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How Spencer's day goes is, she gets a boardgame from Eddie Lamb that leads her to some crucial areas within Radley. One of them is a room full of cribs and hobbyhorses, which -- since she's tonguing her meds and has given up sleep altogether -- is where she meets and has a quick slow-dance with her dead best friend, before being discovered by Dr. Wren with evidence that he helped CeCe Drake break into Radley for A meetings with Mona, under the odd belief that CeCe and Melissa had Mona's best interests in mind. (Also, Alison got CeCe thrown out of college -- maybe by snapping that girl's neck that time? Even the most lenient RA would probably escalate that one.)
All of which is very exciting -- to say nothing of Veronica's flashback to a moment before Alison's death when she found her sneaking in the backdoor with a bloody lip -- but not as thrilling as a last-minute framing device that tells us Spencer's been secretly working with the A-Team since Mona's visit last week. It even comes with a black hoodie in her size. Her duties this week? Shocking, actually.
Ezra's response to Aria's meeting with the Rosewood Principal last week -- in which she was made to disavow their entire relationship -- is to take her on lots of public romantic dates, I guess because the thrill is gone. Aria offers to pick up Malcolm from karate, and for some reason Ezra thinks that's a fine idea. Of course, she's so terrible at this that he gets kidnapped before she even shows up, so then she spends the entire episode not telling anybody that her boyfriend's son is missing, and eventually finds him at this super-creepy carnival -- which is exactly where Spencer left him. Yeah.
After a tiring day of other people's exhausting problems -- such as wondering how much of an ass-ache Malcolm's parents would be about it, if Aria just never found him -- some ill-timed but well-spoken advice from Ella means a breakup for Aria and Ezra. On the downside, it is very sad but heartening to hear her rational, valid, mature reasons. On the upside, it is the fiftieth time they have broken up. For these reasons. So we'll see.
Just as we'll see about whether Toby's really dead, whether Wren or Eddie is right about the other one being a creep, and most obviously, whether Spencer's really gone black. I would say, just by my own reading, that she's still just our sneaky little Spencer and will be an A-Teamer for about five seconds of week's episode, but the best thing is that you really have no way of knowing.
After an early scene spent trying to scream Spencer back into acting normal, Hanna wrestles with an aggressive Emily over whether or not she's meant to care about crazy Spencer or dead Toby this week, or remain focused on the lurking cop her mom tried to kill recently, or possibly the lengths she went to in order to connect Caleb back with his dad: Who, Ella tells us, is now being investigated for much larger church thefts. In the end, Caleb turns his back on his dad... And A waits about twenty minutes before letting them know it was all an A scheme and the dad is actually blameless. Twist! Sad, yucky, poor-Caleb twist.
Emily takes time off from yelling at Hanna and Aria to yell at her mom about getting more information about the body that was found last week. First the Liars sneak into the morgue for a quick run-in with Redcoat and a quick peek at the body -- which is not Toby's -- but before you can even recover from the amazing #ISmellDeadPeople screen bug hashtag, Pam tells Emily a new secret: They've found a separate body, much closer to Toby's description, so he might be dead after all.
Week: Redcoat is revealed, the Liars learn about Spencer's shocking betrayal, and somebody blows up a house, in the spring finale. Then we wait until June. What do you think will happen? I think Redcoat is multiple people, but not like the A-Team are multiple people: I think Alison copied herself across several identities to keep herself safe from the original A, and Redcoat is part of that larger game. She's too tall to be a dwarf with a knife, but now that I'm thinking about it I guess she could be two dwarves, with two knives.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!PREVIOUSLY
Spencer's convinced she found Toby's body in the woods, even though she didn't have a chance to confirm it was his face; now she's in Radley Sanitarium, working at best two separate agendas (relocating her mental health and chasing Mona's trail) -- but an invitation to the A-Team has been extended, and not for the first time, and given Spencer's semi-permanent fugue state and emotional/internal goodbye to the other Liars last week, it's possible she's up to a good deal more.
Aria's about had it with her boyfriend's adult responsibilities, and has been verbally working through her doubts about their future for a while now, making it the most/only interesting form of self-absorption she has ever attempted. Oh, and she told Rosewood's sudden principal that she's not even dating him, so now he can sub while he looks for a more permanent position.
Emily's been the most stable one of the group for a while, in terms of reality, but a weirdly flirty vibe triangle with her girlfriend and Halloween Shana, and continual anxiety about Toby, have left her a little frayed at the edges. Luckily, Pam is back and more awesome than ever, with a possibly useful job at the police department doing tasks unspecified. Hanna's pretty sure Caleb's Uncle Dad, whom she forced to return to town and got a job, is on the take, but she isn't talking to Caleb about it. She has 99 other problems, including a riled-up Detective Wilden and a mom who's back in Hitchcock femme mode.
RADLEY
Liars: "Did you not know we were coming?"
Spencer: "No, this is just how I dress now. Like a mental patient. And the reason for that is fairly simple to suss out, I think."
Liars: "Maybe it would be best if you stopped being one, then. Your mom..."
Spencer: "My mom thinks I can power through this, because she has no idea what is going on, because she's been in the UK since last season. My mom would be wrong about that."
Hanna: "THEN JUST STOP BEING MOTHERFUCKING CRAZY."
Liars: "Hanna, that is not an approved form of therapy."
Hanna: "I don't care! This is boring! Spencer, they found the body."
Spencer: "Yeah. Toby's body. Duh."
Liars: "That's the thing, it's not Toby. That's... Maybe we should have led with that."
Spencer: "Nevertheless, it is Toby. And I am not going anywhere."
Hanna: "I SAID FUCKING STOP BEING CRAZY."
Liars: "Hanna, Jeez. The point is that you are not crazy, really, but this place is making and will continue to make you crazy, so we need to subtract this place by getting you home."
Spencer: "I have to go be crazy elsewhere now. Later, boners."
She retires to her room, sneaking around with sneaky stuff* for a while, before the nurse comes and is like, "Are you gonna be totally rude or are you going to say goodbye?"
* The sneaky stuff is her A-Team welcome-packet merch, which includes:
1. A Hoodie, of course
2. Creepy Gloves
3. Some Instructions for being Evil
4. Scary Things for Later
5. Really aggressive Eyeshadow and Mascara
6. A big old Can of whoop-ass
7. A healthy dose of Irony, in the form of tickets to a puppet play of Faust, a play about the irony of making a deal with the Devil only to find oneself having made a deal with the Devil, made further ironic because of the puppetry, made further ironic because it will eventually be the objective correlative for how the first thing she does for the A-Team is like, absurdly evil and scary because she is possibly a puppet of evil who thinks it is the tricker of evil, just like in the play, etc.
MARIN ENCAMPMENT @ FT FIELDS
Hanna: "Emily, where are all my things?"
Emily: "Everywhere! On top of my things. You are an inconsiderate guest!"
Hanna: "We can discuss that after I find all of my things."
Emily: "This is me being super stressed out."
Hanna: "You know I can't care about the Toby Stuff until month at the earliest."
Emily: "Yes, let's talk about your very important problem of how your mother did not kill a cop."
Hanna: "How did the car, which Aria helped me push into a swamp like we're both morons, somehow end up not in the swamp? And why does Darren Wilden creep around Rosewood even more than Redcoat? It's like a fulltime job with him lately."
Emily, awesomely: "First, if Wilden's looking for his car then he's not A, so it isn't urgent. And also, cars don't float. If they did, the Pilgrims could have driven here."
Maybe the best line and line-reading of the whole episode. What a hilariously non-Emily thing to say, yet so perfectly Emily in its construction and delivery. You know girlfriend's having a time when she deigns to speak to Hanna in her own language.
Emily: "My guess is he thinks he knocked up Alison and we haven't been polite enough to tell him otherwise yet, so he thinks he's in danger of his actual evil deeds being figured out. Which deeds, I presume, have to do with him being -- like everyone else in this whole world between the ages of like 19 and 35 -- an associate or tangential member of the NAT Club."
Pam: "Who wants breakfast? It fulfills me as a woman to cook and to clean."
Hanna: "I'm ungrateful! Later!"
Pam: "Hanna is the best, I'm not gonna lie. But that bitch is filthy. She needs to fold her shit and put it where it goes."
Emily: "She has 99 problems. Giving us all MRSA is merely one, and low on the pole at that."
Pam: "Speaking of crazy people, how is Spencer?"
Emily: "She's perseverating on the fact that the dead body was Toby's, like she does."
Pam: "That girl is like a dog with a bone. A scary, morbid, macabre bone."
Emily: "Any help you can give me by illegally passing me information from the precinct would be really great."
Pam: "My maddeningly correct views on parenting say, okay. But only because I don't want those girls pulling you down with them. Why can't they just have zero problems all the time? Why can't they be more like Aria?"
Emily: "The first and last time anyone will ever say this about anyone, but yeah. It's weighing on me having to be both the Emily and the Spencer at the same time."
HUGE PUBLIC DATE
Ezra: "Why are you acting like being seen together splitting a cruller, holding hands, kissing, discussing our relationship and generally acting like tools is a bad thing? Just because you told your principal, my new boss, a lie that we have never dated?"
Aria: "I would love to do those things absolutely anywhere, except here at this bistro where we are doing those things literally on the sidewalk of the only street in Rosewood."
Ezra: "Not getting it. Hey, remember how you nearly killed my kid five minutes ago? I was wondering if you'd like another chance to kill my kid, later on today. Don't worry, I will lie to his mother about it and bring us all down in flames."
Aria: "Just pick him up from karate? No prob. I know where the karate school is because I once goaded a boy there into nearly dying, which later gave him a massive drug habit. Hey, does your son have any congenital heart issues?"
COURTYARD
Caleb: "[Starry-eyed with the romance of finally having a daddy, and it's so sad because Hanna can't say anything, and just waits for him to talk himself out so she can kiss him quiet. Poor old Caleb.]"
Hanna: "The reason my hair smells like Febreeze is, in a nutshell, that Pam is a crazy person. Or that I am filthy, and she's the one who is not crazy. Either way, that old lady sprayed me down."
Caleb: "Let my dad buy you dinner with his ill-got gains tonight?"
Hanna: "I dunno. I mean, okay. I mean, let's go Dutch so I don't end up with even worse tummy-rumblin's than I have right now."
Caleb: "I am realllllly going to pressure you to do this. It has to do with masculinity. It's not like super-complicated but I'm willing to walk you through it..."
Hanna: "No, I remember this from when Ezra was poor for five seconds and all he wanted to do was buy everybody shit all the time."
LOCKERS
Aria: "But couldn't we just take the coroner's report to Spencer?"
Emily: "The one that doesn't say not Toby Cavanaugh, you mean?"
Aria: "More importantly, why are you getting texts from Shana and blushing?"
Emily: "Hey, when I was out of town, Paige hooked up with her, and now Paige is out of town..."
Aria: "I guess you had to have problems at some point. I guess dating an actual crazy person was just not interesting enough."
Hanna, verbatim: "Sorry, you guys! Caleb had a lot to share."
Emily: "Heh."
Aria: "So while you were doing that, Emily is a whore."
Emily: "So she's cruising me, so what? So I love the attention, so what?"
Aria: "Without Spencer here, somebody's gotta be puttin' the screws to everybody."
Hanna: "Look, let's just steal the dead body and take it to the sanitarium and show it to her."
Aria: "Right impulse, insane execution. But I guess we could snap some pics? I still have our candy-striper gear in my closet of horrors, and to be honest I've kinda missed the morgue."
RADLEY
Eddie Lamb: "Do you want to play a board game?"
Spencer: "Board games are for olds."
Eddie Lamb: "So's Duke Ellington, but you'd still let him play the piano in this mental institution, if that scenario ever came to pass."
Dr. Wren: "Spencer! For some reason I just found out you're in this mental institution! Eddie Lamb, check out my smoldering secretive side. Also my officious, rank-pulling side."
Eddie Lamb: "No problem. Anybody else that would be annoying in the extreme, but you are fucking dreamy."
Dr. Wren: "Hey, did my inappropriate conduct over the course of several episodes have anything to do with you losing your shit and being committed?"
Spencer: "I can honestly say no to that one. Nice to see you."
Dr. Wren: "Here's a creepy thing to know. Eddie used to play this very game with Mona in this very room in this very mental hospital. And now you are becoming her, so."
Spencer: "NBD. Probably she left some ridiculous elaborate clues in there like a treasure map or something. Now that I'm on the A-Team I don't even question her motives for that crap."
MRS. MONTGOMERY'S CLASS
This week we're studying Ray Bradbury's spooky town-with-secrets masterpiece Something Wicked This Way Comes, whose title comes from Macbeth. You should watch the movie and read the book, and then you should also read Dandelion Wine, which is probably my favorite Bradbury book of all time despite being the least interesting, but continues the vibe; all in all there are four books set in this place, Green Town, but I haven't ever read my copies of the other two. (I don't think The Halloween Tree is set in Green Town, but it's the most overtly magical and cool of his small-town things, and has the same flavor.)
Ella: "Hey Hanna? Why is your mom out of town? I need to ask her about her boyfriend's recent hire, Uncle Dad."
Hanna: "Is he stealing everything from the church that isn't nailed down by any chance?"
Ella: "Characteristically, I am going to not answer that question in a skillfully elegant way that tells you everything you need to know."
Hanna: "Even though I am aware of this and not even really in denial about it, I'm freaking out just enough to be weirdly aggressive about this."
Ella: "As is my way, I am going to remain calm and awesome throughout our encounter because I am the best person on any show, ever."
RADLEY
True to form, the board game contains clues that lead Spencer all over Radley, including to a window with a busted latch that you can open with the merest pressure. There are multiple spots marked on the map, but this is the first and most important one because when we see Spencer she'll be resisting forcefully her mother's attempts to get her out of there, which means she's got more agendas in play than you'd at first assume, so it's good to consider these Radley scenes as their own little trail of crumbs. Spencer's story mutates throughout the episode as we learn it, but at the end it circles back around to the beginning, to reverse it once again.
WOLF DINNER
Uncle Dad: "I am very excited about my new job! Spoiler, I am being framed."
Hanna: "Even when it's not about A, somehow it becomes about A. Therefore, I am going to be wildly passive aggressive about this dinner and necklace you've bought me."
Uncle Dad: "It's in the shape of a beautiful angel because that's what you are."
Hanna: "I wish I could be happy about this, but I am bitter on life this week."
Uncle Dad: "Hang on, Pastor Ted is calling me."
Hanna: "Probably because they found out you switched the bells when you were repairing that tower, and made a tidy eight grand from it."
Uncle Dad: "Or maybe to congratulate me on my rehabilitation into society!"
RADLEY
Veronica: "Hey, put on this blazer like a baby lawyer. That'll make you act normal."
Spencer: "Not even my bizarre prairie outfits could do that. For you see, I am actual crazy."
Veronica: "Spencer, if I really were Mariska Hargitay, I could just tell you how everyone in my family got raped like a million times and you'd cheer right up. But instead, here is a horrible story about how I knew your friend was being abused and yet I said nothing and now she is dead."
FLASHBACK
Veronica: "Alison! What are you doing creeping into my kitchen in the middle of the night?"
Alison: "Is that a full bottle of vodka in your hand, in the dark?"
Veronica: "Don't be dumb, I'm not Ashley Marin. Why is your face all bloody?"
Alison: "Can I please just have a hug? I don't want to talk about my nightmarish existence right now."
Veronica: "Just don't bleed all over my insane Myra Breckinridge dressing gown I sometimes wear in the middle of the night."
It is the most-needed hug in the history of embraces. Sasha P is a gifted actress.
Alison: "...That was a good hug! I'm going to go back to being a feral monster now. That vulnerable child routine you barely saw was merely for pretend."
Veronica: "Cool, later."
RADLEY
Veronica: "...So then she died."
Spencer: "You didn't tell the cops this?"
Veronica: "Yeah, but I downplayed it pretty much like I'm doing now. I just figured it was her brother that was beating her up in the middle of the night during a sleepover, and like, whatever. Not my problem."
Spencer: "Right, because you didn't want either of them to stop blackmailing dad about how Jason was his bastard."
Veronica: "It is the Hastings way. But now I don't think it was Jason, who frankly seems like a cool kid. I'm still pretty Catelyn Stark about his whole deal, but really only in the same way Ella hates Ezra, which is to say: Because I feel like I'm supposed to."
Spence mutely turns toward the window -- as always, the weather in Rosewood is precisely calibrated to her emotions, so it's raining every time we return to her room -- but she nods, which was a welcome surprise. Not sharing more than that, just, Yes, part of why I am crazy has to do with Toby being bad, and also dead. It is one of the most moving scenes they've ever had together. I know I joke around about their family, but when you get down to it one of the most human dynamics in the whole show is how they're all these savant geniuses who fight and fight and then immediately drop their shit when it's time to care and circle the wagons. What looks disjointed from the outside, Spence's stuff with Melissa or her parents, is actually a demonstration of the most realistic continuity of all.
WOLF DINNER
Uncle Dad: "Enjoy your meal and jewelry, but I have to go get fired now."
Hanna: "Fat chance, Uncle Dad. I'm so sure I could enjoy either of those things."
Caleb: "But you love jewelry and free things."
Hanna: "Not as much as I love not constantly fucking over your birth parents."
MORGUE
Emily: "Aria, you stand guard because God knows you're worthless otherwise. If you see somebody coming, text me. Hanna will be taking a picture of a dead body, and/or texting madly about her latest grownup problem."
Hanna: "Where would you even unload a hot churchbell, anyway?"
Aria: "I dunno, maybe like melt it down or..."
Emily: "God damn it. You want me to be the Spencer, fine. I'm the Spencer. But you can't then ignore me like I'm the Emily, or else there is functionally no Spencer. Pull it together, ladies."
Hanna: "One thing about a morgue is, I am about to vomit."
Emily: "I'm not checking these bodybags by myself. You start over there."
Hanna: "Did you ever think about, like, the impermanence of life? I was fat, and now I'm skinny. I was poor, sometimes I am rich. Some episodes I eat constantly, other episodes I use food as though it were a credit union. And yet in the end, it all comes down to this... ephemera. Just bones. Merely the democracy of death, cosmic and prosaic at once."
Emily: "Good God I love you, Hanna Marin. Now help me unzip this unmarked bodybag."
While Redcoat haunts Aria for a second, spots Aria and runs away again, the Liars inside make a horrifying discovery: The dead hiker is not Toby, but a rando, and then on top of that, he's wearing one of the Alison masks! Which suggests the question, did Redcoat come in here, do this nonsense, leave just long enough for the Liars to show up, and then turn around and come back, spot Aria lurking, and then run away again? Or, as I've been theorizing for a while, is Redcoat possibly a different faction or group altogether from the classic A-Team, who perhaps was coming in here for other reasons than either them or the Liars? I hope we'll understand more about this whole thing week. It's fascinating.
RADLEY
Spencer is reading Nine Stories, and later on will have asked for Franny & Zooey, which is like the opposite way you should do that, but maybe she's reading them for the first time. At first I thought this was because of "Uncle Wiggily In Connecticut" -- where the mother freaks out that her daughter is sleeping in such a way as to make room for her imaginary friend, like Veronica is doing -- and then I spent a lot of time wondering about the other stories, because this episode has so much literary allusion in it, but then I actually got a little choked up when I realized what's really going on because it's simpler than that, and way more complicated too:
Salinger was Toby's favorite author. He became the language of their love. Nobody on this show, least of all Spencer, has ever been able to draw the line between "mourning" and "searching for meaning" -- this show could be subtitled Stage Three: Bargaining For Dummies -- but with Toby she's actually just straight up conflating them: Whether or not Toby is dead, he's dead. Whether or not there's meaning in their story, she's going to find meaning in his story. Whether she's reading his favorite author because she misses him or because she's searching for clues to his mindset from beyond the grave, this is how she loved him, so this is how she misses him. Don't ever tell anybody anything.
Spencer: "So you randomly gave me Mona's favorite game yesterday?"
Eddie Lamb: "Did I? Huh. Well, I played it with her, sure. We do that here, a lot."
Spencer: "Wren said she was like obsessed with it."
Eddie Lamb: "Well, he'd know."
Spencer: "You guys are really tense with each other. Like, one or the other of you has to be a particular amount of bad guy in order for the narrative to set you up, it's a mutual exclusion by the way the story's being told. So one of you must have been the one to mess with the visitor passes and ID badges. Was it Wren?"
Eddie Lamb: "This is me refusing to tell you yes, but yes."
Spencer: "Then this is me fake-taking my medication, and a good day to you."
She puts the pills in a baggie in her pillowcase, which is super lumpy because it has a million other things in there that we don't know about yet.
COURTYARD
Caleb: "So you're avoiding me now, huh? How much direct questioning will it take before you come out with your ongoing weirdness about my dad?"
Hanna: "More than it should, less than you might think. I just don't want to fight you about it, and I want to be supportive, which means I have to pretty much not say anything at all because either way I lose, but yeah, he stole. He's a thief."
Caleb: "Check me out being totally reasonable about this, like I always am."
KARATE
Aria: "Hey, I'm here to pick up Malcolm Mack? I'm kidnapping him BTW."
Karate: "Oh, somebody already kidnapped him."
Aria: "I have outdone myself, then. Who was it?"
Karate: "A haggard-but-beautiful chick in a black hoodie and creepy gloves, calling herself Aria 'The Child Catcher' Montgomery. See? She wrote it right here."
Aria: "Yep, figured. Any mysterious clues in his cubby? Yep, a horrible carnival just like in the book we're reading in English class. Thanks for nothing, Karate Lady."
COOGER & DARK'S PANDEMONIUM SHADOW SHOW
As you can imagine, a carnival in Rosewood has about 120 percent more clowns than necessary.
In addition, there is the aforementioned Faustus puppet play, which is beautiful to behold -- life-size puppets, for starters -- but is made even more deliriously frightening by the fact that the entire audience, children and adults, are laughing hysterically at it, even though nothing funny is going on at all. Just manic panic up in there. And as the camera pans across these deformed Joker grins and helpless, terrifying, dead-eyed laughter, we land on Malcolm: Laughing along with the rest of them, as A's black glove sneaks in from off-screen to steal a little bit of his popcorn.
Ella: "Aria, what are you doing at this carnival, looking all fucked up? Don't you have a relationship to impale yourself on like an idiot?"
Aria: "That's precisely what I'm doing, mother dear. Now if you'll excuse me, I see a hooded figure kidnapping the kid I was supposed to kidnap."
Ella: "Okay but can I just reiterate that you're the fourth person in a three-person family and inevitably are going to get pushed out? And that's the best-case scenario?"
Aria: "No really this is really good advice and I will act on it later, but first I have to find this child I lost to my immortal enemy before dropping him on his wee head becomes the nicest thing, by comparison, I have ever done to him."
RADLEY
Eddie Lamb: "Oh good, a copy of Franny & Zooey, the only book less appropriate for a person having a mental breakdown than Catcher In The Rye itself. I'll just be taking this to Spen..."
Dr. Wren: "I'll give it to her."
Eddie Lamb: "I, um, how is this your deal at all? Why are you flexing on me right now?"
Dr. Wren: "[Portentous allusion to whatever went down with Mona and Toby and the badges and passes which makes it seem like Eddie is the bad guy, but then he's so fucking creepy about it that you think maybe it swings back to Dr. Wren again. Which is like so sad, because the only thing Wren has ever done wrong is everything he has ever done, but he's adorable enough to overlook it. Which is how girls end up dead, and I realize that, but I'm helpless here.]"
Oh, and now I get it: The other reason we can't narratively have anybody visit Spencer's room is because she's not in her room. So this is a handy way of reiterating the Wren/Lamb problem, while also bouncing back to Spencer's storyline, without actually showing Spencer. Which balances out the act, structurally, between the four girls... But also and more importantly increases our feeling, going forward, that we've seen Spencer way more recently than we actually have. Brilliant, if you think about it: We haven't actually seen her since last night, but this scene locates you in Radley for a sec, which is all it has to do.
MARIN/WOLF ISSUES
Hanna: "I mean, I called my mom but I don't see how..."
Caleb: "Don't worry about it. I have been hating that dude my entire life, it's fine."
Uncle Dad: "Hey, I just randomly saw your car outside. Can we talk?"
Caleb: "No. GTFO."
Uncle Dad: "I'm still trying to prove my innocence! Your support would mean a lot!"
Caleb: "Sorry. [Long speech of valid complaints that were probably quite the load off.]"
Uncle Dad: "When you put it that way, I am a piece of shit. Hence my avoiding you right up until your girlfriend forced the issue. Won't bother you again."
COOGER & DARK'S PANDEMONIUM SHADOW SHOW
Aria: "A child under my care has been abducted. Should I call the cops or just see how it works out?"
Emily: "Call the cops. Unless you don't feel like it, and then I guess just blow it off."
Aria: "If I lose this kid forever, I'll never hold hands with my man-boy lover again."
Emily: "If you call the cops, A will know because A is magic, and then A will murder your child at a carnival, which is the scariest place to die if you're anybody, but especially if you're a child."
Aria: "You're right. I will definitely solve this on my own."
Emily: "Oooh, when you put it that way, no. Meet me at the police station immediately."
Noting a puppet show of Faustus, Aria immediately connects this to the flyer A left her about this puppet show, so she puts two and two together. In the tent, Malcolm sits all alone, looking drugged or maybe that's just Malcolm, and he smiles at Aria like it's no big deal.
Malcolm: "There's gonna be another show, the man outside said so. I'm just early, sitting here unattended eating possibly drugged ice cream."
Aria: "Are you stupid? You totally got kidnapped. How can you not know this?"
Malcolm: "First of all, I'm drugged. Second of all, your friend Alison told me you were running late. She basically answered the secret question."
Aria: "That was not Alison, but okay. Let's go find your dad. This is already like an Inception of abductions, and frankly I'm sick to death of your entire family anyway."
RWPD
Pam, oddly: "Emily? Get the fuck out of here, don't visit me at work while your dead friend is being found in the woods over and over."
Emily: "Uh, you're the one who is constantly electrifying our windows and putting GPS on my phone and shit. You didn't say you'd be working late, and besides, I'm here to either report, ignore, or cover up a kidnapping. Details pending."
Pam: "The fact that I am acting so weird should clue you in to how there's something major going on and I will update you the second I get home. Come on, we have a rapport where you should be getting this."
Emily: "Actually, yeah. Just took a second because my friend kidnapped this... You know what, not important. See you at home."
RADLEY
All but carrying a candlestick, the incredibly Gothic Romance-looking Spencer walks through a beautifully shot hallway, all dark woods and strange light, all diaphanous nightgown and hooded eyes, through the steps of another one of Mona's treasure-map paths. Half-asleep and full-on nuts.
Alison DiLaurentis, a dead person who is no longer among the living, welcomes her to the anteroom of the spot, marked by a Mona-intense ballpoint star, and as usual I'm just going to present her shit verbatim, because I never have any idea WTF she is talking about. She puts on a record of that old song "I'm Your Puppet," which she's been humming while Spencer took this epic ten-yard journey into the heart of mystery, and gets sprightly as hell, as per.
Ali: "Didn't your mother have this [record]?"
Spencer: "Your mother."
Ali: "Really? I must have left it at your house, and didn't get it back. I left a lot of stuff there. Is it just me, or was sixth grade the best year ever?"
Spencer: "I didn't even know you then..."
Ali: "Oh, honey. You didn't even know me when you knew me."
So, something happened around about sixth grade, before Alison started collecting her dolls, and the evidence is possibly at Hastings Manor as usual. And possibly there's something to the confusion between their mothers? This is all coming to us live from inside Spencer's head, of course, so it's worth thinking about that. It's not Veronica who would sing this song about being a person's puppet, but Alison's awesome scary mom?
But this is coming on the heels of Veronica -- who spends most scenes, but especially this episode, as far away physically from her daughter as possible -- admitting to an undiscovered moment in which she metaphorically mothered the untouchable Alison. Which is, in turn, an embrace she now steals back from Alison, perhaps?
Ali: "Give it up, Spence. Let's pretend you're getting ready for your first boy-girl dance party. No one ever tells you that the practice is so much more fun than the real thing..."
They dance, so sweetly. Of all the relationships they had with her, I've always found Spencer's the most interesting, because they're both so confrontationally, openly strong. They challenged each other in a way that made them equals and she didn't really have that with anybody else. So to see them dance, it takes on a more adult shading than with anybody else. They seem like two grown people, dancing secretly in the night. Not sexual, necessarily, just... I don't know, have you ever had this experience? Sometimes you slow-dance with somebody, it's a particular kind of thing that is just what it is.
Emily, she'd be manipulating. Aria, she'd be teasing with her own grown-upness I think, although it's hard to imagine this happening with Aria. Hanna, who wouldn't want to slow-dance with Hanna? No homo. I guess what's striking about this is that it's not particularly hard to swallow, with Spencer: Isn't this all they've ever done?
Spencer: "Was it Toby? Was he the one that gave you that bloody lip?"
Ali: "Toby? Oh, sweetie. Girls fight much dirtier than boys. I'm lucky she didn't leave a scar!"
When Spencer stops dancing, Ali offers to change the record, but no: "I can't, I haven't slept in three days. I'm looking for something." Alison dismissively waves her on, into the scariest possible room -- all haunted cribs and hobbyhorses, like you would actually totally expect to find in Radley Sanitarium -- and vanishes. Within one of the horses there's a cache of clues: Mona's nurse's costume and ID badge ("Ali Dee"), along with a visitor's pass for CeCe Drake, signed by Dr. Wren Kingston... Which is when he appears, dispelling the song and the dreamy vibe and bringing her back to the cold reality in which she is a crazy person rooting around in a room she shouldn't be in, in the middle of the night, and he's the authority figure who just found her messing with stuff that directly could indict him for the badge scandal. If he weren't so beautiful, one imagines, the scene would be of Spencer getting racked into some medieval electricity device; instead, he will be charming some more.
GRILLE
Ezra is on the phone outside, with Maggie like always, making a variety of unreadable faces as they discuss yet another eventful day spent in Aria's care. But when he comes back to the table, it's with a light heart. For the moment.
Ezra: "Malcolm immediately drifted off into the sleep of someone who has been fed drugged ice cream by an escapee from a mental ward, but in those last moments he couldn't stop talking about how you're the Best Stepmother Ever. I guess he forgot the time you damaged his brain... Or maybe that's why he forgot. Knock on wood."
Aria: "Listen, that's great that you didn't get in trouble with the ever-flexible Maggie, but on a separate note, I'm dumping you."
(She dumps him, for about one million years. Love Lucy/hate Aria. Fun to watch/super boring to write or think about.)
Aria: "Somebody's gonna end up hurt here. I'd prefer it be me. This is the classiest thing I have ever done, and I honestly do deserve a ton of credit for thinking about it that way, much less explaining it that way."
Ezra: "Which I would give you, if I had any reason to take you at your word, but I'm Ezra Fitz. You'll get over it. I've had my share of these days..."
Aria: "-- The ones where you realize our relationship is a terrible idea?"
Ezra: "Yeah! But my bad judgment always comes through in the end."
Aria: "Which is why I'll be walking home now. Good night, Mrs. Calabash."
RADLEY SANITARIUM, HOBBYHORSE ANNEX
It would have been weird to have it in the same episode at the carnival, but every time we come back to the creepy crib room I really want some of those giant circus balls in there. Do you know the ones I'm talking about? Like with a star painted on it. Just go full-on Tweety Bird, adult-sized-cribs, Tchaikovsky Nutcracker, Suddenly, Last Summer with it. A teddybear or pink bunny rabbit, bigger than a man, with huge white plastic eyes, slumped over in a corner. Spencer absentmindedly bonking on a xylophone while we chat.
Spencer: "Okay, out with it. Mona kept souvenirs, so skip the denials and just tell me how many times you snuck CeCe Drake in here."
Dr. Wren: "Fine. That was an unholy mess, I almost got fired for it. But the why is, she called me asking to help Mona. Seems Alison got CeCe kicked out of university with some stunt at a frat party, so she had experience getting over the psychic scars Alison left behind."
Spencer: "I cannot count the ways this story seems unlikely, but I can admit that a civilian such as yourself would not know which parts of that story are suspicious. Leaving aside the part where CeCe has never demonstrated disloyalty to Alison, which is new and interesting, I still wonder how she even knew Mona was here."
Dr. Wren: "Melissa called her."
Which I guess means... Nope, lost it. This is all so confusing. I think the point of this scene is to put both the Black Swan and CeCe back on the table for the A mystery? Which makes sense because Jason already connected them to the murder mystery, but them Emily (et. al.) made it seem like they were on opposite sides of that one, so it's actually probably simpler to just cast doubt over both of them once and for all. With just one episode left in the season, that's actually very smart.
FIELDS
Pam: "Emily, we need to talk before Hanna gets home."
Emily: "Why were you so weird at work and bringing up cold case files?"
Pam: "Don't tell anybody this..."
Emily: "LOL."
Pam: "...But they found another body. It matches both Jason and Toby's descriptions, and has the tattoo from when Spencer saw it. There was significant trauma, let's say, so they can't identify him for sure, but... The odds are getting softer on this one, honey."
Emily: "So only the most freaky parts of the unhelpful information, you're giving me."
Pam: "Yes, and you can't tell anybody."
Emily: "It's like you said to a starving man, 'Here is some delicious pizza,' and then you open the box and it's just dry crusts and pineapple chunks."
POOR WOLFIE BABY
Caleb: "I am so dissatisfied with my lot! And thanks to my jealous stupid jailbird dad, I even have to feel weird about accepting my affluent mother back into my life."
Hanna: "It is never a bad idea to give a person a second chance. Unless they are on this show, and then you are signing your own death warrant."
A Text: "PS, I totally framed Uncle Dad for bell-robbery and probably also fiver-stealing, and now you have fucked up Caleb's life in several different matryoshka-nested ways for no reason."
Caleb: "Ho hum. I am depressed."
Hanna: "You wanna hear something funny? Not like ha-ha funny, but like Kafkaesque funny."
BACK HOME
Aria: "Shit, son! How did Caleb react?"
Hanna: "Reasonably, of course. But while he's off finding his dad, I'm inventing wild scenarios where he hates me."
Aria, verbatim: "Caleb's familiar with the workings of A..."
Hanna: "Yeah, so's Ezra. Doesn't mean you're gonna be telling him about how you got his child abducted today."
Aria: "That's true. I would never, ever tell him that shit. Honesty is not a synonym for idiocy. But guess what, on that note..."
Emily: "-- GUYS! WRONG BODY! HIKER NO! TOBY YES!"
Aria: "Emily. Use your words."
Emily: "The John Doe we found in the Alison mask was just some unlucky hiker. They found a body tonight in a shallow grave at the exact spot where Spence dropped her purse."
Aria: "...I'll get the candy-striper outfits."
RADLEY
Memory Mona: "Look at all that's happened since you turned me down on our little drive up the mountain. But I believe in second chances..."
Memory Spencer: "You don't have to ask me again, Mona. I'm in."
And so we end with Spencer, putting away her toys from today's adventures: The hoodie, the gloves, the tickets to the puppet show. I admit it's shocking, but looking at that edited exchange on paper it makes me wonder a little bit: Mona saying "I will continue to torture and imprison you until such time as you give me what I want, which has stopped being about Hanna and started being about you," shit, I'd give in too. Especially if my inaugurative bad deeds were something as simple as going to a circus for an hour with a well-behaved youngster. That sounds delightful, and there's popcorn and everything.
WEEK
Shots of Spencer back to looking glamorous again, finally; Mona running around with the Liars, possibly; Aria yelling at the Liars about how Spencer's on the A-Team (which I predict will be true for five minutes tops); a house blowing up and nearly killing everybody, of course; Redcoat is revealed to at least Hanna and Spencer. And, we're told, to us. I know the show will be back in June and there's no functional difference between a "spring finale" and a "fall finale," as far as the big reveals, but I really feel like this one will be gamechanging -- enough so, actually, that I'm avoiding spoilers and hope to recap it as I'm watching it, Tuesday night. So until then, XO.
JACOB CLIFTON is a freelance writer and critic based in Austin, Texas. He currently recaps The Good Wife, Deception, Bates Motel, and Pretty Little Liars for TWoP. Jacob can be found online at jacobclifton.com, on Twitter, and on Facebook.