In the local paper the next day, Spencer is shocked to find a front page story about vandalism at Hollis College. Usually, it is a front page story about a teenage girl being murdered. Well, she marches right out into the yard and lights into Johnny about how she is always — literally every single second of the day — one step away from going to jail for first degree murder. Okay, and when that is your life, you cannot also add charges to your record for defacing public property. He’s like, “I was just trying to help you learn to ‘color outside the lines.’” And she’s like, “Shove your metaphors up your butt!”
Andrew shows up to tutor Aria in “math and science” because “Fitz” isn’t very good at those subjects. That’s what Andrew says. “Math and science.” And “Fitz.” Aria is distracted because she can’t stop thinking about how jail called her brother, and her brother is a blood-stealer, and her brother leaves candy for strangers in the forest, and her is phone dinging with messages from Hanna about her brother. Andrew grabs her phone away from her and tries to make it into some kind of physics question and then reads her texts right off the screen.
Where is Caleb? Where is Toby? I have had it with these new dudes! I am not going crazy. This is not my lesbianism talking. Johnny is awful and that little move by Andrew would cause him to go home with a hook-hand if he did that to me!
And just as I wish for that, Emily comes bursting through the door, wide-eyed and frantic! Where is your knife, girl? Sadly, she has no knives. But she does have information about the zillions of dollars Mike has in the bank. He drives away real fast before they can question him, and since Aria refuses to ride on Emily’s bike handlebars, they recruit Andrew to drive them on a stakeout.
Hanna tries to talk to Ashley about how her dad makes too much money for her to get financial aid to go to college, but Ashley tells her not even to try to talk to him because the terms of their divorce were: Absolute Abandonment. But Hanna has to try anyway. She goes to her dad’s office and he tells her he cannot pay for her to go to Ballard because he has promised horrible Kate — who alcohol poisoned Hanna one time, and Mamaw Marin yelled her her like an angel would — that he will pay for her to go to Dartmouth.
Ugh, that’s it. Everyone in the invisible jet. We’re going to live on Paradise Island. #EndOfMen (Except Toby and Caleb.) (And Holden. I liked that little hobbit.) (And Mr. Fields.) (Travis was good, too. Travis can come with us.) (Actually, no. Everybody out of the invisible jet. This is all Johnny’s fault.) #EndOfJohnny
Spencer is in the middle of drafting an email to Melissa about how she needs Wren’s help to get into Oxford, when she receives a text from Emily telling her to come to their stakeout of Mike.
The stakeout is at some dive bar in the woods, and the person Mike is meeting is Cyrus, the guy who kidnapped Ali (or fake-kidnapped Ali; I honestly can’t remember) and but Ali wouldn’t make a statement about it until the police let him go? I think he cut her, though, for real, in a basement. Anyway, he’s also Hank Mahoney. Mike gives him the blood for blood doping and/or implicating his sister and her friends in the death of his girlfriend. If this is some kind of long game for Ali to get the Liars into jail so they’ll be forced to talk to her, bravo. Triple bravo if I can see her face on my TV again.
Ezra is a black hole. Observe as Hanna is drawn away from the main storyline of all the other Liars and coerced into long conversations in which he charms her with tales of when he was just a young, handsome billionaire who’d been cut off from his family, dressed like a hot dog, begging for porridge and spare change on the mean streets of Rosewood so he could put himself through college. And he did! And not only did he achieve a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for teaching the world’s longest curriculum on The Great Gatsby; he also ultimately saved up enough money to purchase more surveillance equipment than the NSA! Hanna claws herself away from his electromagnetic radiation, and on the way out the door, she spots a flyer for a beauty pagent. The prize: One (1) college education!
The stakeout.
Spencer: I am here now. What is happening?
Aria: Mike’s giving money to the guy who (fake?) kidnapped Ali.
Spencer: Everybody’s a fucking creep.
Aria’s phone: [Rings]
Emily: Oh, is that Ezra? I told him you got into college in Savannah, by the way.
Aria: Whatever.
Spencer: I know you’re probably missing Paige, Ems, but at least whatever is going on in your love life is better than if you were dealing with one of our young men.
Emily: No, stop. Toby is a good guy. I’m sorry, but you’re the one who is being a rat bastard right now, Spencer.
Spencer: That’s not what Johnny says.
Emily:
They get a text from A with a photo of their blood samples, and realize Mike already skedaddled and Cyrus is about to run their asses over with his little moped. He tells them he doesn’t like to be followed and they tell him all the want is what he took from them and he says he’d be willing to work out a trade and Andrew comes screeching onto the scene with a baseball bat like he thinks he’s Prince Charming. Cyrus rolls his eyes and drives his electric scooter away. (Seriously, it’s so quiet! It’s very funny!) And the Liars glare at Andrew.
At home, Ashley tells Hanna they’ll figure out college and not to worry about it. Bank robbin’ time, yes, ladies? (Yes!)
At home, Spencer tells Johnny she realizes she’s been eating his frozen mac and cheese and to make it up to him, he can have all their trash for his art. “Art.”
At home, Talia is waiting on Emily. See, the deal is that she’s still married to her husband and she loves him, but not romantically, and he knows she’s into girls and he’s okay with it, because they got married really young and their skulls were still a little soft.
Talia: I know, I’m a mess. I get it. You probably can’t even imagine a mess like this one, romantically. You’ve probably never even broken up with your long term girlfriend because she kept accusing you of having secret meetings with your dead girlfriend, and then slept with your dead girlfriend who wasn’t really dead, and then gotten back together with your long term girlfriend who had been bullied into the closet by the dead girlfriend before she fake died.
Emily: I don’t want to talk about it.
They hold hands and feel like maybe they can work something out, scissor-wise, at least until Paige comes back for prom.
The Liars have a sleepover and discuss how they should honestly have just become lesbians and gone to Haiti with Emily that summer when she built houses with Rumer Willis. When Spencer goes downstairs to get some blankets, Mike stares at her from the porch like a creeping creeper.
The Risen Mitten drops Hanna’s blood all over some couch cushions or a flower dress or something. I guess she’s the first one Ali wants to schedule a meeting with!
Thank you to all of you for being so patient for this week’s recap. It’s been a week over here! Also, thank you for always and forever to Nicole (@PLLBigA) for these beautiful screencaps and for all those Hannily dance scenes she keeps posting on Twitter.
