Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Nukes & Cookies
By Jacob Clifton | Season 1 | Episode 14 | Aired on 01.24.2011
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Man, Lucy Hale is awesome. Just firing on all cylinders tonight, in another Buckley Dreamboat performance that's so dazzling it's almost enough to make you wish Aria Montgomery could find happiness.
...Almost.
Ella (hi!) brings in Aria's old babysitter -- now a famous New Yawk writer-lady and played by my beloved Alona Tal -- to demonstrate the possibility of a non-Rosewood existence, and hooks her up with Ezra in a way that manages to be slightly menacing. Of course all Aria can do is perseverate on this woman Simone and her age-appropriate wiles -- even though everywhere people are getting murdered and run over and A is still fucking up everybody's lives -- to the point where even Ezra has to roll his eyes.
Maya's phone has been reprogrammed, just like her mind -- oh, and FYI it turns out in a deleted scene that she had a history of drug use, which is why her hippy parents flipped so quick, if you were wondering -- but luckily Hanna has a heretofore unknown but strangely tense relationship with this bizarre slacker-hacker narc of the Quileute Tribe, and he's willing to adjust Emily's phone to get through the roadblocks. I don't know much technology, but it's all very hand-wavy and Zero Cool and leads to many excellent hacker conversations. Not so excellent is the convo with Maya, who is taking to her brand new cult like a duck to creepy, crazy water and sending Emily off the deep end.
Spencer's laptop with the Ian footage has gone missing, and only Ian could have taken it, so there's a lot of Thin Man, classic Spencer-stomping hardcore no-bullshit action for her. (Appropriately enough, Spencer is dressed like a thin man the entire time. Her outfits are getting to be like if Blair Waldorf's clothes had a baby with Scott Fitzgerald's clothes. It's so shocking and so very hot, but never fear: Aria's clothes still come out slightly ahead, with the usual brazen touches of mental illness.) She also crosses sneaky paths with Hanna's narc friend, so I guess he's here to stay. I just wish every boy on this show were played by Noel Kahn, and then we wouldn't have these problems. No: Every boy on every show. That would be pretty cool.
Everybody looks especially delightful this week -- even Ian, still doing his Sinister Julia Child routine -- which is nice because they're having a danceathon, like in Stars Hollow or the Dust Bowl days of olden times. It brings Ella and Byron together (she rocks their encounters hardcore, of course), but more importantly it's one of the most luxurious visuals I've ever seen on this show. You could watch this dance with nobody talking and still be getting your money's worth, so gorgeous is it. The lights, the projections, the music... It's how I've always wanted my birthday to look! But with way more molesters, obvs.
Not so nice for Hanna, anyhow, since she's having no luck finding a job at even the weirdest boutiques, and must rely on A's bizarre generosity one horrible soul-crushing task at a time. Next up: $200 a pop to dance with poor old stalker Lucas...
And that's when everything goes impressively bugshit.
Before you know it Emily's drunk as hell and bitching out Hanna for stringing Lucas along (like Ali did with her), bitching out Ian for killing everybody or whatever, Toby's unfair lo-jack, and stumbling around the place like a gorgeous zombie. Hanna's over here getting dumped by Sean and rescued by poor old sweet Lucas, who thinks this is a teen movie where she finally loves him, and not actually the disgusting prostitution that it is. Aria tries to eat Simone's face off and Spencer's stealing a dance with Ezra to keep Aria from embarrassing everybody, only to get pulled into dancing with Ian so he can threaten her with certain death if anybody finds out he molested her... I mean, it's intense. Annnd fabulous.
So back at Spencer's, Hanna agrees with Drunk Emily that she was acting horribly tonight --but doesn't explain about the cash money because we're not talking about Ashley's stealing thing -- and then finds Spencer's laptop randomly on the coffee table. Needless to say, the Ian video has been wiped... But there's a picture of Alison heading merrily to her death, with somebody following behind. And in the little thing at the end, and it's even creepier than normal, Ella smiles warmly at A as she hands over that leather jacket/gloves combo in coatcheck, because they totally know each other.
Next week: A finally detonates some landmines, leading to what looks like (but is probably in all fairness not) a full-on Girl War between the Liars.
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!But even that's not changing things, because she pulled this same shit at Homecoming and look how that turned out. "Do you bring me to these things just to ditch me? If you're trying to piss me off, it's working." And I have no doubt that Hanna could scramble and defeat this little snit-fit too, but then what do you know? Another A text, which she stalks off to read, leaving Sean shivering with virgin rage and total cuteness: Price just went up to $500, now that Hanna's in danger of calling it off to save her relationship. Gotta love A.
Spencer's having no luck with the keyring in Ian's office, so of course it's the perfect time for Caleb to appear like a wolf from the shadows and give her some grief about it. He offers a chainsaw to break in -- like that tree that disappeared! -- and to pick the lock for her if she wants, and she's like, "First, close that door and stop lurking, and second of all, there is literally no way I could possibly explain to you what's going on here. There are murders and incest and stress and secret identities and whatever, it's a moment I'm having." And then Caleb is once again fabulous:
"I don't live in a cave," he lies, because I think he does at least three days out of the month, "I get it: The rich girls steal, the pretty girls lie, the smart girls play dumb, and the dumb girls spend their days trying to be all of the above."
Which is just: Succinct. That is in fact what happens. And the reason is that, along with gay dudes, straight girls are the only people whose existence ruins the entire economy of men and women, which is why gay dudes and straight girls are constantly being infantilized. What he's describing is the feeling of being objectified. Being turned into an object works for everybody except the person it's happening to, which makes you feel crazy, claustrophobic, locked up in a synthetic hothouse/tower that everybody is telling you is okay and normal and the way people have always done things. Which just isn't true, and you know it isn't true, so in order to keep that cognitive dissonance at bay -- in order to remain a person at all -- you have to hide: Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody. To survive long enough to grow your hair out and escape, you have to be a spy in your own life. A pretty little liar.
To the dulcet retro sex-tones of Howard Jones, Byron appears and asks Ella to dance with him. She's game, so he immediately takes it to the next level: They should take Aria and Mike and Simone to "that little pizza joint" they used to go. Ella's like, "That sounds great, tell me how it goes." Byron smiles and says it wouldn't be like old times if she weren't there, and Ella's amazing: "It would be like new times," she says, and when he says it's just a pizza she knows different: "Yeah, but it comes with a lot of toppings."