just laughing and laughing as a mannequin-sized puppet trades his soul for unlimited sex and wisdom. A reaches into his popcorn cup with her Risen Mitten-ed hands and enjoys a snack. Too bad they don’t serve tapioca pudding at carnivals, huh, A?

Aria runs to the carnival as fast as she can in her Leviathan-skin boots, looking everywhere for Malcolm, but finding only evil-er and evil-er masks. Ella is there, just wandering around eating some cotton candy, trying to remember if she one time had a son who would have been into this kind of tomfoolery. She dispenses some love advice to her daughter, but Aria spots A buying a balloon for Malcolm, so she tosses her mom aside like an old pair of dreamcatcher earrings and barrells after Ezra’s kidnapped kid.

She loses them in the crowd, and so she calls up Emily to ask if she should call up the police, and Emily is like, “Yes! No! I don’t know! Why is A targeting you all of a sudden? I thought she didn’t know you exist!” The camera swirls and swirls and swirls around Aria as she contemplates what kind of cake you buy for a person to apologize for accidentally selling his kid into carnie-folk slavery. She finally spots the Faust puppet tent, where Malcolm is just sitting inside eating an ice cream cone, waiting for the second show to start. Aria slaps that cone out of his hand like she’s Spencer and it’s a blazer, all, “The fuck, Malcolm? You knew I was supposed to pick you up, right?” And he’s all, “Yeah, but your friend Alison picked me up instead. You know? Alison? Wild eyes. Electric shock hair. Kept quoting this book about the guy this puppet show is based on: ‘I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.’ She’s your friend, right?” Aria drags his tiny ass out of the tent and home to Alex Mack.

Wren and Eddie Lamb get into a scuffle about whether or not Eddie can visit Spencer and give her a book to read. Wren is adamant that he stay away from Spencer’s room tonight. Eddie doesn’t need to know what she’s doing (or – spoiler alert! – not doing!) in there. He hands over the book and glares at Wren, and Wren glares back and says he hopes they’re not having the same problems they’ve already had once before.

Uncle Jamie stops by Hanna’s and Caleb tells him to beat it because they know he stole that bell and that fiver, and Uncle Jamie gets so gross so fast it makes me want to punch him right in the nuts. He’s like, “Oh, ho! I see how it is! You can forgive your mom for abandoning you because she gave you a Mercedes, but you can’t forgive me because I only drive a pick-up truck!” Caleb breaks down in tears and says he spent his whole life sleeping in the school ventilation system and the only reason he survived his because he learned how hot spots work, and so he made money for food by unlocking phones for people whose girlfriends were in drug prison. For a time, he even shared a Star Wars sleeping bag with a guy who stole his whole life savings to buy tickets to Comic-Con! Uncle Jamie leaves in a huff. FINE BY US, ASSHOLE! AND STAY OUT!

Over at RPD HQ, Pam is toting around a Missing Persons box when Emily arrives to inquire after the John Doe down in the morgue. Pam tells her to scurry on home and she’ll be there later to debrief her.

Wearing a flowy cotton nightgown, Spencer Hastings creeps out of room 217 and counts her steps through one hallway, then another, through an empty corridor, over some broken hobby horses, down a flight of stairs. She is walking into the wind the whole time, or whoever is humming is doing it real breathy-like, because Spencer’s hair whips around in the moonlight as she tip-toes. She finally finds herself in the subbasement doll hospital where Alison DiLaurentis is just hanging out, listening to some records.

OK, and the song Ali chooses is Dionne Warwick‘s “I’m Your Puppet.” It is to that tune, and the lyrics “Pull the string and I’ll wink at you, I’m your puppet / I’ll do funny things if you want me to, I’m your puppet / I’ll be yours to have and to hold / Darling, you’ve got full control of your puppet” that Ali pulls Spencer into her embrace and slow-dances with her, for practice. It’s the second time she’s lezzed out claiming it as “practice,” which is something 64 percent of all lesbians do when they’re teenagers. In fact, I one time spent an entire summer “practicing for my husband” with my Jesus camp female co-counselor. (By the end of the summer, I had memorized the entire book of Song of Solomon, and also I could take off another girl’s bra with two fingers with my eyes closed.) Ali and Spencer sway in the moonlight and then Spencer stops to ask if Toby is the one who beat up Ali in her mom’s flashback. Ali goes, “No, your mother already told you, it was Melissa.”

Spencer pulls away fully from Ali’s ghostly embrace and finds a star on the saddle of a hobby horse. The same star that was on the pirate board game treasure map she spent all day studying. Inside are Mona’s nurse disguise and Radley employee badge – and a visitor’s pass for CeCe Drake(!) authorized by Wren Kingston(!!), who, by the way, is standing in the doorway now instead of Alison. He explains that he did authorize CeCe to visit Mona because they had in common the fact that Ali ruined both of their lives. Remember when Ali threw that girl down the steps at Ian’s frat party after snapping her neck? I guess CeCe took the fall for that one, because she got kicked out of college over it. How’d CeCe know Mona was in Radley anyway? Oh, you know, Melissa called and told her.

Ezra takes Aria out to dinner to celebrate how she didn’t let his son get murdered today. Malcolm was so pooped from the satanic puppet show experience that he fell right to sleep mumbling about black hoodies and red trench coats. Aria’s PTSD finally kicks in and she breaks up with Ezra for the ten bazillionth time. He just kisses her on the cheek and says he’ll see her tomorrow.

Emily is sitting in her Paily window seat when Pam arrives with the news that a hot guy with a chest of steel was found murdered in the woods and stuffed in a shallow grave, right where Spencer said she saw Toby’s body. Emily is like, “Well, is it him? Did they identify him?” And Pam goes, “Not yet. The guy was pretty disfigured; the coroner said he looked like he’d fallen down an elevator shaft. Anyway, at least it wasn’t another one of your girlfriends, right? Silver lining!”

Over coffee, A texts Hanna and Caleb to let them know that between the kidnappings and murderings of the day, she found time to steal that church bell and frame Uncle Jamie, so just let her know when they want it back and she’ll drive it on over in the murdermobile.

Later that evening, Aria and Hanna are enjoying steaming cups of cocoa and talk of being terrorized in front of a nice fire when Emily bursts in to tell them the news about the hot body PRD found in the forest. Aria goes, “Goddammit. I guess Spencer is never coming out of Radley now, and so shitty stuff is going to start happening to me all the time.”

What she means is that A usually targets Spencer and not her.

But what she doesn’t know is …

… Spencer is the one who kidnapped Malcolm and bought him all those treats at the hell carnival! What! YES! WHAT! Awesome! Inside her pillowcase with her satchel of adrenalized hyperreality pills, Spencer has also been keeping a black hoodie, two tickets to the Fasustain puppet show, and this memory: “You don’t have to ask again, Mona. I’m in.”

At the morgue, a coroner wheels in the hot dead body from the woods. He accidentally pulls up the sheet so we can see that the torso has that “901 FREE!” tattoo on it, only guess what? That shit is faded because that shit is fake.

Next week: The Liars find out about Spencer and Spencer finds out about Red Coat and Spobians find out whether or not their ship is well and truly sunk. (Guesses: Spencer is a double agent, Ali is Red Coat, Toby is alive.)

Forever thanks to my screencapping partner Maggie (@MargaretRosey), who has plenty of delicious PLL countdowns up her sleeve before next week’s finale!

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