Previously on Pretty Little Liars, Hanna absconded from Ezra’s Ravenswood lair with one of Ali’s diaries, into which she had ciphered a variety of opinions and feelings and poems about how dumb and fat and slutty and in love with her the Liars were. She also made a map of her multiple hideouts, including the Busy Bee B&B where she and Aria used to holiday as children. On the way to the (now defunct) bed and breakfast, Ezra hacked the Liars’ GPS, cell phones, and the actual weather so they would be forced to hike to EzriA’s Love ShAck so he could lock them in a laundry room and re-steal Ali’s diary. Betwixt these shenanigans, Emily sat on the kissing rock, crying all day; Hanna tried to convince everyone that she was fine with Caleb leaving her for a ghost lover; Spencer called Mrs. D a whore in eleven different ways before moving into Toby’s coffee shop loft; and Aria lied to everyone including Ezra about Ezra.
The Liars are speeding back toward the Busy Bee B&B now that they’ve realized how decoding Ali’s diary and handing it back over to A is definitely going to get her murdered again. It’s an even more dire predicament than last time Ali was definitely going to get murdered because The Grunwald is too busy menacing Miranda over in Ravenswood to find the time to answer the Tippi hotline in the murder room she built in the sorority house she oversaw at Cicero College. No way is that seer is going to find the time to pull Ali’s championship breath-holding ass out of another grave. But when the Liars arrive at the B&B, the place is ransacked and A has already scrawled a message on the wall about how it’s too late, bitches.
The next morning, Emily drops off a pie at the church bake sale, which: every time Emily delivers pastries, it’s a mark of death for whoever consumes them – RIP Maya – so probably we’ll be getting another funeral before this season is finished. Spencer is on the phone with Emily because she senses that Emily is two wrong steps away from Radley at this point, a feeling she knows well. But she has to hop off when her dad shows up at Toby’s door. Fooled into a false sense of paternal affection, due to the fact that he’s been in town for three days in a row, Spencer assumes he’s there to collect her and bring her home. He is not. He is there to speak to Toby, who emerges from his bedroom half-naked and dripping wet, inviting Spencer to shower with him. And then, the greatest line of dialogue ever spoken aloud. Peter goes, “Put some pants on; we need to talk about Radley.”
He also wants to talk to Spencer about Jason, who has very clearly been axe-murdered by Jessica DiLaurentis – along with Alison, if you want to know my personal theory – at this point, and so they need Spencer to stop digging around in his biz. Peter says Jason is in rehab, fell off the wagon, got into a bar fight. She doesn’t believe him because she’s Spencer and she doesn’t believe anything anyone says ever, but also because she heard him flat-out lie to everyone in the world on the phone yesterday while sneaking around the kitchen with the woman who had his bastard affair baby.
Aria and Ezra share some breakfast cuddles because Aria has decided to break up with Jake and Ezra’s got some kind of book deal situation happening in Philly today, so things are really going his way. He tells Aria she looks like she’s seen a ghost at one point, and then twirls his mustache and giggles behind his hand.
Hanna is still operating in a state of rage-denial about her breakup with Caleb. Rather than facing down her broken heart, she decides to face down her closet, wearing an amazing shirt that just straight up says “Creeping” on it. When Ashley confronts her about the fact that no one in this house has ever, ever bothered to clean out a wardrobe depository, except that time the cops cleaned Tom’s gun out of one of the upstairs closets, Hanna shirks and shrieks and storms out of the room. Basically, she’s throwing away everything Caleb ever saw her wear, which is … everything. Spencer also tries to talk her out of it, but her pleas are even less convincing than Ashley’s because Ashley has real life wisdom and the last time Spencer lost Toby to the clutches of a ghost, she ended up in a mental institution with twigs in her hair, following a hand-drawn pirate ship map out onto the roof.
Whatever, though. Whatever to everything you thought you knew and everything that came before. Get a load of this: Shana Costumeshop hits up Emily and tells her she’s got a message from Ali. Yeah, that’s right. Shana Costumeship grew up beside Ali’s grandmother in Georgia. When Ali would come to visit in the summetimes, they formed such a bond. For Shana, it was lesbi-curious like with Ali and Emily, I reckon, and for Ali it was whatever capital for however she measure the value of her relationships. Ali Emily-ed Shana even more than she Emily-ed Emily because that girl left her whole entire life behind and moved her ass to Pennsylvania and began dating Paige and Jenna and making moves on Emily when Ali showed up at her Georgia house, caked in grave dirt, asking for help.
The Liars don’t know if they believe Shana. On the one hand, they’re like, “What a weird story she wove. Who would drop everything to move a thousand miles away to take a job at a Halloween store to infiltrate a town’s teenage lesbian mafia to help a formerly dead girl who probably offered up one five-second frencher in exchange for a lifetime of feeling like balls?” But on the other hand, Emily is sitting right there, vibrating with anxiety and excitement and desire and shame and rage, so they’re like, “Ah, right.”
Emily explains that she offered Shana the ultimate test: She wants to know what Ali said to Emily the time she pulled Emily’s lifeless body from the barn that doll led her to when she was on the hunt for Dr. Annabeth Gish. If Shana can produce that information, Emily will know Ali is alive for sure. The Liars exchange looks and slowly explain to Emily that in the past A has known stuff that only Ali knew, so who’s to say that Shana isn’t on the A-team? But Emily’s already got that tingly sensation in her heart and mind and loins that comes from thinking the girl who loves no one loves you best and most. That you see “the real” her. It’s done.
Emily meets up with Shana in the privacy of the middle of the town square and I’ve got to say: I had no idea how happy I was going to be to see ol’ Costumeshop again. It’s not just that she’s looking fierce as fuck or that it’s so lovely to have another queer woman of color on our TVs or because of that one time when she played the violin like some kind of teenage musical savant or even that we just found out she’s been spy-banging every girl in town – actually, yeah. It’s that last thing. That info is Mona levels of crazy-gay. I love it. Anyway, Shana recounts the Emily/Ali barn meeting, word-for-word, kiss-for-kiss, and even though Spencer strongly discourages her from going alone to meet up with Ali, Emily honestly cannot help herself.
Do you think somewhere in Rosewood Paige senses something dastardly is afoot, but just can’t put her finger on what’s wrong? So she goes for a long bike ride and swims laps for a couple of hours and when that doesn’t calm her spirit, she buys some Chinese food just so she can smash it into trash cans? Maybe she pulls out some T.S. Eliot and reads “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” right out loud. (“Would it have been worth while / To have bitten off the matter with a smile / To have squeezed the universe into a ball / To roll it toward some overwhelming question…“) Maybe she makes sure the furniture in her and Emily’s Sims house is arranged just so. Maybe she calls up Caleb to ask when they can sleuth together again, and maybe he answers this time. Maybe he tells her he’s developed complicated feelings for a ghost. A chill runs up her spine, a cold shower for her brain, but she doesn’t know why. Out in the woods, in a secluded workshop, a mask-maker turns out a dozen masks of Maya St. Germain’s face. Paige makes the drapes more puffy in her happy computer home, shivers, checks her phone for texts from Emily. Nothing. (“…To say: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead / Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all’-“).
Over at Mojo Dojo, Jake is excited to tell Aria that he’s going to Nationals to beat Mr. Schuester’s ass into the ground! She is happy for him, really. Honestly. Truly, she is happy. Also, she shagged Ezra while he was away and so she’ll be getting back together with him now. Jake looks like a kicked puppy, but his sadness turns to incredulity when he Charlie Browns out into the street and sees Ezra having a pissy little hissy fit in the middle of the road, banging on some lady’s car with his fists and shouting at her about how she’ll be sorry and doing a hair-pulling whirly-twirly when she drives away.
Aria misses this little tantrum, but Jake tells her all about it when she shows back up with a gaudy broach he sent he from Kung Fu Sectionals. She tries to give it back to him, but he’s like, “I don’t know anyone else who dresses as insane as you. Also, your boyfriend is a psychopath.” Aria says the Ezra she knows wouldn’t hurt a mouse. For real. There is no way that guy would buy four mice, name them after her and her friends, slaughter the one named Spencer, and rub its blood all over a trophy. You know what else he wouldn’t hurt? A parrot. He wouldn’t make it into a cannibal by force feeding it rotisserie chicken, OK? He just wouldn’t.
Over at the Marin’s, Hanna has trashed the place. The foyer is covered with boxes and there’s a pool table in there now. When Travis comes over to check in on her – she’s fine, dude, fine fine fine everything is fine – she invites him to play a friendly game of stripes and solids. (I have no idea what that game is actually called.) It’s all balls and sticks and you’re holding the stick too tight and hold it softer and do this with the balls and yeah just like that you know how how I like it. After all the thinly veiled foreplay, Hanna lays a smackeroo right onto his cowboy lips and when he pulls away she’s like, “Well, duh. Of course you’re not interested in me like that.” Which is ridiculous. Hanna Marin, do you know you? Have you seen you? You gorgeous PinkDrinking Hufflepuff, literally everyone is interested in you like that!
The person who does say no, however, is Ashley Marin, who walks in on their smoochin’ and asks Hanna to please step outside for a word. And the word is: Nu-uh. She explains that burning all the clothes he loved you in and the hobo things he left behind and getting your lips all over another boy’s lips might seem like the best way to get over Caleb, but you gotta let the pain breathe so you can mourn it so you can really heal from it. And then Ashley Marin – this bank-robbing, fake architect-murdering angel over here – she takes Hanna out to a place that lets you buy plates to throw at a wall. It’s cathartic. It’s sweet. It’s excessive and wasteful they’re both probably slightly drunk. It’s very Hanna and Ashley. It’s wonderful.
Mr. Hastings drops off some Radley paperwork for Toby that basically offers him a big chunk of change if he agrees not to ever talk about his mom getting pushed out of a window again and also doesn’t pursue legal action against the asylum. Spencer thinks it’s a copout, but Peter says just yesterday all Toby wanted was a hug and an apology, so actually, this is even better. But then! Oh ho, then! The writers are like, “Oh, yeah? This is the most boring story on the show? Well, check this out!”
No, for real. Check this out: Jessica DiLaurentis, whose daughter used to trade souls with Cece Drake at Radley Institute for the Criminally Insane, is on the board of directors at Radley Institute for the Criminally Insane. Also? The night Toby’s mom fell (or was pushed!) off the roof, she was up there with another patient and no one will say who it was. So suddenly what happend with Toby’s mom isn’t just a chance for him to have a non-Spencer storyline; it’s super relevant to what the heck Jessica DiLaurentis’ whole deal is and I’m pretty sure her deal is that she murders her children.
Spencer finds out all of this stuff by snooping through her dad’s briefcase while, super hilariously, a hired chef bangs pots and pans around in the background, cooking a fancy meal, and Peter and Spencer try to out-Hastings each other. Spencer calls Toby to tell him not to sign the gag order, that she’ll explain later, and then she rushes out of the house because she’s got a lesbian ninja-ghost reunion to bust up.
OK, here we go. Emily spends several hours getting ready for her meeting with Alison. It takes place in an abandoned warehouse, obviously, and as soon as Shana drops off Emily outside the door, she zooms off in the brand new Mustang she bought to replace the time-traveling ’66 Mustang she lost when Jenna went re-blind and Mona swooped in and purchased it. Emily tiptoes through the warehouse and when Ali appears in neither a black hoodie nor a red coat, but just in regular teenager clothes, Emily rushes at her full-force and they wrap each other up in a desperate embrace.
It’s like this:
Ali:I knew you’d come. Those other bitches stopped giving a shit about whether or not I was alive after my third funeral, but you were my favorite and what we had was special. Emily: This is really you; I know it’s you because it’s not saturated and blurry like an Instagram filter in here. Ali: The way I treated you, it wasn’t awesome. From pretty much the moment I woke up several feet underground in my parents’ backyard, I started having some regrets. Emily: One idea I have is we can go to the police! Or your parents! Ali: I meant to brainwash your heart back to season one levels of Emilyness, not your brain. The police and my parents all murdered me, so no. We can’t do that. But you can help me. You alone.When Spencer reveals herself, Emily’s face looks like murder. It’s intense. Scary intense. Emily has never looked so terrifying. She says Ali will never trust her again, never reach out to her again, never say she’s her favorite again. She’s shaking with rage about losing Ali (a little bit) and losing her status with Ali (a lot bit).Emily: How? I’ll do it. I’ll do anything you say. Ali: Have you ever seen one of those NatGeo documentaries about how lions won’t attack packs of zebras, so they circle and circle until one zebra gets isolated from its family and then the lion attacks? Emily: You want me to be your Lion Queen? Ali: No. Emily: You want me to be one of those hyenas who can’t wait for you to be King and shivers whenever anyone says your name? Ali: No. Spencer, in the shadows: CLANG A LANG CLING CLONG BING BONG BANG! Ali: You betrayed me! You invited someone else to our secret lovers meeting! Emily: Wait, no! Don’t go! Come back! Do you want me to be the zebra? The lone zebra? The cut-wide-open, bleeding, broken, dying zebra? Ali? Is that what you want? I’ll be the zebra! Please don’t go! Ali: [Goes.]
Spencer goes, “Honey, listen to me. Alison’s gift – and you know this, OK? You know this in your soul – is sowing seeds of enmity and discord among us. She takes our secrets and twists them and pantomimes them back to us like freakish shadow puppets, daring us to turn on the lights. She makes us afraid of each other, makes us feel like we can’t trust each other, makes us feel like she’s our only path to salvation. Right? Ems, look at me. Look at my face right now. I am telling you something you already know. She loved you, OK? In her own way, she loved you. Probably more than she loved anyone else because you are golden on the inside. Losing her was the worst thing that has ever happened to you, I know that. But we both know it was the best thing too. Do you want to be her secret again? Kissing her in the dark only to have her shame you for it when the lights come back on? Or do you want to love with all of your remarkable goodness, in the sunlight, where the world can see it? The way you loved Maya? The way you love Paige? The way you love us? Me, you, Aria, Hanna: we are stronger together than we ever were apart. We love you and you love us. We’re in this together, Emily. Don’t let her do this to you again.”
I think this Emily storyline is brilliant for a zillion reasons, one of which is that it’s soul-punchingly real to me. Just as a lesbian teenager who was in love with a straight girl who loved everything about the way I loved her, this resonates on a bruising level. I’m looking at Ali and tilting my head back and forth and wondering where the bullshit stops and the truth of her starts and which things that we’ve seen about her over the years – through memories or flashbacks or journal entries or dreams – have been real. Which ones can be trusted. There’s a danger in believing anything we’ve been told about Ali because the narrators of her presence have always been unreliable. Drugged up or asleep or poisoned or suffering severe trauma from their Ali interactions. And anyway, memories aren’t like watching movies. They’re like watching live theater productions of the last time you remembered the thing you’re remembering now. It’s why doctors are treating PTSD with ecstasy these days.
I think the sample size of Ali canon (real or remembered) means we can say some things for absolute sure: Ali and the Liars were in danger and she knew they were in danger. She was plotting an escape from it, one way or another. She engaged in relationships the way dictators or cult leaders engage in relationships, surrounding herself with people she could coerce into loyalty with a potent mix of affection, apathy, derision, and white-hot fear. The people she could not coax into following her (or the people who couldn’t offer her anything), she wanted them out of the picture, something she achieved with ridicule, slander, and fireworks to the face. She hoarded everyone else’s secrets as a means of control but dispersed her secrets sparingly among people up and down the eastern seaboard, doling them out like shiny rewards for good behavior. She understood the dark, gross things about life in the real world that the Liars either didn’t understand or wouldn’t acknowledge, so at least some of her interactions with them served the purpose of molding them into survivors. In a lot of ways, it almost seems like Ali was trying to make the Liars into soldiers. Which seems noble, kind of. But it also seems like she was making them into soldiers for her own personal army, which seems … slightly less altruistic.
Ali’s main gift was making every person she met feel like they had a singular connection with her. Like she got them and they got her on a wavelength no one else could occupy. It’s no surprise that Emily-the-budding-lesbian interpreted that connection romantically, just like it’s no surprise that Ali found a way to work it to her advantage when she realized it was a thing.
Is Ali in love with Emily? I’d say no. Just based on everything we actually know about her, I’d say no. Is Emily in love with Ali? At least a little bit she is, and always will be, I’d guess. I’m sure Ali is sorry for fucking her over like she did. I’m sure all the cold nights she spent living under Jason’s porch or in that Cicero college murder room or sharing bunk beds with Maya up at Noel Kahn’s Truth or Dare cabin, I’ll bet she wished she could be in Emily’s warm bed while Emily fussed over her and made her hot chocolate and played with her hair and loaded up her iPod with new music. I’ll bet she wished for that real hard. And I’ll also bet she actually is scared for her life and actually does want to come home. But she’s doing it in the most Ali way possible: Making Emily a minion and grasping at the power structure that once made her such a formidable queen bee.
The world isn’t divided into good people and Death Eaters, right? Harry did some questionable stuff and Draco had a soul. It’s not Potters on one side and Malfoys on the other. That’s too easy. It’s lazy. I mean, Team McCullers, obviously. Team McCullers forever. But Mona Almighty, this Ali/Emily thing is valid. Also, it’s better than so many of the inane queer storylines on TV right now precisely because it’s so murky. I want to work for my satisfying stories, man. I’m not dumb. Don’t try to hashtag me into some kind of black-and-white shipper war.
ANYWAY. Emily is pissed and Spencer is scared and Hanna feels a little bit better after smashing those plates so she calls Caleb and leaves a beautiful closure message, and Ezra and Aria enjoy a delicious brownie while Jake slices open his foot on his heavy bag at Mojo Dojo because Ezra stashed some literal knives in that thing. It’s one of my favorite #BooRadleyVanCullen shout outs ever. All these years we’ve been going, “Ugh. Ezra. With the peaceful life and the cakes cakes cakes.” And the show smirks and goes, “Yep, here he is with a cake. AND HERE JAKE IS GETTING CHOPPED TO BITS AT THE SAME TIME BY EZRA’S HAND. History: rewritten. Now what?” Love, love, love.
The Risen Mitten pulls a copy of The Tempest out of somebody’s locker. Hanna’s maybe; Ezra found the play in her purse last week when he was ransacking her room. There’s a picture of Ali and Shana as little kids inside the book, so the Risen Mitten goes ahead and rips that in half and lights Shana on fire. Please, please, please let her be playing “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” on her fiddle when she gets finally gets attacked. “I said, ‘My name’s Shana, and it might be a sin, but I’ll take your bet, you son-of-a-bitch, ’cause I’m the best there’s ever been.'”
My mostest bestest thanks as always to my screencapping partner Maggie, who is jonesing for that Paily love scene more than anyone I know. You can download all her screencaps here. And follow her on Twitter here.
