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“Pretty Little Liars” recap (4.20): The Chamber of Secrets has been opened!

Forgive the brevity of this week’s recap, you guys; I’ll be back to full speed next week.

Previously on Pretty Little Liars, Spencer’s Adderall bender climaxed into a glorious noir film in which she worked out that: she thinks Ezra Fitz is a skeeze in league with Mona; she wishes Toby would sometimes play the Spencer role in their relationship; lesbians do have more fun in the sack, and some girls never grow out of wanting to climb trees; Ali is a child-woman beast, but definitely a magical one; and the pages of Ali’s diary – which they discovered pre-hallucination- have been changed enough to matter in a code-breaking way. (Ezra doesn’t know they know he knows.)

Spencer wakes up in Mr. Fitz’s classroom in the wee hours of the morning, assuming she blacked out and drove there. Spencer Hastings doesn’t always sleepwalk, but when she does, she heads straight for an institute of higher learning. Ezra finds her there, all, “Hey, wake up. You definitely got here because you’re a junkie and not because I drugged you and dragged you from your bed and planted you here.” She runs away from him while he calls after her about how it’s time to stop playing this game and ‘fess up and he can help here and, here, have a lollipop, little girl.

A normal person goes home, sleeps it off, tries again tomorrow. A semi-normal but slightly unhinged person takes a quick shower in the locker room and a quick nap in her car and makes it a half day. But Spencer Hastings, she just zooms through the school collecting a variety of items out of different lost and found boxes and cobbling together an outfit that makes her look 100 percent homeless. Hanna, the only person who seems to care that Spencer is warping down a rabbit hole at death-defying speeds, calls her out on dressing like a hobo, and not in a sexy computer-hacker hobo way. Emily legit goes, “Did you have … an accident?” in the most Aria way possible. I mean, Spencer shows up looking like that after all this time, you assume she dragged herself out of a dumpster after being clubbed over the head, water boarded while forced to listen to “It’s a Small World” on repeat, locked in a cage with some hyenas, and then tossed from an airplane with no parachute. Accident my eye. There are no accidents in Rosewood, Pennsylvania.

It makes you appreciate Mona even more, doesn’t it, looking at Spencer looking like this after just one week of trying to simulate Adrenalized Hyperreality with pills. That girl was accomplishing ten, maybe twenty times more mayhem than Spencer is right now, daily, and always looking fierce.

Anyway, the Liars argue about whether or not they should tell Aria that Ezra is A. Like, OK, yeah, he has a proven pattern of pedophilia and murdering teenage girls, but they don’t want to, like, hurt Aria’s feelings.

Good god. All y’all are acting like Arias this morning. Snap out of it.

So Ezra sidles up to Aria in the hallway and hands her Spencer’s permanent record file folder, which includes not only the reminder that she was once a patient at Radley Institute for the Criminally Insane, but also a new bit of old information about how this isn’t the first time she’s used performance enhancing drugs to her own detriment. Ezra goes, “Now, what I could do is take this file that I stole and begin an official, professional intervention, but that takes a long time and I need you to know right now that Spencer is addicted to Ritalin, a few side effects of which include: startling accusations, pathological lying, memory loss, black-and-white fugue states, rage against authority, things like that, so.” Aria takes the file and promises to follow up with Spencer on her own because maybe she’s ramped up on drugs, or maybe it’s just one of those days when the garbanzo beans(!) are out of place in her salad.

Toby shows up at Rosewood High with season one hair and a turkey sandwich to share with his lady, whom he loves even when she’s wearing the dessert-themed scrubs Hanna had in her locker for some reason. She eats for the first time in days. He looks like he did when he chased Emily through the chemistry classroom, smashing beakers and whatever. Dropping her off at the ER and speeding out of town. Oh, man. That’s the night Emily won that BEAUTIFUL TOYOTA, remember? I think she came out to Hanna in that episode too. Maya was alive back then. You could trust cars not to hijack you and drive you to your death. The good old days.

Toby smells Spencer’s hair and says he almost forgot her scent, and guess what, he did forget her scent, because I’ll bet Spencer usually smells like lilies from Queen Victoria’s own personal garden instead of what she smells like right now which is Orange Is the New Black. They make plans to have a date night and Spencer says, “I wouldn’t miss it for the world!”

In the courtyard, Hanna is eyeballing Emily’s string cheese and Emily is slapping her hand away because she’s hungry and Hanna is like, “But, look at my face!” And Emily is like, “Oh, fine. Take it.” Aria sneaks up and drops this bomb onto Hanna and Emily: “So, like, Spencer is an addict. Two years ago, right around the time Alison went missing because of being murdered by this whole town simultaneously, Spencer was so drugged up that she was blacking out and having violent outbursts during fits of sleepwalking.” Hanna and Emily’s faces. How many interventions can they be expected to participate in at once.

This next scene is, I think, the best written/acted/directed/edited scene of the entire series. Spencer shows up at what she thinks is an intervention for Aria, but is actually an intervention for her. They tell her they know she’s got a pill problem, and all the ways she tries to explain that the real problem is Ezra and his love of sleeping with/axe-murdering little children, the more she sounds like a person with a pill problem. She realizes what is happening (that this isn’t about them saving Aria, but about them saving her) right at the time she realizes what is happening (that Ezra moved first and, in doing so, proved that he’s A by making her seem like she’s bonaners the more she accuses him of being A). She is positively unhinged with frustration and indignation and, frankly, a little bit of respect at his sinister brilliance.

The Liars are like, “Sweetheart, you need a time out.” And she’s like, “The last thing I need is a fucking time out.” And they’re like, “That’s exactly the kind of thing a person says when they for sure need a time out.” It is so amazing and so sad.

Mona is on a date with a sad-face Mike Montgomery, who very much wants her to say that she l-0-v-e-s him. But she doesn’t love him. She loves Hanna. She loves herself. She loves the chaos of a city-sized chess game played with human pieces. Ezra shows up to ask for a favor and she tells him to scram, but politely; you get the feeling even Mona is scared of him, which is more than enough proof at this point for me to call him a monster.

Back at Spencer’s, Hanna and Emily are just chomping on some pizza, marveling at how tits up their friends’ lives are, when Spencer comes downstairs and thrusts a little pouch of pills at them, all, “OK, fine, I am addicted to hyperreality, but the truth of that doesn’t negate the truth of Ezra being a frikkin psychopath, so do you want to hear my plan about entrapping him at the zoo or not?” Zoo? Zoo? There is a zoo? I don’t know how that place has not yet come into play, but gods yes, we want to hear your zoo plan, Hastings. The plan is: Ali needs the money from the sack of coffee, so they’ll set up Ezra by making him think they’re delivering the coffee-money to this marvelous new zoo and when he show up, she’ll go into rehab and they’ll know she’s an addict but one who always comes correct. Hanna and Emily are so in. The zoo. What could possibly go wrong there that couldn’t go wrong at a barn in the night? (Spoiler alert: It’s snakes.)

Veronica Hastings is back from Out of Town lookin’ supafly in her tennis gear. She wants Spencer to join her down at the club where Spencer once dirty danced with a cook/tennis instructor who dumped her when he realized she wanted him to go to tennis camp. The nerve. Spencer blows off Veronica by name-checking Toby and then blows off Toby by name-checking Veronica and then puts a blonde wig in her purse and heads on down to the zoo.

Aria runs her tattling tail over to Ezra’s apartment to talk about how her intervention with Spencer was a bust, and he’s like, “But how much of a bust? Did she drum up any cuckoo accusations about anyone in particular to prove that she is need to be institutionalized?” Aria almost says yes, but then checks herself because Ezra has got that eerie glow around him like the night he asked her to drive two hours for a can of chickpeas. She says, “Spencer was just acting generically nuts, but I want to leave it at that.” He pushes and pushes about how he’s going to have to intervene and talk to the Hastings’ and the school and maybe even intercept that UPenn application Cece Drake sent in on Spencer’s behalf from the mailbox at Noel Kahn’s murder cabin. He says you can’t really be too cautious when you’re talking about a girl who ended up at Radley because she one time saw her boyfriend’s commemorative “no more incest” tattoo on a dead body in the woods. I mean, she didn’t even check to see if it was his face under that motorcycle helmet!

Aria goes, “Yeah, when you put it like … hang on. How did you know that very specific thing I absolutely never told you?”

Ezra goes to the Rear Window Brew to enjoy a delicious cup of coffee and write in his diary about how rewarding it is to have finally destroyed Spencer Hastings. Emily serves him and drops a whole crate of dishes on the ground, all, “Mercy, what a klutz I am! Oh, but my phone is ringing!” On the other end of the phone are Hanna and Spencer, watching her through some binoculars and telling her what to say to lure Mr. Fitz to the zoo. Say you’re delivering a coffee satchel full of cash to the reptile house at 7pm. Say it’s for Ali. Say you can’t say what you’re saying. Say, Spencer, do you think me and Emily will have time to visit the sea otter exhibit? And maybe the giraffes? And can we share a cotton candy, do you think? No, Emily, don’t say that.

Ezra’s attention is fully piqued.

While Spencer tries very hard to not be addicted to drugs, before giving in and calling in her own prescription to the doctor’s office and to Academic Andrew’s Black Market Pharmacy, Aria tries very hard not to give in to getting herself killed, before driving her ass up to Ezra’s cabin to snoop around. He has installed a new password-protected security system and after she tries the last name of every prestigious author in the world, she tries Ezra’s own name, and then B-26. Which is correct. Which is fantastic.

You remember that poem he wrote for her, don’t you, called B26? He gave it to her in that glamping episode I was talking about earlier and it refers to the song that was playing on the jukebox the first time they met and also says, I swear to god, “It’s a number / It’s a song / It’s a / girl / Smooth / Pearl joy packed / Gold falafel.” Gold falafel! Chickpeas, you sneaky bastards!

Aria digs around in Ezra’s cabin for a while, comes up with nothing, even down in his lair, which he has apparently emptied of corpses, surveillance equipment, and canned legumes. But she doesn’t give up because she’s got a sneaking suspicion Spencer is correct and she wants to be on this show with her friends now. Her perseverance is rewarded when she opens up a copy of a book called “Carnivore’s Secrets” and finds a manuscript Ezra has been writing about Ali. He even voiceovers it: “The first thing Alison ever told me about herself was a lie. Lying was her oxygen. She could do it while she was laughing. She could even do it when she was kissing you.”

If that don’t give you some fucking heebijeebies in your soul, I don’t even know.

Ezra gets an alert on his phone that someone has broken into his cabin again, so he goes zooming up there and when Aria hears him pull up, she hurls herself out of a window and runs through the woods praying to sweet Vanderjesus above that Emily will show up like she did for Paige that time and Cousin Nate her boyfriend right in the gut. It’s actually terrifying. She’s hiding and shivering and trying not to cry out while he shouts like a hide and seek game about, “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” He calls her and she panics to put her phone on silent and the whole time this is happening, ABC Family is taking a Twitter poll about whether or not they are True Love.

OK, but that’s not even the best part. The best part is Aria runs so far and so fast that she happens upon a ski lodge and a ski lift which she jumps into for reasons I will literally never understand, and once she is up up up in the air, she realizes Ezra is buckled into the seat beside her. Hahaha. What in God’s name. This show is everything to me. Everything.

They have this conversation:

Aria: You murdered Alison and now you are going to murder me, you absolute motherfucker! Ezra: No, you’ve got me all wrong. I am a teenagefucker. And I’m not a murderer. Aria: You did or did not sleep with Alison DiLaurentis when she was the age of 15? Ezra: Accidentally! But I slept with you when you were 16 on purpose! Because I am a reporter! Aria: Is that code for child molester? Ezra: No, see. Yes, Ali lied about her age and I believed her and slept with her, so after she died, I was like, “How weird was that bitch?” and I decided to write a quote true crime story about her.

Aria: You knew exactly who I was the day I came into that bar in the pilot episode. Ezra: Yes, Suzy Clueless, I knew. Aria: You knew I was going to be a high school junior and you were going to be my English teacher and you’d fucked my then-dead underage best friend so you thought you’d fuck me too, for information for this true crime book of yours? Ezra: But I fell in love with you! That part is for real! It’s why I’ve been stalking and recording you and your friends during every moment of every day for the last two years! I mean, that and my true crime book. Aria: You were like a three on the creep factor, in my mind, and like an eleven in Spencer’s, but this? This shit right here is off the charts. ABC Family: Hashtag YouDownWithOTP?

Ezra tries to get back the manuscript that solves Ali’s not-murder but also implicates him in at least 75 felonies, but Aria tells him to die in a lodge fire because she is going to read that shit cover-to-cover – aaaaand then she promptly drops it from the sky and the pages fall everywhere. On Twitter the other night someone called that a classic Hufflepuff move and I laughed so hard, like only a true Hufflepuff can. (This morning I locked myself outside onto the snow covered streets wearing pajama pants, a t-shirt, no bra, two socks, and one shoe. I know me some classic Hufflepuff moves.)

I’ve been a little nervous that the writers were going to try to walk back this Ezra-as-a-baddie thing, but after that, there’s just no way they can. I mean, no, maybe he’s not A, but he is a grown man who knowingly seduced an underage girl to begin his surveillance program on her and her friends to find out the truth about what happened to a whole different underage girl, whom he also seduced. Yeeesh.

I wonder what’s going on over at the Ambrose Pavilion snake house. Oh, of course: It’s exploding. Hanna absolutely did not want to go in there, but Emily coerced her through her powers of shoulders persuasion.

They mill around in there for a while, getting their faces real close to the glass at one point and getting rewarded with a terrifying attack because: camouflage. The whole time they’re peeping on Spencer dressed as Ali, and when she gives them the signal they’re supposed to drop off the money and she’ll pick it up and Ezra will show up and kill her and then she’ll have proof that he’s A. These girls are never going to learn about exit strategies, huh?

OK, except they’re not watching Spencer dressed as Ali. They’re watching Mona dressed as Spencer dressed as Ali because Ezra was already onto their game. So when Spencer shows up, they’re like, “… the shit?” and not just because of her wig.

Her amazing, amazing wig.

My stars, that wig.

Well, as soon as they realize they’ve been set up, the snakes start smashing out of the glass and the lights start flickering and the educational announcements go haywire and there’s fog and it’s a mess. The zookeeper, hilariously, finds them running around in circles begging to stay alive and tells them it’s closing time; they have to go. No comment whatsoever about the building coming to life.

(I miss Cece.)

Mona comes in late for her date with Mike and then Aria shows up looking like a person who just hurled herself from a ski lift and ran home barefoot without even trying to collect the pages of Ezra’s book from their place on the forest floor. She smashes things. It’s kind of awesome.

And in Spencer’s kitchen she is confronted once by Toby, who is very disappointed that she missed out on their romantic dinner, since he himself has never ruined a romantic dinner by lying; and also by Veronica, who says, “This shit again, for real? We’re not covering for you if you start blanking and doing attack-y stuff you don’t remember, like what happened right around the time Ali was murdered.”

The Risen Mitten collects Ezra’s novel and stashes it in the folder with Toby’s therapy papers he/she one time recovered from the sea.

An enormous thank you, as always, to my screencapping partner Maggie (@margaretrosey), without whom I would be lost.

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