Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 57 USERS: A YOU GRADE IT I Have Hot Ice Cubes In My Head
By Jacob Clifton | Season 4 | Episode 18 | Aired on 02.04.2014
Liars: "We are collectively worried about Alison."Spencer: "Which I fucked up, and I'm sorry. But that was before drugs."
24 HOUR PARTY HASTINGS
An amazing sequence of Spencer googling the shit out of some stuff and taking pills and drinking bottled water and bouncing off the walls and putting together the clues and figuring out what it all means. It goes on for a really long time, not in a bad way -- it's luxurious, and "Sail" is playing, which is funny because this same thing happened on The Good Wife, the song plus the Study Aids, although here there's the added punch of the "maybe it's my ADD" line -- and by the end, when she's hit the bottom of Andrew's bottle, the sun is out.
I think we're meant to understand that Spencer's been treated for ADD in the past, given a school file we see later, but how it plays out is that we're treated to multiple instances of drug-seeking behavior and I never really put together how she was rolling. Like she calls the doctor, impersonating her mother, and then later on she buys street Study Aid, but then claims after that that she's going to the pharmacy, but she doesn't go to the pharmacy. I don't know. Girl, get your ass together. If it's not making you better it's making you worse.
Which I guess is the beautiful point of all this: Her fierce desire to solve this problem by gerrymandering around Aria's feelings, to protect her even from the fact that she's protecting her, is what is driving her. She -- this is so Spencer -- has looked into the mirror of her (negligible) limitations and says, "As long as I don't die, this is the time to go all the way." For all the marbles, as they say: Turn yourself into Mona because it's actually important, deadly important, and because it comes from love instead of just anger or competition, you can't even really talk her down from it.
BETTER LOVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY
Aria: "What? Somebody broke into your cabin? How scary! For you."
Ezra: "I'm not worried about it. They didn't find my evil Lair, so..."
Aria: "Well, that's good that you're not interested in looking into it or anything. Almost like your complacency is a response to knowing good goddamn well who was there."
Ezra: "Actually it's just a pretext to get you up there for the weekend so you can't talk to Spencer."