Previously on Pretty Little Liars, Alison went to trial for murdering Mona Vanderwaal and Hanna went to jail for murdering Mona Vanderwaal and Rosewood’s own prosecutor named the Liars as co-conspirators in the fake kidnapping of Alison DiLaurentis which lead to the murder of Mona Vandwerwaal, but nobody thought to say that it’s impossible for any of these people to be guilty of murdering Mona Vandwrwaal because Mona Vanderwaal can’t die. I will never believe Mona Vanderwaal is dead. I saw the body in that car trunk and I don’t believe it. I went to her funeral and wore a lei and saw Mona’s mom punch a child in the face and I don’t believe it. I saw the video and I saw the barrel and I even saw Mona’s glamrock Christmas ghost, and I don’t believe it.

The story of Perd Hapley covering the Alison DiLaurentis trial is that he’s the news anchor covering the trial. He calls on special correspondent Sara Shepard, who has “been with this case from the beginning” (ha!) and asks if Allison is going down, down, down. The story of that situation is that it’s extremely personal and only the business of Emily Fields. The main thing Sara Shepard tells us is that the prosecution is calling a surprise witness today and it’s got everybody shaking in their boots.

And that witness is bespectacled ginger-haired Vanderloper Leslie Stone, who came to town after (not for) Mona’s funeral claiming to be her best friend and confidante, a thing that had Mike and Hanna’s hackles in quite a knot. Leslie chronicles the things Mona said Ali said to her, including, “If you jibber-jabber the truth to Tanner about my fake kidnapping, I will feed you to some worms.” Lawyer Julie thinks this is hearsay, but the prosecutor produces a greeting card Mona sent to Leslie reiterating the worm thing. A greeting card! “Happy birthday, Leslie! I wish I could share ice cream and cupcakes with you today, but as you’ll remember from our previous phone conversation, I have lost my appetite ever since Alison DiLaurentis threatened to feed me to some worms if I tell the police the truth about how she staged her own abduction. Hope you get a lot of good presents! Love, Mona.” The judge says the greeting card is awesome/admissible.

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Well, and then Leslie launches this invective about how the Liars stalked her all around town when she came to visit after (not for) Mona’s funeral. They wouldn’t let her rummage around in Mona’s room unattended. They wouldn’t let her pop all the heads off of Mona’s dolls and shine a flashlight down into their doll guts to look for … things. They wouldn’t let her play Mona’s records backwards. They wouldn’t let her steal Mona’s books. They wouldn’t let her try on Mona’s clothes and rifle through her old coat pockets, or spend just a few minutes poking around on her laptop, or even let her flashback without Hanna standing there watching.

Spencer runs out of the courtroom like a maniac to call Caleb for some reason, but she bumps into Officer Toby on the stairs and they feel weird about how Spencer keeps making out with everyone who is not him and he keeps not telling her top secret police business. He wants to know how the Oxford interview went. She wants to know why he didn’t fucking call her the second he found out Tanner had an arrest warrant for Hanna. He wants to know if she’s still thinking about going to college in Hawaii. She wants to know what/who the goddamn hell was in that barrel in Hanna’s storage locker that Tanner confiscated. Spencer barely even has a chance to explain that she had to ride a dolphin across the Atlantic Ocean because her purse came to life and started bleeding all over a thousand-year-old chair and she was scared to get on a plane, because Emily comes clomping down the steps hollering about how barracudas have duller teeth than Leslie and they need to get Hanna on the phone stat.

There are always a couple of really standout episodes of PLL during every mini-season, but usually the one right before each mini-season finale is the most fun and exciting because that’s when all the chess pieces that have been moving around all season finally click into place at a frenetic pace. This next scene right here is the tops.

Alison is on a payphone at one end of the jail and Hanna is on a payphone at the other end of the jail and they’re conferencing in with the Liars at Spencer’s house to talk about Leslie.

Ali: Who the fuck is Leslie Stone? Did she enroll at Rosewood High when I was dead or something?

Hanna: Yeah, and where does she get off saying I stalked her? All I did was not let her ransack my dead girlfriend’s bedroom. Emily gets it.

Ali: Whatever, what’s up with the “Varjak trail”?

Aria: Well, he definitely ordered some pizza.

Ali: Let Spencer talk.

Spencer: We texted him and he called Aria back and played Edith Piaf so we broke into Mona’s bedroom because that’s where she and Hanna used to have sex to the soundtrack of Edith Piaf and hidden inside a broken mirror we found a notecard with clues on it but we haven’t cracked them yet because we can’t find a decoder parrot.

Ali: Damn. Listen, I still don’t have a solid alibi because I didn’t see anyone when I was hanging out at that busted park by myself for ten hours waiting for Cyrus the day Mona was killed, but someone may have seen me and she probably owns a jacket with flowers on it.

The phone goes dead. In jail, Hanna and Ali glare at each other. And in Spencer’s living room, the Liars furrow their brows and wonder where in the world they’re going to find a girl who owns a jacket with flowers on it.

Aria is very freaked out for Mike because of how Leslie Stone named him in court today as one of the people who would not let her have all of Mona’s possessions and/or move into Mona’s bedroom after Mona died, but Mike says it’s about time for him to tell the truth to a court of law anyway.

Aria does not want Mike to take the stand, and her point about the imminent danger of doing such a thing is proven when he lugs a FedEx box in the front door in a minute and there’s a giant fucking blue whale tongue in there. Even Mike can barely lift the — dripping (gag!) — tongue out of the box and his whole body is just pecs. Aria and Mike manage to shove the tongue back into the box and cover it up before Ella comes bebopping into the room to tell them dinner is ready. (Only a dismembered mouth part from a sea beast could eclipse Ella Montgomery making a glorious entrance back into our lives.) Aria tells Mike it’s a warning from A and if he talks, it’ll be his tongue getting mailed around the world next.

Down at the precinct, Toby gets pissy with Tanner when she asks him to make a Starbucks run. He says he went through the “academy” the same as everyone else. He does not know why Tanner is freezing him out just because he is the boyfriend of the Spencer who was arrested for murdering Bethany who was buried in the grave of Alison who faked her own death and is now on trial for killing Mona who was forced to check into a sanitarium for emotionally torturing Spencer who also spent time in the same sanitarium after Toby faked his death to go to work for Mona during the time when she found the dead body of Darren Wilden who was murdered by Cece Drake who looks exactly like Alison and Hanna and Bethany who all look like the girl murdering Mona on that video. Tanner stares at him without blinking for ten full seconds before telling him to just go get the goddamn coffee.

Before this show is over, I want to see Tanner have a conversation with Cece Drake. About literally anything. Doesn’t have to be about how she killed a police officer. Could be about purses. Cat care. Eyeliner. Camping. Wine. The Voice. Just anything. I want to see them interact one enchanted time. It’ll be like the opposite of those Cute Overload pictures where the zebras nurse the baby lions.

Every day is laundry day at jail, and Hanna waits patiently in line while Alison hands out clean jumpsuits to everyone. When it’s Hanna’s turn, they have a covert conversation about the anagrams from Mona’s mirror. They exchange notes and agree to meet back at laundry duty tomorrow night to see if either of them have cracked Mona’s code. Pretty sure both of y’all already cracked Mona’s code (for something gay).

The next day, Aria rushes to Ezra’s bookstore and finds him out back fixing the transmission in his windowless white van. She asks him to please take Mike for “a long drive up to his cabin”* because surely the three years of “research”** he did on the Liars makes him understand how dangerous everything is for Mike right now.

And Ezra’s all about how Aria is in danger and he can’t believe there’s cow parts involved and he wishes Ella was the one who had opened that box because this is so scary the only person who can help them is the police. CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS MOTHERFUCKER? CAN YOU BELIEVE HIM? He watched Aria and her friends get tortured eleven ways to Sunday FOR YEARS and never went to the police and never even intervened to keep them from getting axe-murdered even one of the times they were axe-murdered, and it’s not even like it’s the first time dead cow pieces have been involved. Mona got that brain in her locker like sophomore year! But now everyone’s in danger and now everyone needs to go to the police and now he’s not sure he wants to break the law. It’s about ethics in true crime reporting, I guess.

Anyway, after he consults his newly acquired conscience for an hour, he decides he will help Aria.

Emily and Spencer decide to launch their worldwide investigation into That One Girl Who Wears a Jacket With Flowers at the shady park where Ali says she was on Thanksgiving. They do not find anyone wearing jackets. Or coats. Or parkas. Or tunics. But they do find some church kids cleaning up the park garbage. This place has been a real mess since Johnny stopped coming here to get his painting supplies. The church kids say they haven’t seen any girls around wearing jackets, but they say they’ll keep a lookout for such an odd sight.

They take their investigation over to Rosewood High school and it is their lucky day! There is a girl at the water fountain who is both wearing a church jacket and carrying a backpack with a flower jacket half-stuffed into it! Spencer is ready to knock the girl out and drug her with truth serum to save time, but Emily intervenes and says she’ll handle it.

Emily: Hello, there! I am Emily Fields.

Jacket Girl: …?

Emily: Emily Fields.

Jacket Girl: …?

Emily: Emily Fields. As in … Emily Fields.

Jacket Girl: Do I know you?

Emily: Do you not know me?

Jacket Girl: I don’t think so?

Emily: Um, okay. Wow. Okay. But do you not suddenly feel, like, super gay and willing to do anything I ask so you can keep standing this close to my hair?

Jacket Girl: Are you the devil in disguise?

Emily: ARE YOU?

Spencer swoops in to try to save the situation, but she barely introduces herself before she starts asking the girl where she got her jacket and was she wearing it on Thanksgiving at the park when she was hiding in a tunnel spying on one of the hundred blonde-haired girls in this town. The jacket girl starts bawling and Ella runs out of her classroom to see what the hell, and isn’t surprised at all to find that it is Spencer making random students cry in the hallway for no reason. Ella tells Spencer and Emily to leave this poor girl alone, and the girl scrambles away with both of her jackets.

Yearbook photo time!

Andrew, appearing out of thin air: Hello, Aria.

Aria: Christ, dude!

Andrew: You smell like the inside of a windowless van. Have you been hanging out with Ezra?

Aria: Not that it’s any of your business, but I asked him to kidnap my brother.

Andrew: Excuse me, it’s common courtesy to ask your boyfriend to kidnap your brother.

Aria: I don’t have a boyfriend?

Andrew: Then you ask the last person you kissed. I am the last person you kissed, am I not? AM I NOT?

Caleb goes to jail to visit Hanna. All he wants to talk about is the murder trial and the law and Mike Montgomery and blah blah whatever will get Hanna out of prison. But she does not want to talk about that because she only gets to see Caleb for a couple of minutes every week and she wants him to describe, in detail, the new flavors over at Lucky Leon’s Cupcakes. She also wants him to back off of Mike because he deserves to live, and Caleb is like, “We all deserve to live! And I am saying that as a person who has maybe died like 15 times since the Civil War!”

At home that night, Aria accosts Ella about how she’s keeping secrets about the girl with the jacket whose name is Kendra (which is the name of the character Bianca Lawson played on Buffy and so therefore Maya is A), but Ella says not everything is Aria’s business, including the fact that Kendra got stoned on Thanksgiving and hid from Jesus in that tunnel in the park for the whole day and night, just wearing her flower jacket and eating Doritos and creeping on Ali D.

Back at the Hastings’, Spencer and Emily drink either tomato juice or marinara sauce and talk about why they can’t talk to Toby about Kendra. It is because Spencer has kissed literally every man who has come within a four-foot radius of her mouth these last few weeks, except for her brother. She calls it “dating” but even Emily is like, “Slow your roll, lezbo, kissing isn’t dating.” Emily does want details, though, because her own personal love life has been pretty quiet since all her girlfriends are in jail or California.

They don’t have time to get into it. Kendra shows up at the backdoor in her jacket

I think Ali is washing clothes for everyone in every jail in Pennsylvania. She has not stopped doing laundry since she arrived here. She’s like the cinderella of juvie, only she already made her fairy godmother wish and it was to be pulled from the ground where she’d been buried alive by her mother. She tries to talk to Hanna about Varjak during laundry duty, and about Kendra from the playground tunnel, but the guards here won’t even let Hanna and Alison look at each other, so they have to hurt themselves on purpose so they can chat in the infirmary. It’s the most Alison thing you’ve ever seen in your life. First she presses a hot iron against her own arm, and then she’s like, “Okay, and you smash your hand in the dryer” like she’s asking Hanna to pass the salt and pepper, and when Hanna can’t do it, Ali’s like, “Oh good lord” and smashes Hanna’s fingers in the dryer for her.

I made such a strangled yelp when that happened, and curled up in a reflexive ball on the couch. Times like these you remember it wasn’t Ali just flying her personal airplane around, sipping champagne and occasionally pulling people from burning buildings when she was dead. She’s hard in the broken places, like what Ernest Hemingway predicted about what happens when teenagers go to war.

Lawyer Julie cannot. She is annoyed af when Hanna and Ali get out of the infirmary, all patched up, talking about Kendra.

Lawyer Julie: Let me repeat back to you what you just said to me. Your main defense strategy is to put a drug addled teenager on the stand so she can tell the jury she saw you playing on the swingset in the park — where she lives, I guess — all day the day Mona was murdered because she was tripping balls and peeping out at you from a sewer drain like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.

Ali: Or you could subpoena that witch I told you about! She reads literal minds, Julie!

Hanna: We’re going to be in jail for the rest of our lives, huh?

Lawyer Julie: Yes.

Ali: Have you found my old parrot Tippi, yet? Have you found Pepe? Both of those guys can vouch for my innocence!

Hanna: I wish Mona were here. She’d get me out of this pickle.

Ali: I CAN DO WHAT MONA CAN DO.

Hanna: No. You can’t. No one can.

But Lawyer Julie goes to Spencer’s to talk to Kendra anyway. Kendra is all, “Yeah, I saw Alison DiLaurentis that day. She was wrapped in rainbows and sprinkled with cosmic things. She was math. She was swirling, rippling water, like a gentle, purple hurricane. And like I knew her, you know? Not from the news, but like deep within myself, I knew her. The sphere of her spirit orbited my consciousness and I saw her pain. She was me and we were both on that swing, not murdering Mona Vanderwaal.”

Lawyer Julie grabs a grapefruit from Spencer’s countertop and reckons she’s going to call Ali to the stand, after all.

After everyone is gone, Toby shows up and he is so mad. He says he took the job as a cop to make himself feel better about how he can’t protect Spencer and the way she repaid the way he was making her misery about him was to kiss everyone else. Look, I love you, Toby Cavanaugh, but you didn’t just meet Spencer, okay? You knew her arch-nemeses were the police when you became the police. You knew her favorite thing was breaking the law when you signed up to enforce the law. You can’t marry a fish and be mad at it when you drag it out of the water and realize its gills won’t breathe air. So anyway, Toby’s willing to give it all up for her. His whole entire career that has lasted three weeks and cost him fifty dollars, a haircut, and one afternoon at some kind of online academy. He’ll go back to being a millionaire teenage handyman, because he loves her enough to give up a thing he has never cared about doing. Toby, shut up and use your mouth for kissing.

So while all of this is going on, Ezra does end up kidnapping Mike, but when they shows up at Ezra’s cabin, Caleb is sitting there in the dark, pissed as hell. Because if Mike doesn’t testify that Mona is just another death-faker in this entire town full of Tom Sawyers, Hanna is going to be in jail forever, and she deserves it less than anyone. Even less than Emily. Ezra says that Mike — who is the same age Aria was when Ezra seduced and started dating her — is a child and cannot be expected to make grown-up decisions. Ezra and Caleb scream at each other for half an hour, and when they stop to catch their breath, they realize Mike has stolen Ezra’s car and skedaddled back to Rosewood.

Or, well, that was his plan, but on the way back down the mountain, someone shot an arrow through his windshield and chased him out into the woods and sprayed bear spray in his eyeballs and tethered him to a pole and beat him up. And then when Ezra and Caleb start running through the woods trying to find him, someone shoots a thousand arrows at them like Legolas up in here.

The finally find Mike tied up to that pole, and before they loose him and drive him home, they take a bunch of pictures of him as “proof.” Proof of what? I do not know.

And neither does Tanner. When the boys show up with the photos and their tale of a Hunger Games-style chase through the forest, Tanner is like, “Did you call the police in the precinct where this alleged ambush happened? No. Did you take your friend to a hospital for medical attention? No. You were running for your lives and worried your friend was close to death, but you stopped — and took a selfie?” Caleb and Ezra yell and stomp their feet and pull their hair and gnash their teeth and cannot believe the fucking audacity of these cops. How can Tanner not believe them!? They have PROOF.

One of the best things about this show is these slick little moments of deeply subversive commentary about like, “Look what happens when these guys are subjected to five minutes of what the women in their lives have been dealing with for five years?”

Also, the fact that Ezra Fitzgerald can go into a police station and throw a tantrum about how there’s no justice or accountability in the world is just the truest, grossest thing I have ever seen.

Alison’s trial.

Lawyer Julie: I am going to throw a grapefruit at your face; try to swat it away.

Grapefruit: [conks Ali in the head]

Lawyer: The defense rests, your honor.

Prosecutor: If you really can’t keep a piece of fruit from hitting you in the face, how did you win this … ARCHERY AWARD at sleepaway camp?

Jury: [gasps]

A-text: Bullseye, bitches!

While they’re waiting for the verdict, Lawyer Julie asks Ali about the archery award, and she says her bunkmate won it, really, but they cheated to make it seem like it was her. But guess who else is an ace archer? Andrew, who shows up at court where Aria’s best friend is on trial for murder to ask her to proofread some kind of college application. That, alone, is enough to make him completely undatable. And I’m not even factoring in the Vanderblasphemy when I say that. So on his college application, it says he was a woodland ranger, and since no one told Aria that Mike was nearly shot to death by a huntsmen last night, she doesn’t think that’s weird at all.

The jury deliberates for three minutes, and then they find Alison guilty of first degree murder. And for some reason, that’s Tanner’s cue to arrest just everybody. All the Liars, cuffed and booked and mugshotted.

The Risen Mitten carts his Liar dolls off to jail. It’s amazing. It’s the best non-Tippi A-tag in this show’s whole history.

Next week: Big A, bitches. No, for real. NO FOR REAL.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to Nicole (@PLLBigA) for the screencaps and all around general perfection.

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