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!That's what a relationship is, when you're Aria: Holding hands, dancing places, getting coffee, I bought you a scarf, we carry matching Moleskins. (An awesome forum poster surmised a few weeks back that the reason Ezra can't get a real date is because all he likes to do is hold hands; that still cracks me up.) Ezra's eyes are now wide with disbelief -- why the hell is this teenage girl I'm dating acting like a teenage girl? -- and he realizes it's time to call in the big guns: "Aria. Why are we having this conversation? I am already in love with someone else."
Oh, well okay then. That's literally all it takes and she immediately chills out. I cannot imagine how it's worth this much effort -- I mean, she's still Aria -- but don't ask me to explain perverts to you. They got needs we don't ken.
While Ella's closing up shop at the dance, handing over A's black jacket and gloves (coat check #32), Hanna wrestles away Emily's magic phone, and then stops her from apologizing about the mean drunk speech in a really kind, awesome manner: "Don't apologize. You were right. The truth is I was worse than Alison tonight. If that's even possible. And I do know how Lucas feels about me. I wasn't messing with him for fun."
And maybe right then she could have explained the Hitchcock movie her mom's gotten them into, but Emily falls into the blackouts and so she just covers her up. Downstairs, Spencer gives Hanna mad props for getting the phone away from her -- "That could cause some serious damage," she says, in her hardcore way -- and then Hanna discovers the laptop on the coffee table, magazines stacked on top.
Spencer assumes thusly that the laptop was never at the dance, and Ian put it there after she left, and immediately confirms that the Kissing Rock footage is gone forever. But then, of course, there's more: A new message from A, in which we see Alison running away from the barn after the Spencer fight but before the Toby run-in where she got the sweater, and a note: Watch your backs. I didn't. - A. There's a shadow behind her, even, but instead of assuming it's Toby they just know it was the murderer.
But I mean, really that picture is all of them, and the shadow that's chasing them is Alison, because they are all sort of Alison, because she's the only other person who's solved that Girl Dilemma, just in really fucked-up ways. Which she passed onto them, like a Professor of Grossness:
Alison was the one that helped Aria discover Byron's extracurriculars, breaking down the generational wall between child and parent in a way that can't be rebuilt and which Aria's still trying to climb and figure out.