Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 2 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT A Broken Bone
By Jacob Clifton | Season 3 | Episode 1 | Aired on 06.05.2012
Hanna: "-- Mona. Whenever Mona would wear them."
Spencer: "Uh, sure. So then over here there was a burlap zombie baby, like on Halloween..."
Emily: "So all summer you've been assembling this three-dimensional Matrix of Mona's Lair -- while also taking a full load at Hollis -- for what reason? To what end?"
Spencer: "It's time we told Emily the truth."
Whoa, what?
Emily: "Whoa, what?"
Hanna: "You know how we came back here the morning after Maya died, to ruin the crime scene for no reason?"
Aria: "That's not the whole story. We totally lied to your face so you wouldn't go even more crazy than you ended up going."
Emily: "Fuckin'..."
Spencer: "Everything was gone when we got here. Diaries, the whole thing."
Emily: "That would be the cops."
Aria: "Hanna's mom would be in jail, Ezra would be in jail... I would probably still be wearing overalls. It was not the cops."
Spencer: "You know how you got that creepy massage at the exact same time Mona was ruining Hanna's relationship with her stepsister? Or how even adrenalized hyperstrength couldn't have gotten Ian out of the bell tower that time? Or how Mona said about fifteen times over the course of the finale that she wasn't working alone, and I didn't ever hear her say that because I was too busy trying to make logical sense of this show?"
Aria: "So somebody was helping her?"
Spencer: "Why did the Black Swan run from you guys if she wasn't up to something?"
Outside, the alarm goes off on Spencer's car: All the doors are hanging open, and the inside is covered in pictures of the Liars at Alison's grave That Night. Like a billion pictures. What is it with Rosewood and getting caught with a shovel? Why is this as scary as the time they blew up and blinded a girl? How does that function? I don't care, because it is awesome and then even more so, as everybody gets a text at the same time:
"Mona played with dolls, I play with body parts. Game on, Bitches. -- A"
NEXT WEEK
The game gets kicked up a notch; the New A finally comes after Aria; Emily unspools the next in what's sure to be a very unhelpful trail of banal memories about like doorknobs or a yo-yo that exists somewhere in the universe; Jenna's back in town; Hanna gets her Clarice on.
JACOB CLIFTON is a freelance writer and critic based in Austin, Texas. He currently recaps Pretty Little Liars and True Blood for TWoP. Jacob can be found online at jacobclifton.com, on Twitter, and on Facebook. IRL work appears in BenBella's SmartPop series of anthologies, most recently A Friday Night Lights Companion and Fringe Science.