Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 3 USERS: A YOU GRADE IT You Start Missing Everybody
By Jacob Clifton | Season 3 | Episode 23 | Aired on 03.12.2013
Emily: "Good God I love you, Hanna Marin. Now help me unzip this unmarked bodybag."
While Redcoat haunts Aria for a second, spots Aria and runs away again, the Liars inside make a horrifying discovery: The dead hiker is not Toby, but a rando, and then on top of that, he's wearing one of the Alison masks! Which suggests the question, did Redcoat come in here, do this nonsense, leave just long enough for the Liars to show up, and then turn around and come back, spot Aria lurking, and then run away again? Or, as I've been theorizing for a while, is Redcoat possibly a different faction or group altogether from the classic A-Team, who perhaps was coming in here for other reasons than either them or the Liars? I hope we'll understand more about this whole thing next week. It's fascinating.
RADLEY
Spencer is reading Nine Stories, and later on will have asked for Franny & Zooey, which is like the opposite way you should do that, but maybe she's reading them for the first time. At first I thought this was because of "Uncle Wiggily In Connecticut" -- where the mother freaks out that her daughter is sleeping in such a way as to make room for her imaginary friend, like Veronica is doing -- and then I spent a lot of time wondering about the other stories, because this episode has so much literary allusion in it, but then I actually got a little choked up when I realized what's really going on because it's simpler than that, and way more complicated too:
Salinger was Toby's favorite author. He became the language of their love. Nobody on this show, least of all Spencer, has ever been able to draw the line between "mourning" and "searching for meaning" -- this show could be subtitled Stage Three: Bargaining For Dummies -- but with Toby she's actually just straight up conflating them: Whether or not Toby is dead, he's dead. Whether or not there's meaning in their story, she's going to find meaning in his story. Whether she's reading his favorite author because she misses him or because she's searching for clues to his mindset from beyond the grave, this is how she loved him, so this is how she misses him. Don't ever tell anybody anything.
Spencer: "So you randomly gave me Mona's favorite game yesterday?"
Eddie Lamb: "Did I? Huh. Well, I played it with her, sure. We do that here, a lot."
Spencer: "Wren said she was like obsessed with it."
Eddie Lamb: "Well, he'd know."