Hanna’s being an adult at the switchboard. She talks to Mabel and asks her about the Fitzgerald night-call answering service.
She pretends that Mr. Fitzgerald is her boss and she lost a phone number. She has the woman check if Alison has left a message. Clever clever.
Toby is giving Spencer a lecture about secrets. Okay, Mr.-I-Was-A-For-A-Long-Time. Let’s not throw stones at glass houses. Spencer is talking about how A is made stronger by Ali’s lies, which is totally true but depressing. She talks about finding the diary, and Toby asks why she got that, and tells her to think about it. Poor Spencer is really cracking under all this pressure.
Then Toby grabs Spencer and says, “Down these mean streets a girl must go, who is not herself mean.” and they kiss, because Spencer’s like “YOU KNOW THAT MOVIE, TOO?!”
Aria’s playing with some toothpicks at the diner when Spencer shows up. Aria’s freaking out, which seems normal under the circumstances.
She tells Spencer that she’s been seeing Ezra again, where “seeing” means “having the sexytimes,” and tells Spencer that she loves Ezra. There’s definitely a feeling here that she knows she isn’t meant to be with Ezra and that something is up.
As Aria is figuring out that Ezra isn’t such a great guy, and Spencer is about to tell her that Ezra is A, Hanna comes running up to tell them that she found Ali. Of course it zooms out and goes silent as Hanna is telling them everything of course it does this to us.
Okay, whew, we are not left in the dark. We are all taken to a nightclub where the phone call came from.
Ali steps out of the dressing room and says, “Did anyone see you come in here?” and tells them to get the hell out. Spencer sticks up for all of them when Ali says they are trying to get her killed. I’m glad they all stick together and back up Spencer. Ali tells them to start thinking for themselves. She tells Ali to see how long she’d last without them, that Ali is setting them up for something.
Just as Spencer is about to tell Aria the truth about her stalker whackjob, someone shoots a bullet through the window! Hanna runs and turns out the light, which is a move I can’t tell is smart or stupid. They make a run for it, or rather, Ali runs for it and they follow her.
They end up in a warehouse and argue, and Ali goes to smack Spencer and Hanna stops her. I love that they’re all sticking together for once, and all standing up to Ali.
Ezra starts calling for Aria, and the others tell her to stay quiet. She, of course, doesn’t listen. In the most heavy-handed “Choose your friends or me” manipulation I’ve seen yet, Ezra stands at a car and tells her that her friends are lying, that he’ll keep her safe, and that he loves her. “No one has ever loved you the way I do.”
Ali turns into normal-manipulative-Ali at this point, too.
This scene had me yelling at my television to just tell Aria that Ezra is evil! But no, they let Aria just walk on over to him.
When she gets over there, it’s Toby, not Ezra. Wait, what? Raise your hand if you rewound this scene. It was Ezra’s voice, wasn’t it? But Ezra is lying on the ground, or we assume Ezra is lying on the ground.
Now it’s raining, because of course it is raining, and Aria is upset that everyone’s been hanging out without her this whole time, you guys.
Spencer is just so tired, so damn tired, and everyone’s telling her to figure it out so they can get on with their lives. She’s afraid of the truth, they say. Toby starts yelling at her to look at the pages.
“Don’t look at the book, look at the pages!” He’s basically yelling at her. It’s unnerving.
AAAAAND we’re in Oz.
Or just color.
Or present day. Or half a second after we jumped in time.
So Spencer just completely lost touch with reality for awhile there and maybe has some mental health issues she should address at a later time.
She grabs the diary, remembering that she needs to look at the pages, not the book. She has Hanna and Emily come over to talk about how now the the book is a trojan horse. There are little changes to the pages. Nice catch, Spence! Names of things were changed: a pavilion, a cute girl becomes cute guy… It’d be minor changes they wouldn’t notice if Spencer hadn’t taken photos.
“A doesn’t know that I have the original pictures on my phone,” says Spencer, while I begin yelling, “BACK IT UP ON TWELVE EXTERNAL HARD DRIVES IMMEDIATELY.”
They go to Aria’s house to stake out her porch until she comes back, and Emily calls her while Hanna looks in the window to find Aria and Ezra kissing! Dun dun dunnnnn.
In A-land, which is also in 1940, we see Ali’s dressing room and shards of glass. There’s a telegram from A, telling Ali (presumably) to break a leg.
What we learned:
– A changed minor parts of the diary.
– …What else can we honestly trust from this episode?
A lot happened or very little happened. I can’t tell. But you know what did happen? Paige and Emily sex. So that’s what I call a good episode.
