In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.
The Montgomerys finally come clean to Aria about their sneaking around, and a reconciliation seems imminent... Until Aria sends a flirty, G-rated text to Ella instead of Ezra. Her mom thinks it's cute, and backs off teasing her the second Aria starts twitching, but Byron -- being a suspicious perv by nature -- is not so sure they can let it slide. What was a marriage in repair becomes yet another Cold War with the kids in the middle, once Ella points out that Byron is a cheater and they still haven't discussed it, but all hope is not lost.
In other weirder news, Aria continues to be pretty much adorable, and in even weirder news than that, I actually missed Ezra, who was MIA this week. I refuse to believe that we have to choose between Ella and Ezra for our guest-stars du jour, no matter how much fiscal sense it makes.
Eternally Virgin Sean decides -- in the classic story of Girl Meets Beard -- to go after Eternally Lesbian Paige, which weirds Emily out no question, even though clearly they are the perfect high school couple. Not to mention rampantly realistic. But after their date Paige shows up at Emily's house on a DL hunt that ends up being a wonderful little Classically 2011 gay-teen scene: "I didn't come out of the closet, I fell out," Emily says, "On my face."
When you talk about gay teens on TV and role models it's usually pretty disappointing because either they're sexless or they become crazies or they are on Glee and manage both, but Emily Fields is such an astounding role model for us all that the gay thing -- like Eric van der Woodsen, and the many Degrassi students that came before -- just seems like the extra little perfect on top.
Hanna's still in the pink cloud of post-sexual bliss/denial when she finds a cute jeweled owl pendant in Caleb's stuff, even after the Liars overhear him talking to a mysterious person about how his entire stint on the show was a setup to get closer to her. Eventually Spence sees Jenna computing (?) and then using the necklace as a USB key. Despite Caleb's fairly believable story that this was supposed to be a fairly short con on Jenna's dime and things changed for him before they did it, Hanna has in short order kicked Caleb out, and slapped the shit out of Jenna.
Two remarkable things there: One, she has eyeballs and we have seen them, and Two, the world doesn't end just because Jenna dropped her giant sunglasses. (Three: Jenna cries and seems honestly hurt by this, which helps with my suspicion that she's either been working against A this entire time, or is the Good A if there are more than one.) In the end, A sends Hanna a smashed candy heart reading HANNA, along with some superglue, because A is absolutely the best.
But the meat of the story this week is Spencer, having become a POI in the Alison case, finally realizes she's the new Toby, so he walks her through how to be a pariah-slash-accused murderer, and eventually they hold hands by the fire and are darling. Ian is stepping up his intimidation game in a whole new way, vaguely threatening her and vaguely encouraging her to run away. Spencer 101: Now she will never be running away, motherfucker.
That night, Spencer's wonderful-as-usual mom comes home with yet more evidence: That tortured sweater that has been all over town since the murder has left fibers in Spencer's one of the tortured name bracelets that everybody wears. I don't see how this is any more damning than the actual insane shit Spencer pulls on the reg, but it's enough to make her mom give her a hug.
Two weeks left -- but in better news, the show's coming back in June! We bitch about these ABC Family short seasons, but they getcha back eventually.
week: Mysterious storage space, some kind of Stars Hollow/Mystic Falls civic celebration, and possibly Spencer finds herself trapped in The Cell with Vincent D'Onofrio. No news on the whereabouts of Noel Kahn, whose disappearance is starting to rival Alison's, in my honest opinion. Just the sheer apathy of these Rosewood people.
Watch the episode below, discuss it in our forums, then see how this show is the new Facts of Life. And check out our spoilery guide to the best moments so far!
What are people saying about your favorite shows and stars right now? Find out with Talk Without Pity, the social media site for real TV fans. See Tweets and Facebook comments in real time and add your own -- all without leaving TWoP. Join the conversation now!
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Well, being named a Person Of Interest in the ongoing vanishment investigation of Alison DiLaurentis has really affected Spencer Hastings' general swerve. She know longer understands algebra, for example.
Emily: "Honey, math is hard."
Spencer: "No, I am hard. Algebra is a jerk."
Emily: "Algebra is very abstract. Like you're supposed to find X, but who knows who X is? And sometimes X sends you mean text messages and sets you up with the cops."
Spencer: "Exactly. I used to hunt X, with all my powers, and assign X to random variables, and yell, and stomp around all the time, but now I am X! And I know I am not X! x != x!"
Spencer's mom -- having recently become a person, just like the rest of the formerly evil moms on this show -- sits her down for a long talk about how she looks and talks exactly like Olivia Benson -- before she fucked up her melting face -- and also: The cops are going through all your shit with their search warrant. They are even looking at the barn, and Spencer's bedroom. Reason having deserted Spencer along with math, she cannot understand what this is all about. Mostly her mom just scowls, as usual.
Meanwhile, Aria is using her detective skills to uncover the fact that Byron is, as usual, lying about everything. Specifically this morning, her dad is lying about how Ella is coming over for coffee, even though there are two used coffee cups sitting right there: "She's coming for coffee? So the kitchen table exists in another dimension where that already happened?" I love Aria now, don't you? Anyway, he stammers and lies and acts weird, and meanwhile Aria's face is slowly lighting up like once-yearly dawn in Iceland, and Ella walks in full of gawky lies as well, and finally they come clean.
Aria: "YOU ARE DOING IT!"
Montgomerys: "Mayhap."
Mike: "What is everybody doing in the kitchen?"
Ella: "Nobody knows for sure."
Mike: "I am so over you bastards. Tell me when you decide what's going on with my family."
Aria: "Here's what's going on: We are going to make dinner for you, like it's Mother's Day breakfast time. You will sit politely at the table while your children focus their willpower on making you ignore all the problems with your marriage. We will triumph."
Byron: "As long as nobody mentions the fact that I was fucking a student, I see this working out."
Ella: "Yeah, that sounds super likely."
Meanwhile, Hanna and Caleb are also pretending to be married. Ashley's not like a regular mom, she's a cool mom, so she tells Caleb when the shower is unoccupied and they all zoom briskly around the house like a well-oiled machine. Hanna finds what first seems to be a maxipad in Caleb's backpack, but which turns out in fact to be a pretty gorgeous, Claire's kind of necklace, in the form of an owl with jewels on it.
Hanna remembers how they did it in the woods and how she is no longer a virgin, and that bizarre owl that kept screeching while they were doing it, and assumes that the owl is a gift for her, as in, Remember that time we did it. She snaps a photo.
Aria: "[An owl, as in S]wooping down to carry off their prey?"
Hanna: "Weird, that's exactly what I said. Right before we did it, and then the oxytocin kicked in, and now we are in love."
Emily: "Have you continued doing it? Having sexual intercourse, I mean."
Hanna: "It's a timing issue. What with him living in my house and going to school with me and generally spending most of our day in proximation, we just don't have the opportunity. But you bet your ass I'm going to solve that one."
On the other side of the lunchroom, Paige and Sean are all up in each other's healthy snacks. The best exchange maybe of the episode and you can barely hear it:
One of them: "Are you team captain?"
The other one: "Yes I am. Also, I'm super gay."
The first one: "OMG, me too!"
The other one: "We should totally date. But never, ever touch each other."
Both of them: "This is workable!"
Aria: "Oh Lord. Hanna is going to hit the roof."
Emily, secretly: "Just because I told her I didn't want to hit it downlow doesn't mean she's allowed to date the other closeted gays of this school."
Hanna: "I think that's great! Sean is a good guy, and Paige hasn't drowned anybody or ridden her bicycle into oncoming traffic in nearly two weeks. Plus: Owls! And doing it!"
Emily, secretly: "I didn't even think about how this might bother you, because I know you, and I know that nothing ever bothers you, because you are emotion-free. However, thank you for letting this look on my face be about something other than my insane girlfriend dating your bland boyfriend."
Hanna: "You're so sweet, everybody! Let's talk more about this owl."
Spencer arrives looking wild-eyed, and they talk about how the cops went through her shit and even took some stuff away. Hanna squeals in fear that they took her Tory Burches, and Aria nearly slaps her. This is no time to act like yourself. Spencer further tells everybody that they will probably get searched too, which causes them -- the four most paranoid people in the history of time -- to get super paranoid.
Spencer has decided that this whole police-raid thing is her fault and that she has once again let down everybody, and while this is not true generally, you have to admit that she was pretty railroady about taking that trophy with the rat blood on it (this show!) to the cops, which is how they all got sucked back in.
Everybody: "Right now we think A is Jenna, because that's what this episode is actually about: We're getting scapegoated, and ever since Hanna got hit by that car we've been learning each week about how we've scapegoated everybody else this whole time. Therefore, Jenna is either going to be proven innocent in this episode, or something so sad and awful is going to happen to her. Either way, it's high time, and plus we've already done that with every other Person Of Interest on this show, except for Noel Kahn who is still missing but probably right this second making his way to Jacob's house, like in Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey."
Aria sends Ezra -- whose beautiful self we will not be seeing this week, and more's the pity because I like them both very much now -- the most gaywad text message of all time, something about how she wishes she were looking into his eyes right now. Which for them is sexting, but also, his eyes are so far apart that it's a legitimate wish. Aria, who is just carrying the Idiot Ball this entire episode, accidentally sends this text to Ella and not Ezra, because they are to each other in her phone, because Aria is such a grownup she only calls other grownups by their first names, or sometimes addresses them as "Citizen."
Sean: "Hey, Emily. Let's have our first conversation."
Emily: "Not happening."
Sean: "Okay, but can I get your 411 on Paige McCullers?"
Emily: "Kisses real good, does a mean karaoke... Um, I mean, I don't know who that is."
Sean: "Oh, right. You're my ex-girlfriend's best friend, that's how we know each other. I am learning social skills. My bad."
Emily: "No, in this case it's fine because Hanna's gone owl-crazy. In fact, what she told us was that you are a good guy and deserve to be happy. And I agree."
Sean: "You are being so Emily right now. It's like, blinding."
Emily: "Paige and I swim on the same team, that's all I know."
Sean: "I have failed to crack your obscure code, and consider this conversation over! Thank you for your time!"
Emily: "I honestly have no idea how to feel about this one."
Ella corners Aria at school to ask how she uncovered the affair her mother is having with her father, and Aria basically just says it's because she has psychic powers, and that's good enough for Ella, because she doesn't really care. What she really wants to talk about is the flirty little G-Rated text message her daughter sent her, and whether they need to talk about boundaries.
Ella: "First I am concerned that you either don't know how to use the phone, or secondly I'm concerned that somehow my affair with your father has broken your mind and turned your Electra thing into an Oedipus thing and now you're going to start trying to act like your father, instead of acting like the girls he fucks like before."
Aria: "No, I was just thrown by this creepy blind girl. Or possibly it was a Freudian text slip, and all the dipshitty things I'm going to do in this episode are actually cries for help to get me out of the statutory situation I've put myself in."
Ella: "Either way, I'm desperate to connect with you and I think teasing you about this text message will do the trick."
Aria: (Has a paranoiac skitz attack that actually scares her mother.)
Ella: "Consider the subject dropped. Sorry."
Aria: "I just don't want you involving yourself in my secret affair. Also, I am going to throw in your face that inevitably your marital secrets become my problem. Let's say that's your fault, even though really it's just because A) Alison was a bitch and because B) I am naturally nosy, hate sausage on my sad bachelor-dad pizzas, and broke into school at night."
Ella: "Somehow you have managed to make me feel guilty about your father's affair."
Aria: "Whatever it takes to get you off the scent of Ezra Fitz. I'm not taking any prisoners on this one, babe."
Every meaningless piece of trash Aria has ever collected having to do with her amazing romance goes into a giant cute purse in case the cops come and go through her shit. Like they'd be all, "This garbage! It must mean Aria is dating an old!"
The one thing she does not grab: The copy of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, in which he inscribed something like, My dearest student, in school and the boudoir: I can't wait to cross state lines with you and have illegal sex with you. Love, Your Statutory Rapist Ezra Fitz.
Spencer is actually, literally, physically delighted to see old Toby show up at her house. Neither of them go to school anymore, really, which is one of the many advantages to having beaten Alison DiLaurentis to death. Toby does a really smooth, adorable thing about how he recognizes all the unmarked detective cars in Rosewood, and has spotted one across the street from the Hastings house, and then he walks her through bringing coffee to the cops, so they'll know she's not intimidated. It's fairly hot, actually.
Spencer: "That would be ballsy awesome if I weren't terrified, but I am, so it seems kind of insincere."
Toby: "I just love how when I asked if you had coffee made, you were like I always have coffee made. I am Spencer Hastings."
Spencer: "Okay, you gave Alison the sweater and then she got in a car with a guy."
Toby: "Yeah, but that's all I know."
Spencer: "It was Ian's car, given the Kissing Rock video."
Toby: "Your brother-in-law? Intriguing turn."
Spencer: "Old news. Frankly, it's ludicrous that you didn't already know this, considering how it's all I ever fucking talk about."
Spencer: "Anyway, because I keep accusing him of murdering people all the time, the cops won't listen anymore."
Toby: "Fuck the po-po. If you don't lie to the cops you're not American."
Spencer: "But I don't lie, and I like the cops. Also, I'm being framed in eleven other ways. Frankly, you shouldn't even be here."
Toby: "Yeah, it could really wreck my reputation as the murdering sister-fucking Boo Radley of Rosewood."
Spencer: "Good point. Let's sit on the couch for the rest of our lives."
Paige is stapling things to the wall about whatever when Emily comes up; she paints on the scariest Oh hi there fellow swimteam member! face in case you were thinking she had gone suddenly uncrazy; also, the intense hairdon't is pretty much back where it started. Much like the clothes of Spencer and Aria, Paige's hair in every scene is a good indicator of how loony she is about to act.
Emily: "Hello, friend. So I saw you talking to Sean."
Paige: "Is that weird? Because of Hanna Banana?"
Emily: "No! Why does everybody think that? She doesn't give a shit about Sean. She crashed his car for not fucking her, and he was like Bygones. She totally screwed him over at that awesome dance, and I was angrier about it than he was. Sean is not a factor."
Paige: "Then what on earth could you be thinking of? Why is it weird?"
Emily: "YOU ARE A LESBIAN."
Paige: "I have no idea what you're talking about."
Emily: "Pssh, okay. Anyway, since we're not dating, I'm cool with letting you do whatever you want."
Paige: "Okay. We're already going on a date."
Emily: "Balls."
Spoilers Based On Jacob's Personal Experiences
1. Paige and Sean eventually move in together; Paige keeps showing up at Emily's house anyway.
2. Paige gets Sean pregnant, heavy drinking commences.
3. Massive Facebook Defriending Massacre.
4. Emily goes on two-week bender, screwing everything that isn't nailed down; rest of group walks on eggshells around her, eventually gets the horns anyway.
5. GOTO Step 1 with some other person that is pretty much exactly Paige in another form.
Paige: "But-but-but it's just a group date! Please don't stop secretly being my non-girlfriend! It means nothing to me!"
Emily: "You're only as sick as your secrets, P-Flag. Good thing I'm supernaturally compassionate."
Paige: "I cannot see how I am the bad guy here."
Ella and Byron discuss how weird their kid-created family dinner is going to be. Ella points out the very fact that is central to this series, which is that half the reason Aria is the way she is, is because her parents keep making her carry their secrets around on her back. No wonder she has no concept of boundaries.
Byron: (Immediately goes into defense mode, but stays quiet.)
Ella: "To change the subject, how cute is this? Aria wants a secret of her own, sweet little darling thing, and she's dating some secret boy."
Byron: (Immediately goes into attack mode, in such a way as to horrifically question Ella's parenting.)
Ella: (Takes off her earrings; points out that Byron's not allowed to do or think anything he's thinking or doing.)
Byron: "I'm sticking to my hypocritical guns. As a veteran taker-advantage of young women, I have crucial insight into this romance and its dangers."
Ella: (Barfs.)
Aria hands her collection of non-incriminating trash over to Emily, who is nothing if not obliging, and they talk about how scary it would have been if somehow the sexting had not been entirely sexless and embarrassing, or if she'd called him by name. "Fresh manicures and tiny keyboards: A deadly combination," Aria says, because now she rules.
Before Aria can bore Emily even more than she already is, they overhear Caleb yelling at his mysterious interlocutor right there in the middle of the quad. The conversation is vague enough that it sounds like some girl yelling at him for dating Hanna also, and him yelling back for always calling him even though he is taking advantage of Hanna's hospitaliano. The best lines here: "First of all, I don't think she's who you say she is... Don't call her that!"
The ladies take this latest dropping of eaves straight to Hanna; she sticks her fingers in her ears and goes la-la-la so forcefully that it's a little intimidating. At one point she's like, "We bared our souls before we bared our other stuff; he told me about Flagstaff, I told him everything too." Spencer makes a fist, but Hanna's like, "Not everything, duh. Not how we blinded that girl or anything, just like about Fat Camp."
The lights dim and zap, black ooze drips down the walls, a throbbing on the edge of sound, and that's when Jenna comes tap-tapping in there wearing the owl pendant. What to do. Hanna goes into a tailspin, of course, and Emily starts threatening Caleb's life, awesomely, but Caleb is nowhere to be found. Hanna is going to lose her marbles!
Speaking of cheating that isn't actually cheating, Emily overhears some Mona-type girl congratulating Paige on landing the impressive catch that is Sean Ackard. The girls just love Sean Ackard! That dull stare, that violence-prone homoerotic vibe, that gleaming chastity belt locked 'round his nethers. Sean Ackard has got it going on.
Ella sees Aria texting madly and refuses to get closer to it, and then a bit down the way there's Jenna creepily typing on her computer with the owl around her neck. (I was all excited to see how Jenna uses a laptop, but I still don't know how all that works. I assume there's a trick to it, because she is blind, but if there was I missed it.) Spencer thinks about starting some shit with her, but just as she's walking over there Jenna removes the own and takes it apart, revealing that it is a flash drive. She inserts it, after finding the port with her blind fingers, and Spencer is like "Whaaa the fuuuu..."
Algebraically speaking, the girls decide, C + J = X, where C = Caleb and J = Jenna and X = A. From this we can possibly determine that Jenna was telling Caleb about "214," in which case it's still something and the whole motel room thing was just an insane coincidence/particularly bizarre mindfuck courtesy of A.
Caleb's still missing, Hanna continues melting down and thinking she gave her precious flower to a lying werewolf, and then just for laughs tries out 2-1-4 on Caleb's locker, and guess what? It totally works. Yiiiikes! (Actually, not yikes, because I have no idea what any of this means. I have sort of lost track of things right now. Why would Jenna tell Caleb his own locker combination? That is redundant. Oh wait, no, that was Jenna getting his locker combo, so she could give him the owl. Got it. But also, your locker combination is personal! Do not give it out!)
Caleb shows up for his reaming in Hanna's gorgeous house, and we learn the deal. Basically, Jenna identified Caleb as a "hacker" -- which, I love it when they say that word, because when was the last time you heard that word -- and asked him to become friends with Hanna.
"I thought it was just some generic bitchiness with all the pretty girls," he says, which is kind of amazing and awesome, and not only on its own but because of his awesome speech during the dance episode when he was like, "We all lie about who we are all the time, and especially girls, because they have to." I love how his misogynistic statements aren't really misogynist, it's just that he's the only character can say them because if a girl said it she would be whining, right, or betrayal, and because they're always true: Not all girls are bitches, but these bitches are total bitches.
Anyway, he insinuated himself into her life -- using the outré and byzantine con-man methods of getting accidentally caught in the school in the middle of the night, mind you -- and but then Jenna started doing her usual totally creepy bullshit to him, and he realized this was not generic bitch games but actually a really bad scene, plus he really liked Hanna, because she is awesome and has become a very kind young woman.
So he was already going to break off the Jenna arrangement by the time Hanna slept with him -- which is why he finally handed over the owl the day; it was supposed to contain Hanna's phone logs but in fact just contains a bunch of fake GIGO gomi -- and the Symbolic Owl of the forest was actually hooting, "Jenna is going to fuck this up!"
While Hanna makes it clear Wolfy's still in the doghouse, Spencer and Toby are still on the couch. Actually, they are so miserable that they have slid down to the floor and are just leaning nihilistically against it. Spencer apologizes for blinding his sister that time, and he's like, "Whatever. All of this is my fault anyway." (I guess because of whatever was going on with him and Ali.) Spencer, this is neat, fixes him firmly: "It's the other way around, Toby. We happened to you."
I love that so much, like, she's fully taking responsibility not only for the Jenna Thing, and the Toby Thing, but she's also saying that Alison was part of her team -- that she was on Team Alison -- and that this is something that indicts all five of them, even unto Ali's actual death and all the fallout of that. It's one of the most stunning admissions/realizations any of these Little Liars has come to yet, and very satisfying. I don't believe particularly in penance -- because it can turn into addiction way fast and stops being about the Thing and starts being about your personal narrative surrounding the Thing -- but I do believe in redemption.
Spencer, coming off a long internal monologue: "What's it like to run away?"
Toby: "Cold."
(Awww.)
Spencer tells him a story about how when she was about seven, she and Melissa were going at it and her parents, of course, took Melissa's side, so she packed a tuna salad sandwich and hit the road. She sat through Beauty & The Beast (she doesn't say it by name, but the timeframe and the parallels to the Spencer/Toby storyline make it pretty clear I think), ate her sandwich, got lonely and went home. Where, of course, nobody noticed she was gone. Toby asks sweetly that she talk to him first if she ever feels like doing that again, and then silently holds her hand. Spencer is having a fucking rough one, y'all.
Heading to the slasher-suspense thing this show does so well -- and so infrequently that it never loses its power -- Byron finds himself in Aria's room, being nosy. He picks up the Anderson book and flips through it... But doesn't look at the inscription. Ella finds him and starts up with him about not prying into Aria's life, considering she has explicitly asked that they give her some privacy right now, and things totally devolve into You Cheated On Me hell in about two seconds.
As usual, Ella is pretty much completely in the right, and Byron is doing his typical Willow Rosenberg crap of, "Why can't we all just pretend my terrible behavior never happened?" Which is, of course, the exact moment Mike comes upstairs and just shoots them a hateful look about how they need to stop jerking him around. Guess dinner's off.
The Liars that are left at school, Emily and Aria, convene to do some intense worrying near the lockers. They decide that probably Jenna sent Caleb after Hanna because she was the only one that wasn't seeing anybody, which is... Which makes no sense at all, because Spencer only dates Melissa's boyfriends and the labor class, Aria only dates secret olds, and Emily dated Maya for one hot minute. Well, but I see what they mean: Hanna is kind of the weakest link no matter what the standard, and she's definitely the only one who gets desperately crazy about boys and self-esteem and stuff like that.
Aria thinks about getting a beard so she can have two boyfriends, because that worked so well with Noel Kahn (IT DID! IT WORKED AWESOME! DO THAT AGAIN, ARIA!), but of course just in Emily's line of sight, as Aria's spouting this nonsense, is Paige and Sean, having a jock blast, and Emily's like, "Yeah, we should all lie about everything all the time and be huge fucking liars. Great idea." Beards are a sore subject for Miss Fields this week. Aria's like, "B'scuse me?" And of course, Emily immediately apologizes for having an opinion of any kind, because it came out so ugly.
Mrs. Hastings continues to be fabulous with Spencer, once she gets home. No Toby in sight, but that incredible red-leather club chaise in Spencer's room is sexier than he is, not to mention the exciting news that Spencer has the same white chenille throw from IKEA that is currently warming yours truly's lower half. I love having things in common with Spencer! I only wish that chaise was one.
Mom: "You've got a good shot at having the search warrant thrown out. Judge Enwright is a notorious rubber-stamp and he probably didn't even read it. Whatever they find, we can get tossed out."
Spencer: "Why me? Why always me? Is it because I'm constantly pointing the finger and getting the cops involved in my imaginary shit?"
Mom, verbatim: "Listen: Police thinking is like water. It runs downhill and travels the path of least resistance."
What a good mom! No wonder Spencer rules. So basically, once Spencer told Young Hot Gay Cop that she dated Ian, that was all they needed to get their dots in a new random order and start working the case again. Spencer admits that Alison used to enrage her, but of course she would never hurt her. Mom knows that's true, and they hug and it's very awesome, because what Spencer needs most of all is a hug from her mom that lasts about a whole year.
Also in need of a hug? You'll never guess! It's shocking what is about to happen!
There's an ad hoc meeting of the Liars in a school bathroom, where we learn that Hanna has been walking the streets of Rosewood all morning feeling totally bereft and crazed because Caleb fessed up. Spencer is not in attendance, because she lives on her couch now with Toby. If only he knew about the red club chaise they could be snuggling up there in IKEA softness and the whole ugly world really would seem like a faraway dream.
After a litany of little worried Liar faces, the water starts dripping upside down into the faucets and the toilets all start flushing with the sounds of dying girls and the mirrors all get wavy and you can glimpse the spirit realm through them in shadowy fits and starts. Jenna has arrived.
The girls prepare to get the fuck on up out of there, but Hanna lingers. Aria sees the scary in her rising, rising, and tries to pull her out of the bathroom nexus before they're all carried away to Oz or Hellraiser or whatever, but it's too late: Hanna has gone temporarily darkside. She stomps on over to Jenna, smug look of evil she constantly has gleaming from beneath her giant Jackie O's, and then Hanna just slaps the shit out of her.
("Try to run me over with a car? Huh, blind lady?")
The shades go spinning across the tile, and the Liars stare slackjawed, and just when you think we're never going to see the eyes of Jenna Cavanaugh -- just when you're picturing them, tentacular or silvered over, Teiresian; the sexual predator, the mad sabotreuse, the warped monster that locked her brother up in a tower, collecting music boxes and snowglobes and killer dolls from an age of death -- the camera flips a trick on you and there she is: Crying. Just a girl.
Just a girl who had problems, big ones, before Alison ever took her down. A girl who was so afflicted by something, whatever it was, that she pulled her brother into it. A girl who was lonely, and then became something more than lonely. A girl who is so grateful for the attention of the strangers all around her that she'll ally herself with anybody -- Ian, Caleb, Ezra -- that shows her the slightest kindness. A girl who walks through those halls every day, hearing the whispers, knowing she's one more thing for Rosewood to point at and fear and swallow awkwardly, averting their eyes. A girl who needs, more than ever, to do things for herself.
The girl that loves her baby brother so much, underneath all the confusion and the sickness, that she couldn't wait to remove the chains she'd put on him. To make it up to him, for the things she did and made him do. The girl that everybody leaves. A girl who plays the flute, and writes beautiful stories; a girl with no friends in the entire world. A girl who wears on her outside what everybody else is feeling on the inside, and scares them to death: Just like every other girl in the world.
"This is Hanna," says Hanna, putting Jenna's glasses roughly back in her hands, "In case you couldn't guess." Hefty stuff. The glasses were a mask, just like the attitude; now she's been seen. The girls leave her there, but she can't move yet.
If you didn't know better, you'd think Jenna's heart was breaking. How ugly she must find herself.
Mike comes after Aria back home, yelling at her about this latest parental fight: "Dump him! Or just say you'll dump him." Ha! I'm so sure Aria would do that. "Lie to them, okay? You used to do it all the time. Tell them what they want to know, even if you have to make it up." But no, because Emily already talked her out of it. Spencer and Jenna are the only ones who really know what's going on, but that's only because we live in their world: The truth is, the only things that matter are the things only Emily knows. Aria promises him this dinner is going to fix everything, and she wills it to be true, hard enough that he relents for a second and heads downstairs...
Where Ella sends her regrets, thanks to the fight Mike thinks was about Mysterious Boyfriend, but was only ever them pretending it was about that: It was about what it's always about, which is that Ella can't let go of the fight and Byron can't let go of pretending to have made up for the fight. So it looks to Mike, and to Aria, like this is all Aria's fault.
Which is another thing about this show, and the way the secrets work on this show: We're all so busy with our own shit that we assume everybody else's shit is actually our shit masquerading as their shit. If you knew all the ugliness and secrets everybody else feels like they're carrying around, you would know that nine times out of ten, nobody's watching you and nobody thinks you're awful because they aren't even looking at you: Just their own shit.
X never equals X, because everybody has their own X. We just think our X is their problem, because from the outside everything looks fine, so clearly we're the weird one or the gross one or the dumb one or the awful one. You think that you're just barely hiding the fact that you are tainted or sick or scary, and you wait to be found out for the fraud that you are, but it's never going to happen. You can be fooled into thinking that the entire world knows exactly what it's doing and you're just the fuckup who doesn't understand it, the world, but the secret truth is that everybody feels that way all the time, so you should cut yourself a break and work on getting better and awesomer all the time, instead of just dog-paddling along with the water up to your neck, the way we usually do. We're all pretty little liars.
Spencer walks downstairs, right into a horrible little moment with Ian, who is drinking scotch on the couch like a fat spider in its web and sort of vacantly grinning at her with his eyes. He's like a diseased cat.
Ian: "Everybody was so worried! We thought you might have run away!"
Spencer, verbatim: "Thank you for your concern?"
Ian: "It would be totally understandable if you did run away, though."
Spencer: "Ian. Shut the fuck up. About everything. Forever."
Ian: "What I'm saying is, maybe you should run away."
Spencer: "What I'm saying is, you are going down in some way. I'm being vague because I have no idea what my move is going to be, and the cops are up my ass."
Ian: "Yeah, well then what I'm saying is that you're either on Team Ian or I will see you fry."
Spencer: "Okay but I guess what I'm saying is, you just convinced me not to run away, just because Fuck You."
Ian: "I see how I walked into that one. I forgot you are 100% badass."
Spencer: "Yeah, that was like the one thing I needed to hear. Thanks, actually. For being a gross motherfucker."
Ian: "I know when I'm beaten, so here are some random threats while I make a hasty retreat."
Spencer: "Holy... Did I just win one? Spencer Power!"
Of course, Paige shows up at Emily's house after her "date" and blabbers about Emily's window seat and how perfect Emily's life is and whatever, and then admits that Sean tried to kiss her and that it was totally gross.
Emily: "This is why you shouldn't date boys. Sean is relatively nice, in the context of Rosewood, and now you are messing him around too."
Paige: "It's easy for you to say that I shouldn't drag innocent people into my web of lies. Your family totally supports you being gay and dating crazy women and potheads."
Emily: "It's like you haven't heard a single world I've ever said."
Paige: "I just mean that you are a hero and that you invincibly came out of the closet and you're a role model and holding me to your standard is cruel."
Emily: "The fuck?"
Paige: "You're fearless!"
Emily, secretly: "I am not fearless, I am the victim of a multi-person conspiracy that used my sexual identity in a horrific game of cat-and-mouse."
Emily, verbatim: "I didn't 'come out' of the closet, I fell out. On my face!"
Emily explains, very wonderfully, the Coming Out Thing, which is that big changes all look like the Apocalypse from one side, with just awful things on the other side, until you actually get there and then it's not only pretty great, but also you don't have giant secrets hanging over your head making you feel gross inside.
Change feels like dying because it is, but if Alison taught us anything it's that we sometimes need an Angel of Disclosure to get you through the parts you're too weak to do yourself. You're allowed to be afraid, there is in fact an entire system set in place specifically to make you afraid, but once you get the courage to step through the door, everything changes. You're out of the Game, and you realize pretty much the only rule of the Game is shaming you into staying in the Game. Because if everybody stopped playing the Game at once, nobody could ever tell us what to do again.
They sit down on the window seat and Emily laughs at the at least two different ironies here: Number one, when she tried to find the Perfect Guy, it was somebody like Paige: Somebody funny and brave, that would pull her up onstage and get her to sing, because she knows she'd never do that on her own. But the second irony, which she doesn't get to explain, is that she's doing that for Paige just by existing. And it's this second irony that brings Paige in for the kiss, there on the window seat.
(And it's a third irony in the way the camera zooms in super tight on their hands while they're kissing -- after the three seconds or whatever that's allowable on TV -- because we're all still playing the Game. It's my belief, or at least hope, that this pan and shot were created to be so specifically jarring just so you would ask, "What's with the hands? Is this romantic? Am I being censored from seeing girls kiss? I bet it's that one. Same-sex kisses are still an Event because we are not quite yet the Future. 2011, where is my flying gay-married car?")
Ashley stands outside Hanna's room, listening to her cry. Caleb's been gone for hours, his stuff is gone, the guestroom bed is empty, and Ashley knows that whatever it was, she was basically right; she doesn't feel great about this, and wants desperately to hold her daughter, but Hanna's too ashamed and hurt to let anybody see her yet. She showed the Liars her owl photo and told them she finally lost her virginity, to a wonderful boy who told her all his secrets, and then in front of everybody he slapped her across the face, and the sunglasses went flying, and everybody could see her. How ugly she really is.
You can't explain this one to anybody, but the hope is we can eventually figure it out ourselves. Poor kid! But you know what, she will. Hanna generally gets the Most Improved medal when it counts.
Meanwhile Spencer's finally able to sleep, in her bed, when her mom comes home and worries over her some more before telling her the latest intel she got from her back-channel with the cops: The bloody sweater's fibers were found caught in the SPENCER bracelet that keeps being such a big deal. You know, the ones she supposedly bought?
Even Mom is like, "Okay. I know you didn't kill this girl, but is there any chance you stashed this sweater in Toby Cavanaugh's house? You know, when you were so convinced it was him, before you decided to tear our entire family apart and go after Ian?" You can see how she got there. The cops have gone to an even weirder place and decided that possibly Spencer brained Alison, hid her body, and then stole the sweater.
Mom has another awesome line -- "Inside their minds, it makes sense!" -- and then, just when you think Spencer's going to get betrayed once again, Mom says the most comforting thing: She's sure now that Spencer is being framed. And she holds onto her daughter for about a year, while she cries.
Creeper tag: One of the best yet -- admittedly it's much harder now to compete, after the whole popcorn-bowl scenario -- in which A opens a lovely giftbox containing a large red glass or hard-candy heart with HANNA on it, places this on a piece of paper, smashes it with a hammer, and then scoops the shattered pieces of Hanna's heart back into the box, with a tiny tube of superglue and a note: Dear Hanna: Try putting it back together. Kisses! A.