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A late night viewing of The Narrow Margin (1952) combines with Spencer's newfound hobby of being a drug addict to create a wonderful experiment in film noir that rides the line between fantasy and reality, making predictions and hinting at future developments in a way that only deepens the various mysteries our Liars are confronting. Old-school sounding music, intense noir visuals and some intriguing period performances abound.
While I am usually not one for gimmick episodes -- look no further than the monstrosity that is most of Community's last few years -- this one did it right by staying true to the show, and focused on the nature of storytelling rather than the nature of pandering to the audience. We've always been watching a perilously sexual noir movie about a Hopper painting, this episode just enjoys demonstrating how rich that retro history actually is. (Compare to Ravenswood's hearty attempt to revive 1800s Gothic Romance, for an even more ambitious genre hybridization from Team King.)
The basic setup is that Spencer uses Hanna's job as a switchboard operator -- and Toby's Lodge-based friendship with Ezra Fitz -- to track down Alison, who is working as a dancer in a gin joint downtown. Once they find her (leading A to her, as usual) Toby knocks Ezra out, and they all escape together. The real point is that Spencer is terrified of accusing Ezra in the real world, whether she's right or not, but also that he modified Alison's Diary before they stole it back so easily. But when the Liars hit up Aria's house to tell her the truth, Ezra is already there.
The dream story, though, is just fantastic. Everybody's doing something great: Paige is having Well Of Loneliness stress about being an old-timey lesbian and threatening to leave Emily for some other, more laid-back time period. (They also have some hot damn sex, which is even more elegant in black and white.) Aria's got the mad-hottest Deco/Bacall stripes rolling the whole time, and plays a convincing wide-eyed ingénue. Mona, Spencer and Hanna play out the shifting roles from The Big Sleep in a fraught (momentary) kidnapping scenario. Mona plays the genius/moll she was born to be. Ezra and Toby play variations on a tough guy theme. And greatest of all, Hanna rules the world as the gum-cracking, smart-ass single gal.
Alison's a backstage bitch who pushes Emily into being a hard-ass and Spencer into figuring out she's been using them as her stalking horse all along, making them pay the A price while she skates by under the radar. Which is almost as helpful as Spencer's use of Dream Toby to both short-circuit her repetitious, methed-up thought processes, and break down her current closed logic loop of doing more drugs so she can solve more crimes so she can feel bad about not solving enough crimes so she can do more drugs.
Since all the clues -- even more than usual, which is really saying something -- are suspect, it's hard to guess what will pay out. A cutely intimate scene between Aria and Paige suggests Paige will be moving on from Rosewood for one reason or another, while the regrouping of Toby and Mona to Ezra's side suggests a return to the questions about the makeup and structure of the classic A-Team. So while the real-time content of the episode is about five minutes -- with four and a half of them comprising what appears to be a single complicated joke about show producer/cutie-pie Oliver Goldstick, Poe's mystery short "The Gold-Bug," and Gödel's incompleteness theorem about a system commenting on itself from the inside of itself (from the inside of itself) -- it's at least enough to get us to week. That's when Aria finally confronts Ezra about the fact that he might be trying to kill her and all of her friends, but more importantly whether Alison got there first.
Either way, the moral of the story is that you should do a bunch of drugs if you want to succeed. Is Spencer going to keep popping pills? Probably. Is that going to help Ezra (And possibly Mona?) bring her down? Definitely. Is Alison working to keep the Liars separated? I think so now, but only insofar as it keeps things hopping in a way that keeps her, in turn, safe. Is Emily going to keep bringing it as hard as she has been? I sure hope so. What we do know is that the Liars will continue to squabble about Spencer's newest intel, Aria is going to throw a fucking fit, and Ezra will... most likely continue to be disturbingly hot.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!PREVIOUSLY
Spencer's busily geo-caching the Valley of the Dolls, but only Hanna has noticed this distinctly different flavor to her madness; Alison's out of money and on the run, thanks to same. The Liars are cautiously willing to stipulate to Ezra's A-ness, but nobody wants to talk to Aria about it because if you even try to imagine the epic shit-fit she's gonna throw, all you see is just a blinding light and a deafening sound and then you wake up on the floor a couple hours later with a nosebleed.
VARIATIONS
In the relentless pursuit of culture that causes Rosewood High to put on so many unnamed theatrical productions or study one book so deeply that it takes three years, today we have arrived at all 32 of Bach's "Goldberg Variations," which I believe in this context is a joke about Kurt Friedrich Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems (and usually indicates a secondary reference to Poe's detective story "The Gold-Bug.") And in this case further references both by having the Liars refer to it as the "Goldstick Variations," which is a comment from inside the show on the name of one of its producers. Which is, in itself, a demonstration of the Incompleteness Theorems that Bach's music, and this set of pieces in particular, already evoke.
Which is a shot across the bow because the whole episode -- written and directed by the Emmy-winning, always great Joseph Dougherty -- is like that: Internal references to external works that strengthen the show's structure while also commenting on it.
The Theorems basically prove that any formal system is actually incomplete. There are true statements you can say within that system's language that you can't actually prove are true, like, you could say "This sentence is false." (A little something known as the Liar Paradox.) And the other side of it is, a system that includes a statement of its own consistency, thanks to Theorem 1, makes itself a lie from the inside out. You say, "This sentence is false is true," and you are automatically lying.
It's for math. But it is also for helping you remember that you don't know what you don't know, a thing Spencer is not always great at remembering.
FITZ
While this harpsichord mayhem (including an aria) is going on down the hall, the Liars -- minus one Aria -- raid Ezra's classroom and go through his shit. The chairs are all up on the desks like it's the weekend, but maybe this Bach show was the last thing of the day. Maybe it's not even mandatory and they're just taking advantage of the fact that something that dorky would draw at the least Ezra and Aria to itself, like moths to the harpsichord.
Hanna is wearing a crazy lace-covered neon pink dress and an odd necklace and she looks confused generally. Spencer's hair is no longer in ponytail, so at least she has regained basic functions, but her sweater has weird Rorschachs on it that turn out to be two foxes facing each other down like Hastings sisters over an inappropriate adult man's junk. (Or maybe it's a vase? I guess it depends on your perspective. To Spencer, for example, it would be two foxes just chilling upside down. Or again, a vase just chilling upside down.) Emily is wearing, to quote my notes verbatim, a white sleeveless vest that is not denim, and otherwise is just a color-blocked nothingness.
Liars: "The thing is, how do we tell Aria that her boyfriend is our stalker?"
Emily: "I say we table that pending further investigation. I kind of like the idea of leaving Alison just twisting in the wind for a while."
Hanna: "Another reason not to be a teacher is, you get a bunch of mugs."
Spencer: "Hey, here's Ali's Diary in Ezra's desk. I wonder if that's significant."
Emily: "The one A stole from us? Uh, possibly?"
Do they know that Aria's "uncle" is actually her "boyfriend" yet? As cool as Emily's playing this investigation (¬and as much as Hanna wants nothing less than to avoid the topic of their impending deaths altogether) ¬I would think that's a dot particularly hard to avoid connecting. So the evidence that led Spencer face-to-face with Ezra and was stolen from Ezra's house ends up in Ezra's desk? Life's so funny sometimes, but let's not jump to any conclusions.
Liars: "Do you think Shana was the second A that menaced us at the cabin?"
Emily: "Drop the Shana thing. Stop trying to make Shana happen, she's Team Ali."
The second they leave after saying this, Mona Vanderwaal scurries in a super-sketch way over to his same office and desk, which I guess implies that she's back on the A-Team and was part of the cabin mess. She bounces out of there with arms full of file folders, which the Liars imagine her first to be stealing from him and then realize probably she is delivering them to him. They act like this is offensive, even though the real reality is that they drove her back to the A-Team. Like put her in a car and drove her over there and walked her up to the door and knocked on it for her and then when it opened, they shoved her in there with a boot to her rear. ("Act Evil, Bitch!")
HASTINGS
Liars: "Where are your parents?"
Spencer, verbatim: "My parents are out of town being lawyers."
Take that, nitpickers that wonder where these people's parents always are. You are not going to get a more generic GFY than that. That is the Website Page of parental geography. "My parents are in the Spring Play, don't worry about it."
Emily: "Are you sniffing a whole lot, as if you have symptoms?"
Spencer: "I just need to do more drugs, NBD. I looked up the address of that phone number that was with Ali's money on my special 'reverse directory' that I know about which is called the internet. And we can email those emails and see if they email us back any emails."
Liars: "Hey, is Shana missing?"
Emily: "Yes, Shana is missing. Or at a swim meet."
Hanna: "Or maybe fucking your girlfriend?"
Emily: "This is not about Shana. Just let it go. Also, weren't you all about quitting after your little trip to the dentist?"
Hanna: "I am totally over that. Now I want to get Mona. Can we get Mona?"
Liars: "You are all over the place today, Marin."
Emily: "Also, clearly that Diary was placed in plain sight so that we would find it. Maybe A didn't put it there in that desk, or Ezra found it and brought it to..."
Hanna: "I am 100% on board with Ezra's A-ness."
Spencer: "Phrasing."
DRIVING IN CARS WITH MAN-BOYS
Ezra, verbatim: "What are you thinking?"
Aria, verbatim: "You don't want to know."
Fair enough.
Haha, actually what she's thinking is another Goldstick Variation, talking about a story she's writing which is also a story we all writing which is called Life: "It started out as this one thing, and then it just turned into something completely different. I had this hero, but heroes aren't what they used to be, so I got fascinated with a villain..."
Ezra: "Does your villain lose in the end?"
Aria: "Sometimes the villain does win. In the story of Life."
Ezra: "What are we even talking about?"
Aria: "I have been playing it real cagey for a while now."
Ezra: "I don't like it when my toys have their own ideas!"
THE NARROW MARGIN
Spoiler alert, but in this 1952 film noir, the sassy lady the cop is supposed to babysit on a train turns out to be another cop, and a random lady on the train is the lady that the first lady was supposed to be. Kind of like how Alison might have been using the Liars this whole time to draw A's fire, so she can just take it easy and see the sights of America. Catch up with some old parrots and psychic witches and Halloween employees of her acquaintance. Spoiler alert, things do not turn out great for the cop lady.
Spence pops some pills and interfaces with the movie, murmuring to herself something that sounds like a witchcraft incantation to raise the spirit of Philip Marlowe into her waking dream scape of being bonkers, but is actually a very accurate-to-the-situation quote from a 1945 Raymond Chandler essay in Atlantic Monthly:
"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness."
Isn't that a beautiful thing to think about? Spencer Hastings, man of honor, woman of rude wit and a lively sense of the grotesque, neither tarnished nor afraid.
While you were thinking about that Spencer took a ride on a very different kind of train, and now everything is monochrome and retro. Toby is there in a hat of a gangster, looking pretty well. He does not call her a dame, but her hair was already doing that anyway. (The credits are in black and white. Spare no stylistic wink.)
You know that everybody in your dream is actually you; you are just putting faces on the pieces of yourself you said no to, so you can have conversations with them. And Toby is very helpful in this waking dream, because he's a detective. He's complete and common, yet unusual all the same. He is looking for Alison's murderer.
"This started out as a job. It's something else now, and you know it... You're spread so thin I can see right through you."
The music goes wild and the credits are in some kind of font and Spencer assures him that there's nothing wrong with her: One's Study, thus Aided, benefits from focus. But Toby isn't buying what that dame is selling.
"Who's kiddin' who, see?"
Who's kiddin' who indeed, Cavanaugh.
BREW WINDOW
Ezra tries to pay for Spencer's coffee at the Brew Window because it is only fifteen cents, because we are in a crazy world. Then he says he's sorry for walking up to her in the hallway the other day and threatening to murder her, because that was kind of intense.
"Sometimes I have trouble taking constructive criticism. I perceive it as a threat."
Ezra's smooth like he doesn't know what she's talking about, and then brings up the Hart & Huntsman so he can be sure that they are both on the same page and talking about the same thing, which is him killing her ass. She's like, "I am aware that you are talking about how we are trying to kill each other, but I didn't want to make it weird. Weirder, I mean, what with us being in this chiaroscuro world of moral uncertainty."
Ezra: "Can I buy you lunch, or dinner, or whatever food was called back then, which is now?"
Spencer: "Maybe. I have to check my schedule, which is written down on actual paper."
Ezra: "Cross your heart? Hope to die?"
Spencer: (Bounces because somehow Mr. Hyde is being even hotter than usual and now it's legitimately confusing what he is trying to do.)
WC
The ladies are wiping the dew from their lilies and chatting about the Bechdel Test.
Hanna: "But what else could I expect from a bunch of low-rent, no-account hoodlums like you? Hoodlums, yes, I mean you and your friends, your whole sex. Throw 'em in the sea for all I care, throw 'em in and wait for the bubbles. Men, with your groping and spitting. All groin no brain, three billion of ya' passin' around the same worn-out urge. The more I see of men, the more I want to get a dog. Too bad there isn't an alternative."
Emily: "Yeah, too bad lesbians don't exist back in the day."
Spencer: "He paid for my coffee. I was gonna say no but then I thought, kind of you owe me."
Liars: "That Aria Montgomery sure did have the shine for him. Wonder if she's..."
Spencer: "Show of hands, everybody here who's never lied about sex stuff."
Nobody raises their hands, because they are some deeply disturbed motherfuckers when you get right down to it.
Emily: "What'll we do about this mystery, then?"
Spencer: "Hanna, you hate men right now, how about you follow him?"
Hanna, AMAZINGLY: "I was born for the job!"
I don't even know what was so great about it. Whatever prep she did for this episode, it's working. Everybody's doing something cool in this episode, it's really neat to watch them work, but Hanna in particular brings the Stanwyck and the Russell. Who knew.
Aria swans in wearing wonderful Bacall art-deco stripes, and they all act like they are not concerned about her well-being. She returns the favor.
Liars: "Did you enjoy visiting your Dad in Syracuse? Which is a lie?"
Aria: "Yes but sadly the Erie Canal Museum was closed."
Spencer: "Then what was the point of going?"
Aria: "Anyway, time to go wrestle the world to its knees!"
Liars: "Act normal, bitch!"
HASTINGS
Of a foggy night, Spencer's flouncing around the house in a terrific satiny nightgown, just doing how you do. She calls a number but I don't know what the number is or where she got it: "Is this Edgewood 5-0139? And you said it was the Fitzgerald Art Foundation?"
She hangs up because it's time to gobble more pills and act weird about everything. So was that the number on the money? We are in a dream world so I guess she could have just popped into existence already dialing that number. But if it was the number on the money, then why did she need to get the address if she was just going to call it? And if it was those things, then why did Ali write it down? "If I am lost or in danger, please send me this money. I have taken the care of writing on it the one phone number you absolutely should not call."
Toby: "Are you seriously taking more drugs?"
Spencer: "Stop givin' me the third degree. I need them to figure out clues."
Toby: "You've already got most of the pieces. I thought you were the smart one."
Spencer: "Fuck you, I am the smart one."
A portrait of Alison wearing a grownup outfit and a very, very Alison smile appears on the wall of Castle Hastings, and they are like, "When did that get here?" She stares down at them and just who knows what she's doing up there.
Toby: "Almost looks like she could step right out of the frame and kiss ya."
Spencer: "Or laugh in your face."
(Accurate.)
Spencer: "Ever wonder what would happen if she was alive?"
Toby: "I guess I'd say, thanks for blinding my sister so she would stop raping me, but no thanks for your lack of follow-through. It did not in my case Get Better, and so now I have dropped out of high school to be a Teen Gumshoe."
Spencer: "Just kidding, she's not alive. (P.S. just kidding, she is.)"
FT. ZGERALD
Ezra is handed a drink by Mona Vanderwaal (more like vanderMOLL, am I right?) while a crazy noir saxophone plays over the siren sounds of the many police driving around on Rosewood's one street that they have. The naked city has a million stories in it, most of them involving sexual advances on a minor. Several of them are about Ashley Marin, who has been tearing it up for years waiting for everybody to get to this movie world where she is clearly the main person. More than you would think are about the consequences of finding a shovel, or the many calamities that can befall a doll that looks like you. One of them is about Noel Kahn, but that one's more of a wish your heart makes.
Hanna, staring up: "Ugh, men. SMH."
I love how in this time period it's not so much the statutory rape, as it is the serial monogamy. "Just workin' his way through our still-maturing bodies. So typical."
WHO RUN THE WORLD
Spencer is reading a Diary story right now called "The Mermaid," all draped on a cassock (or that red club chair/divan thing I love so much, maybe, cleverly hidden) in the middle of absolute darkness, like Alison's anachronistic phone booth that time. The piano music in this part is particularly moving. Oh, and get this:
THE BREW
Up behind her on the Dogville stage is the Brew again, this time set for a dinner scene, so Spencer -- the internal auteur of this externally auteur fantasy -- can watch it go down in real-time.
Emily: "So then I was like, 'Yeah, I guess lesbians don't exist.' Fooled 'em again."
Paige: "Why are you giving me the third degree about Shana? I already said sorry."
Emily: "I don't care, we were on a break. This isn't about Shana. I mean, not in that way."
Paige: "I thought about you when I was with her... I can't believe I just said that! That's what a boy says when he cheats, I feel almost normal."
Emily: "Then act like it, bitch."
Emily takes Paige's hand and I think we were all kind of wishing (them included) that Spencer's fucked-up Matrix brain would put Paige in that Prince Charming outfit from the Black Swan dance. C'mon, just... nope? Fine. The bartender notices them touching hands and continues wiping that Nighthawk counter down like it's the taint on their souls. He makes it totally weird.
Emily: "Don't go, you always go first. If you're that paranoid, maybe people will notice that and put it all together. Those lesbians, they'll say. Leaving in a certain order every time. How gay."
Paige: "I gotta go first, Emily. I gotta go so I don't have to see ya walk away from me."
Emily: "Are we breaking up in the real world? What is the point of this scene? Why is Spencer in her kitchen fantasizing about us being oppressed by archaic social norms?"
Paige: "I said I gotta go! I gotta scram."
Truth be told, though, Emily does break up with Paige a shit-ton, so I guess Dream Paige has a point. You either die a hero or you live long enough for a car to drive through Emily's house, or Jenna to get drowned in a pond, or Lucas to get drowned in a lake, and then before you know it, it's Splitsville, kid. Later they will they have sex and it will be amazing. (Spoiler alert.)
MONA
Uh, I don't know fashion words so you know how the back of a collar can sometimes go very high? Like if you are an evil queen or maybe a duchess. Well, that is what Mona is rocking, whatever you call that. And finger waves. She totally loves that Hanna is following her (that really would be, like, her version of Christmas) and then she leads her around a corner and then Hanna gets distracted by a million antique mirrors in this thrift-store window and then there are a million Monas all staring at her. A literal Wonderwaal.
I guess it's how back in the Hayes Code days you would see somebody eating food or looking drowsy, and that was meant to convey they were on drugs. Or like how on Melrose Place, Matt Fielding was always eating food instead of dicks. I guess it's like that, only here, a million Monas is the code word for getting kidnapped. By a tiny little flapper dressed like an evil duchess in the middle of the night. And dragged back to the apartment where you both just were.
HASTINGS
Spencer: "Just rocking a nightgown and answering my old-school telephone, you?"
Mona: "There's a blonde package waiting for you in Apartment 3B!"
Spencer: "Hang on, what? I haven't slept since January, I'm a little out of..."
Mona: "Sorry, this is Mona Vanderwaal and I am at Ezra's apartment and I am going to kill Hanna. OR we are having smoothies. It's just a dream, don't worry about it."
Spencer: "Okay I will get dressed."
3B
Mona answers the door in such a sassy molasses way, just like the junkie sister in Big Sleep, spoiler alert, and it's awesome. She is really good at being somebody's bitch backup, it doesn't really matter who. She's such a heavy! She is like, the Molly Millions. Hanna is parked on the couch looking pissed off because they... I don't even really know. This scene doesn't make a lot of sense, but I think that's on purpose. They all say weird things at each other for a while, and then Hanna and Spence finally decide to leave, and Mona and Ezra are just like, "Okay bye."
Ezra: "You shouldn't let an amateur be the tail, Spencer."
Hanna: "Well I'm just not as used to walking the streets as Mona is."
Mona: "Even in this time period you can do better than that. We have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores that just makes it okay for guys to call us sluts and whores."
Ezra: "Would you like some of my private juice blend?"
For real he says that. Not even Aria could get a boner from that.
Spencer: "Juice? Not... Board Shorts Ale?"
Ezra: "No, I get it. I understand what you're implying. Question, why tail me at all?"
Spencer: "Are you and Aria back together? It won't really matter in the long run but I am having an entire drug-induced hallucination about what if it did."
Ezra: "You can't kill true love, honey!"
Mona laughs because Ezra is so embarrassing, but he gives her a flinty "Nix" without even looking at her, that thing he does with the thin lips, and she chills out. Man, sometimes you see couples or even just friends and the way they interact it's just like, "I am never going to their house for dinner. It would make me too uncomfortable. Neutral territory only."
Spencer: "I am just here for two reasons. One is to rescue Hanna from that couch where she's peacefully sitting, unharmed in any way. But two is, you need to lay off the teenage poon. I am telling you this as a bro."
Ezra: "If you were sure I was A, you would have told Aria that by now. But haven't, because you're not sure. And you're not sure because you are high on drugs, and also because you are also legitimately confused by this show."
Spencer: "Mostly the first one! Hastings out."
Hanna dips something in Mona's juice and says something weird and then they leave and Mona says something weird and he looks at his pocket watch and the music is like, "That was pretty weird, huh?"
VINTAGE DRIVE
There's an old-school lady's vocal, like that Amy Winehouse type of music I don't like, so I couldn't tell you what it actually is.
Hanna: "What is it with men? Why do they always turn on you? Is it because they wear hats and the blood gets stuck in their heads? You know, I heard that's what causes baldness."
Spencer: "You need to take it down to like a three, okay Hanna? Right now you're at like an eight, and I need you at a three."
Hanna: "What have you been up to while I was getting kidnapped?"
Spencer: "I traced that phone number through a secret method I know about called calling the phone number."
Hanna: "Why would Ali call the Fitzgerald Art Foundation? Is this real? Does it have bearing on the story, even?"
Spencer: "In my fugue state hallucination, you have a night job of working at the switchboard of our town."
Hanna: "Sure, that checks out."
But again, the way Hanna leans into this stuff is so frigging great to watch, who cares what's happening?
THE NOVAK
Aria and Paige are taking a moment to just lounge around the bathroom on a giant thing in the middle of the bathroom, you know, chatting like the good friends that they are.
Aria, verbatim: "So when you're done with the roll you take it to the drugstore, and a week later you pick up your pictures."
Paige: "Thank you so much for explaining that to me!"
Aria: "Well, I'm artsy. What are you going to do with this camera, anyways?"
Paige: "I am taking Emily on a canoe trip."
Aria: "Like is this in a gay way?"
Paige: "Lesbians don't exist in this time period."
Aria: "I don't think of Emily as a tomboy. I used to be a real tomboy, I'd spend more time in the tree in our front yard than I would in my own bedroom."
Paige: "What changed?"
Aria: "Eventually I realized it wouldn't get me nearly enough attention. Or wait, I fell in love! And then I just didn't want to climb trees anymore."
Paige: "Like is this in a gay way?"
Aria: "I guess you just grow out of it."
Paige: "Aria, no offense but what the fuck are you talking about?"
Aria: "I have no idea. Maybe this is just Spencer's way of processing how she used to make out with Alison all the time."
MEN LODGE
It's the kind of exclusive organization where little boys in hats come to meet little men in hats and share their hat secrets and drink Board Shorts Ale.
Ezra: "I'll tell you what I know about people. They're no damn good. Everybody's out for themselves. That's the simple truth."
Toby: "If I'm no damn good, why are you talking to me?"
Ezra: "Because I have no friends. And because we both know what happens when a man lets a skirt get to him."
Toby: "Like is this in a gay way?"
Ezra: "I am taking the long way around to explaining that Alison DiLaurentis is alive and Spencer Hastings knows how to find her."
Toby: "That is interesting. Also, I am Spencer because this is her dream."
HASTINGS
Spencer can walk in a pencil skirt like you are actually a time-traveler; it's mesmerizing. Alison comes spookin' out of the shadows wearing her picture from the portrait and then they talk about the portrait for a while. #AlisonInBlack says the suggested hash tag, inscrutably enough.
Alison: "I should have been nicer to the man who painted that."
Spencer: "Was it Hector Lime? Remember Hector Lime? Hey, why didn't you tell us you were boning our English teacher before he even moved to Rosewood?"
Alison: "Whatever. I kind of hate that painting because I will keep getting old, now that I am not dead."
Spencer: "Right, so if you stay dead, you'll always be the girl in the painting."
Alison: "That's immortality, my darling. No big deal but do you want to make out?"
Spencer: "How come you didn't warn Aria about dating our future English teacher?"
Alison: "Well, for starters I was dead. But also, no woman has ever been able to warn another woman about a man."
Spencer: "Can you honestly just not tell me that he's the reason you're still hiding?"
Alison: "Because that would be super boring... Whoa, scary Spencer Look! Maybe I should be afraid of you!"
Spencer: "Nah, I'm just trying to figure this out."
Alison: "You have all the pieces, why can't you put them together? I am also Toby who is also you in this dream world, but the difference is that I am even more about you constantly taking pills than you are."
Toby Cavanaugh on one shoulder, Alison DiLaurentis on the other, Spencer Hastings in the middle. That is a lot of chin in one place. Spencer runs to the pills to check on them, and then spazzes them into the garbage disposal, and then has a long nightmare time of A shadows roaming around the switch of the disposal while she's down there one elegant wrist-deep.
Spencer: "My pills tho!"
Toby: "I turned back into Toby and I am anti-pills now."
Alison Portrait: (Heh heh heh.)
COMMERCIALS
Alex Pettyfer being fucking revolting in his new film. If Alex Pettyfer showed up in Rosewood they would say, "You are too rapey looking even for us. Go home. We are at full capacity for creeps."
The Fosters being the best show on TV and maybe of all time.
RWPD
Toby has arrested Spencer for putting her hand in a sink and now she's got the lamps on her and the noir blinds behind her and Toby is giving her the business.
Spencer: "Duh, Alison's dead."
Toby: "Really because I think maybe she's alive."
Spencer: "I may have been confused about that previously."
Toby: "Because you are on drugs? Spencer doesn't get confused, Spencer's the smart one."
Toby Idea One: Spencer killed Alison and then fugued out. A perennial favorite.
Toby Idea Two: Spencer helped Alison fake her death, and this is all just a gorgeous mistake. Doesn't really hold up past the point where she got denied at U Penn, a thing no Hastings would ever allow.
Toby Idea Three: Or maybe Spencer's not that clever, and Alison's been tricking her and the Liars this whole time into being cannon fodder for a sort of Find-The-Lady shell game. That way she has them working overtime to save her, and overtime to draw A's fire. Plus, she is awful.
That is the first thing on these mean streets Spencer can take home with her, so far, but it won't be the last. Everything Alison has ever done, or emoted, or said becomes both sincere (Theorem One) and completely calculated (Theorem Two). It would also explain pretty much all of the Not-So-Good Guys: CeCe Drake, the B-Team, Mona Vanderwaal, the Black Swan and the infinite Redcoats, all be working to keep the Liars in a permanent state of crazy, so they'd run around more like chickens with their heads cut off, confusing the issue with their special brand of chaos. Filling up the whole Battleship board with total static so A could never tell which ship he's aiming for. Doesn't that sound bizarrely realistic?
FT. ZGERALD
Aria is sitting on a zebra sofa with a Bessie Smith-type voice singing, still in those great stripes but now featuring a giant bow in her hair like you might put on a child's present. She says the following shit out loud:
Aria: "I always thought champagne was the most sophisticated thing in the world! Besides zebra-print sofas, I mean."
Ezra: "Well, it isn't. You are."
Aria: "I bet you say that to all the high school girls you trick into fucking you."
Ezra: "Are you sure you want to blow up our secrets to your dumb friends?"
Aria: "I can't even remember where we left this the last time you brainwashed me."
Ezra: "Guess what Alison's alive."
There's the most amazing close-up of his lips, whispering; and cut to an amazing close-up of her giant Aria eyes going twice as wide as the music swells. Good God this episode is cool.
THE SWITCHBOARD
Hanna works it while she uses a connection within the switch boarding community -- whose name is Mabel, of course -- to get a bead on the Fitzgerald answering service. You know, for all those important Art Foundation calls that can't wait until morning.
Hanna: "Mabel, I'm just trying to track down one crummy phone number. How many favors have I done for you? Remember those three sailors?"
She gets the number, and then connects a few more calls, and the whole time she's rolling her eyes and cracking her gum and it's so, so perfect. The subtle line between homage and unintentional parody they're walking, you never see how well the show is doing it quite like you do when she's pulling out all the stops like this. It's not a joke about old movies, like a sitcom would do or like Mathnet or whatever: It's an old movie about old movies, a totally different thing, and the fact that we're nearly done and it just became clear how tough this would have been to get right. That's the most impressive part of all.
FIELDS
Paige: "That's exactly why I wore this doily dickey on my prairie dress and my hair in these weird balls on my head and this giant chunky necklace: to seduce you."
Emily: "It's a testament to us both how well it's working."
Paige: "Sigh. So many people in this lonely city full of pedophiles."
Emily: "Don't be lonely! I wore these shoulder pads and this giant belt specifically to romance the lonesome right out of you."
Paige: "I'm not lonely, I'm afraid of being alone when you outgrow climbing trees. Meaning that I can't tell if you're actually gay since it hasn't been invented yet."
Emily: "Please don't subject my femme experience to cultural erasure just because it doesn't fit into the narrow norms of your conventional queer narrative."
Paige: "Oh, I will be doing the exact opposite. Of that."
She does the exact opposite of that, in fact. It's excellent. Curtains in the wind, swooning music, hot kisses, Emily hookin' her finger through Paige's bra strap as she settles back into the pillows. For a time period without any lesbians, I gotta say they are very good at it.
SWITCHBOARD
Hanna! Is on the case! Just crackin' that gum and grinning to herself as she invents social engineering a good seventy years early.
Hanna: "Is this the All-Nite Answering Service?"
TANAS: "Yes it is. The only one."
Hanna: "Listen, my boss is Mr. Fitzgerald himself, and I lost a very important phone number... Do you have any messages from an 'Alison'?"
That Mabel really came through, giving her the number of Rosewood's preeminent (only) all-night answering service, the one called "All-Nite Answering Service."
If you bought stock today, I'm talkin' pennies on the dollar, you'd eventually be a multi-millionaire by the time Aria gets back from Iceland, because -- and you didn't hear this from me, Martha Stewart -- eventually that company's IPO is going to hit triple digits. It won't be called TANAS anymore, though. Where do you think Website Page started? That's right, before they got big and bought out TANAS, back in the mid-2010's, it was called The Website Page. They only changed the name after the Winklevoss Twins started saying they invented it. But really it was Hanna Marin, this whole time.
RWPD
Spencer's still interrogating herself via Toby, who is, TBH, quite flattered by his suspenders and the whole look.
Toby: "One thing Ali taught us both is that secrets aren't just secrets, they're weapons."
Spencer: "Yeah, that's true. But now I'm thinking, A didn't just come out of the woodwork. A monster like that, you gotta feed it. Nurture it. And that's just what she did, feed the beast, with every dirty trick and every lie she got us to tell. It all made A stronger..."
Toby: "Which is who?"
Spencer: "I honestly don't know. First it was Mona, confirmed, but then it wasn't. Maybe I know, or maybe I'm just looking into another mask."
Toby: "But Ali's alive. Never you mind who told me. And you know where to find her."
Spencer: "I got nothing! All I got is a book fulla cruel stories and fake names and bad poetry!"
Toby: "Since when does the Devil give out free samples?"
She knows what he means, but she shuts down because there's still some crazy left in this episode and once she figures out what he means, it's all over. So she just kind of has a headache there until he picks her up and reminds her about the mean streets.
"Down these mean streets a girl must go who is not herself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid..."
Classically it would be the Aria that gets this kind of help from her dreams, but we're untwisting the labyrinth since Alison came back. Spencer's doing the same thing Hanna did that time in Sullivan's office by using her Aria muscle she never knew she had to get places her Spencer muscles could never, ever take her. Same reason they keep highlighting the fact that Hanna's becoming the brains now, by having Spencer co-sign it, or the way Emily's increasingly holding down the Spencer position in the group.
Theorem One: You can be anything you want to be in this world. Theorem Two: One thing you can never be is weak.
THE BREW
Aria: "Just sittin' here at the Brew, looking full-on amazing."
Spencer: "You seem weirded."
Aria: "Just please don't give me the Spencer Look."
Spencer: "Okay, just this once."
Aria: "So I've been seeing Ezra again. In a sex-type way."
Spencer: "That's fine."
Aria: "I mean really it's your fault. You reminded me that I liked Karate Jake but loved Ezra. I mean, love him. Like so much."
Spencer: "You don't seem convinced."
Aria: "It's like, everything that's happened with him and me, I don't feel like it's ever happened to anyone else before."
Spencer: "That is both literally the most Aria thing you have ever said, and also a very real feeling. That is biology at work."
Aria: "And it probably wouldn't have happened to me if I hadn't walked through that one door, that one time. It all would have been different. And who decides what door you walk through, anyway?"
Spencer: "Maybe Alison, definitely Ezra."
Aria: "It's been sexy and dangerous and awful and wonderful. It's like a story."
Spencer: "God, you're awful."
Aria: "It was perfect..."
Spencer: "Was?"
Aria: "The story's changing."
Spencer: "On that note, please do not get mad at me about what I am about to say."
Aria: "Is it about me? Because okay."
But before Dream Spencer can tell Dream Aria the thing she's been itching to tell her for weeks now and also itching to not tell, Hanna appears! What's up, girl?
Hanna: "I've been leaving you messages everywhere, at every late-night answering service Mabel knows of! I found Ali!"
We cut to outside the Brew, so we don't know what she's saying, and there's an old-school siren, and then the Liars make haste…
TO SOME GIN JOINT
Spencer: "First of all these burlesque posters are misspelled. Nitely is not a word. And also, how irritating and typical. Only Alison DiLaurentis would have the brain wave to be like, 'I'll be a stripper! The pervs will never find me here!'"
Backstage, Aria's being her S4 awesome self ("Looks like somebody threw a hand grenade into a room full of Rockettes") and Emily is picking through the pasties and whatever, wondering what on Earth Alison was thinking. That's when Ali walks in.
Alison, yanking off her gloves: "Did anybody see you come in here? Then get the hell out! I told you not to come look for me."
Aria: "Things have changed. We are bored, for one thing."
Alison: "Nothing's changed for me, though. This one already tried getting me killed once since I got back."
Spencer: "Don't be a bitch."
Liars: "Seriously, you are wearing us out."
Alison: "This one would just love if something happened to me. She'd never have to worry about dropping back down to second place."
Aria: "Man, I forgot this side of you. Which is most of you."
Alison: "You mean you're not sick and tired of her ordering you around?"
Emily: "Jesus, dude. You are out of line!"
Alison does this immensely eloquent sort of ugly, bitter laugh at that, and Spencer pulls her fur collar up and agrees that it's time they all started thinking for themselves. Ali's quiet and smiling, unbreakable, with her chin up in that defensive posture she takes.
Spencer: "You're setting us up for something. I don't know what it is, but it's a setup. We're supposed to be some kind of decoy for you and take all the heat, like in that movie I'm watching while I have these drug visions. But as usual, you only ever tell us what you want us to know..."
Alison: "But you've changed so much, huh? Hey Aria, got any questions for Spencer? Hey Spencer, got anything to say to Aria?"
Once again, Spencer Prime backs off that concept, and suddenly a gunshot rings through the room. Quick-moving Hanna slams off the lights, and they all hustle out into the maze between the dressing rooms and the stage, which goes on forever and ever but never ends up leading out.
Alison: "Split up, go different ways."
Spencer: "Just like usual, so we get followed and isolated, and you get away safe."
Hanna: "Alison, if you hit her I swear to God."
Just then Ezra starts yelling for Aria, out in a loading dock at the end of the maze, and Aria goes into some kind of somnambulistic useless sex state where she stops being on this show and starts being on her own show. Also like usual.
Spencer: "Don't tell him where we are."
Alison: "But why, Spencer? Tell her why."
Emily: "Alison, shut the fuck up. You're being mean."
Alison: "Not gonna lie, I love that you're like this now."
They continue to squabble, even as he starts saying all his brainwashing shit like usual.
"It's safe. You can come out now. I'll take care of you. I don't know what they've told you about me, but it's not true. I'll keep you safe Aria, I promise. I love you. No one has ever loved you the way I do..."
When Aria asks why she's supposed to be afraid, everybody looks at the floor, which enrages Alison. After all, what was the point if they're still this weak? And Aria eventually is so turned off by her attitude that she goes out to him, in her neat wool coat: "I think I liked you better when you were dead."
They watch her walk toward him, out of the frame, for the full hour it takes her to get there. When he pulls out a something they all clutch at each other, but it's just a lighter. And it's not Ezra, it's Toby, who has bested Ezra in a hand-to-hand while Aria was zombie-walking toward him in the fog. Toby ushers them all into the car, and by the time they're set, Ali has, of course, disappeared.
Aria stares out into the rain, Spencer acts super shifty because she's about to start asking questions, and eventually Emily has to admit that Ali was right, they're all being chumps by treating Aria this way just because they're scared to say reality.
Toby: "You figure it out yet? Because this car's just about out of gas."
Spencer: "Me too, bro. I am goddamn exhausted."
Hanna: "You're not alone in that one."
Emily: "Just figure it out already! Who cares who gets hurt at this point. Hurt ain't dead."
Toby, verbatim: "You're all the time talking about wanting the answer. Maybe you do, maybe you don't."
Aria: "Maybe you are afraid of getting the whole truth."
Toby: "She already has that."
Finally irritated by all this portentous nonsense (or maybe the on-the-nose huddle of insecurities they're all embodying means it's almost over) Spencer-Toby reminds her how easy it was to get the Diary back, and that the Devil doesn't give free samples. That's when the car crashes into oncoming lights, just as the gunfire's going off in the movie in the real world, and Spencer -- without much ado, honestly -- hustles over to the reclaimed Diary, and notices it's been dicked with. The pages on her phone are slightly different from the pages in the book now, rendering it useless/useful again in a whole other way.
LIARMOOT
Emily: "But why give it back, after he came at us so hard to get it?"
Spencer: "Because it's a Trojan Horse. Here we have 'I can't stop thinking of Ambrose Pierson,' okay, but in the scanned page it says 'I can't stop thinking of Ambrose Pavilion.'"
Hanna: "What is either of those things?"
Spencer: "Doesn't matter. It's enough of a clue that he needed to change it. All of them are just little things: January becomes March, a cute girl becomes a cute guy..."
Emily: "And he thinks we won't notice, because we're so proud of getting it back. That high-stakes heist where we walked into his class and took it."
Hanna: "So we have our edge back, but on the down that means Ezra left it there for us, so he definitely knows we know."
Spencer: "Yeah, it confirms my theory I formulated based on him threatening my life in every dimension of the universe."
There's a cute moment as they rush out the door where Hanna mentions Aria's lie about visiting Byron in Albany, and Spencer just offhandedly corrects her that it's Syracuse. This was hilarious because of the way she said it and the way it was edited, but I realize I can't explain in print. Just trust me, it was a riot.
MONTGOMERY
Emily: "Wait. Let me try calling her one more time before we wake up the whole house."
Spencer: "First of all, she is the only person that lives here. Think about it."
Hanna: "Yeah, but she's not alone. I used this special spy technique I know about called looking in the window, and she is in there kissing Ezra. And he's wearing a hoodie."
Spencer: "Aw, fuck. I guess we don't have to tell her right now, then. Oh darn."
A-TAG
Back in the noir universe (unoirverse), the camera says goodbye to Ali's dressing room, the lighted mirror, the jagged shards of glass everywhere, and lights upon a telegram from A, stuck in the mirror frame like it's a precious memento.
Break a leg. Stop. Kisses, A.
The picture closes down in an old-school iris wipe, and the film burns off the projector altogether.
THE SIMPLE ART OF MURDER
That was fun, right? Framing from the inside can do such radical things to a text, and the fact that it was so tied up with Spencer's own internal stuff just made it all the more poignant. But so before I go, here's Raymond Chandler on the bizarre nature of the hard-boiled narrative. Or, why it's fine that Alison DiLaurentis can often be found flying a plane with a mask of her own face over her face, despite being a deceased individual:
"Undoubtedly the stories about them had a fantastic element. Such things happened, but not so rapidly, nor to so close-knit a group of people, nor within so narrow a frame of logic. This was inevitable because the demand was for constant action; if you stopped to think you were lost. When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand." -- The Simple Art Of Murder (1950)
Theorem Two: If anybody ever tells you they're telling the truth, trust me that they are lying. The demand is for constant action; this sentence is true.
And here's Raymond Chandler on why Pretty Little Liars fucking rules:
"There are no 'classics' of crime and detection. Not one. Within its frame of reference, which is the only way it should be judged, a classic is a piece of writing which exhausts the possibilities of its form and can never be surpassed. No story or novel of mystery has done that yet. Few have come close. Which is one of the principal reasons why otherwise reasonable people continue to assault the citadel." -- ibid.
Theorem One: In order to tell a true story, you need two things. You have to lie, and the story can never end. The reason people keep telling the mystery of the dead girl is less that it hasn't been solved yet, and more that it can never be solved, because grief is not Sudoku.
You don't ever get out, you just turn into something new; the faster you run, the less distance you cover. Even with Alison alive, their attempts to control the chaos of their world is still telling them this same lesson. A system that is literally about our futile search for meaning in the meaningless shadow of death will never, unlike a Bach fugue -- or a Spencer one -- ever resolve itself. Can't Stop won't stop. The demand is for constant action:
This sentence is false.
WEEK
Spencer continues flipping out on the Liars about how Ezra is A, and Aria starts picking up on the fact that her boyfriend is obviously evil and isn't even bothering to hide it. When Ezra makes the case that Spencer's a whack-a-doo junkie, nobody can deny he is 100% correct.
JACOB CLIFTON is a freelance writer and critic based in Austin, Texas. He currently recaps The Good Wife, True Detective, The Blacklist, Ravenswood, and Pretty Little Liars for TWoP. Jacob can be found online at jacobclifton.com, Twitter, and Facebook.