Pretty Little Liars Episode 521 Recap: Vengeance Is Mine

Friends, hello! Please accept my bended-knee apology for the lateness of these last two Pretty Little Liars recaps. Technology and my health have been conspiring against me, but three trips to the doctor and two trips to the Genius Bar seem to have gotten things back on track. This is a shorter recap than usual, but I promise to make it up to you after tonight’s all-new episode!

Previously on Pretty Little Liars Mike told Aria about how Mona was working on a plan to frame Alison for her (fake) murder and unmask A by collecting a full refrigerator of her own blood. Spencer got her brain completely scooped out and replaced with SpaghettiOs by a rambling wreck named Johnny. Emily broke up with Talia (kind of?) because Talia’s husband came a-callin’ at the coffee shop talking turkey about bisexuality. And Hanna danced like your childhood dreams of flying.

The Liars hit up the Rosewood Federal Penitentiary and Inevitable Baby Doll Hospital to apologize for that tiny thing of having Alison tossed into jail for a murder she did not commit. They explain how Mona’s plan to stage her death and frame Ali probably actually got her killed, and then Aria amazingly, hilariously, chivalrously defends the Vanderjesus: “Once she found out who A was, she was going to come back home and be like, ‘LOL, Tom Sawyered, y’all!’ And then you would have gone free!” This does not do much to console Alison, that Aria Montgomery of all people is now Mona’s most ardent worshiper. Well, besides Hanna, obviously. And Hanna’s not even here. Aria again: “Hanna had shit to do, Ali. God, get off our nuts. You’ve barely even been in jail a few weeks.”

What an upside-down world we live in where Aria has stealthily scooted in under Hanna (hey-o!) as the best Liar this season. Guess who we’ll blame for Spencer’s tumble to the bottom of the list? Oh, it’s Fucking Johnny, all right.

As the Liars are getting ready to go, Ali tells Aria she’s going to dime out Mike so hard it’s going to make everyone’s heads spin around like Poltergeist. Aria begs for some more time for Mike to solve things, and Ali’s face is so perfect. It is the absolute perfect “Are you fucking kidding me” face.

It’s been a long time since I believed Ali was a bad guy. A long time. But when she gets out of jail, I kind of hope she starts torturing these guys (again?). They sort of deserve it.

The Liars disperse. Spencer goes home to find Veronica marching around the house in a livid trance. She cannot believe Spencer went to jail to hang out with Ali when she is under investigation for one half dozen crimes herself. She tells Spencer to pack up her shit because she’s going to London to meet one of Wren’s old Oxford buddies who is going to get her into college on another continent. Probably she should be sending Spencer to Bangladesh or Yemen or Cambodia or some other country that doesn’t cooperate with U.S. extradition requests, but okay, Veronica. You do you and SVU.

On her way to work, Emily is accosted by a woman named Claire Handleman (no, for real, I’m not making that up like “Costumeshop”) who is a handler for the Glass Slipper Beauty Pageant. You guys aren’t old enough to remember her from In the Heat of the Night, and that’s okay, I’ve made my peace with that, but she was awesome on that show. Also, she was on Days of Our Lives last year, which is a fun fact because half the people on this show have been on Days of Our Lives, including Hanna’s dad who was her uncle when they both lived in Salem. TV is great!

Anyway, so Claire Handleman tells Emily her mom didn’t sign her pageant permission slip, which means a couple of things: 1) Emily is still a minor and therefore not old enough to be dating Talia, and 2) Emily still hasn’t told anyone her parents vanished in the night and never came home. Emily lies and says she’ll have her mom sign the paperwork. Claire says she should have been signing that paperwork for years because Emily has always been a shoo-in for Miss Solar System.

I forgot to tell you that Aria is wearing a lanyard that is also a skirt. It’s bananas. She goes to Spencer’s to help her pack for London, and while she’s there, she buys one dollars’ worth of legal advice from Veronica Hastings. So like one zeptocecond of legal advice. Basically, she wants to know if Mike can go to jail for the various ways he has obstructed justice and hulked out on everyone this season. Veronica says yes to that first thing, and no to the second. Hulking out is not a crime. Aria puts that information her back pocket.

Upstairs, Spencer is packing like she’s leaving for a year (and maybe she is!), and Hanna and Emily forget for a second that it’s not season one anymore. They both start pleading with the Liars to recruit honestly just one single adult, a competent one like Veronica maybe, who they can tell about A, and who can help them stay out of jail and out of that one grave. Aria finally has something to protect that is not just her hats and earrings. It is her brother. And so she vetoes roping in a parent or a police to help them. Spencer does not get a vote. She cast her vote for Johnny and therefore all of her other votes are void for the rest of the season.

At Fitzgerald Bookstore and Candy Shoppe, Emily is wearing another one of Paige McCullers’ t-shirts, I do believe, and talking to Talia about how she needs to start working during the school day instead of on nights and weekends because she’s going all in on pageants now, in terms of her future.

Talia: Whatever. I’m quitting anyway.
Emily: Girl, you are a mess. And don’t get me wrong, messes are one of my biggest turn-ons, but you are a grown-up mess messing out on a teenager. I’ma give you the number to this woman I know named Annabeth Gish.
Talia: Nothing matters.
Emily: I mean, it matters that I don’t kill every patron of this bookstore with my poisoned empanadas, so you should stay.
Talia: Fiiiiine.

Mona is doing laundry at jail. It is sadly not sexy lesbian laundry, like what Piper and Alex get up to in the jail laundromat, but it is just as gay. She forlornly writes Mona’s name in the dust on the table like it’s her middle school notebook. Later on, she’s gonna walk back in here and find that someone has written “… told everything!” under Mona’s name, and underlined it.

Next thing you know, Ali’s getting a present in her cell, and it’s a tiny little Alison doll inside a tiny little plastic barrel with a note talking about, “Guess who’s getting broke bad next?”

Jail Living Room.

Ali: Thanks for coming to see me, Mrs. H.
Veronica: I came to see if you have any insight into why my daughter keeps sabotaging her future.
Ali: Is this about Johnny?
Veronica: Ugh, no. I already snapped his neck. This is about her coming to visit you in jail.
Ali: Speaking of which, my lawyers don’t want me to take the stand to tell my story because they think everyone will think I’m lying.
Veronica: … and you feel surprised about that?
Ali: Maybe you can coach me. I know your main thing is you’re worried about Spencer, but she won’t be implicated in anything if I take the stand.
Veronica: I also think you’re an asshole who makes bad decisions and I judge you for that.
Ali: Mama, please. Remember when Melissa found a dead body in our backyard and she just went ahead and buried it on the off-chance Spencer had killed the person?
Veronica: Okay, valid. I’ll think about it.

Hastings/DiLaurentis 2016!

When Aria returns home from Spencer’s, Andrew is waiting for her. They were supposed to do some studying, but she forgot due to her brain being absolutely full of theories and terror. She apologizes but he finally comes clean and says he doesn’t care about helping her study; he’s honestly just trying to get an invite to her pants party. He asks her out on a date to go see All the Presidents Men with him, says, “It’s a thriller about getting messages from a shadowy figure who knows everybody’s secrets.” Remember that time when he said, “War is a game that has to be played with a smile!” Are you A or what, Andrew?

Well, Spencer is in London. This is a thing you know because the London Eye and the Houses of Parliament and The Clash singing “London Calling” and Wren and Melissa’s flatmate talking more British slang than the entire canon of Harry Potter fan fiction written by Americans. YANKS. Remember when this guy played Kurt’s boyfriend on Glee? He always wore that hat. His name is Colin and he heard Spencer likes to be mansplained to these days, so he tells her to stop trying to contact her friends and family back home and start studying up on Oxford. (For example, Oxford is two hours outside of London. That’s a tip from me.)

Emily is on her way rehearse her sexy dancing when Talia shimmies up, Subaru loaded down with all her possessions, to tell her that she came clean with Eric and they’re separating.

Emily: How’d he take it?
Talia: He was pretty pissed. He said I’d lied to him. And also that every television show and all porn and half of Katy Perry’s discography had lied to him, in terms what bisexuality is.
Emily: You can come live with me. It’s the lesbian I can do. I mean, the least I can do. Since I caused your breakup and everything.
Talia: Well, my homosexuality caused my breakup. But I won’t say no to a roof.

And so that’s settled!

Aria has found Cyrus who is also maybe Hank Mahoney. He is in the hospital because he crashed his moped. She wants Hanna to come visit him with her. Hanna doesn’t want to hear it. All she wants to do is support Emily’s plan to dance Hanna into college, go to college, get a degree in — I’m gonna say — Neuroscience and Behavior Studies, marry Caleb, and move to literally any other place on earth. Aria makes those baby bear eyes and Hanna sighs and goes with her to the hospital.

What they find is a guy claiming to be Cyrus all wrapped up in bandages in the burn ward. Does that stop them from interrogating him? No, it does not. They toss out a bunch of questions about who he is and who did this to him and does he happen to know by any chance what happened to the vials of their blood he bought off of a teenage boy in a diner in the woods? He mumbles and grumbles and groans like how mummies do. And then he reaches for a pen and writes “Varjack” on a napkin.

Hanna and Aria think it says “carjack” at first, so they’re trying to work out what that means when you’re talking about a guy that drives an electric scooter around. But then they decide it means “Varjack” like Paul Varjak from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which was my first guess when Cyrus wrote that down, but I thought it meant Ezra and they think it means Ali. But then! I remembered Ali had a fake passport that was for “Holly Varjak” and so then I was like, “Oh, Cece Drake burned this man alive!” So anyway, I’m not any better at this than Aria is, and even she susses out that Cyrus never texted or emailed with Varjack, only saw him/her in person, or else he would have spelled the name correctly.

Aria is radiant this season.

As soon as they leave the burn unit, a mummy on the other side of the room stands up from its bed and ambles over to Cyrus and murders him. Ha! I love this show so much!

Spencer’s Oxford interview happens with some guy who calls the United States “the colonies,” like he is 250 years old and mad as hell about the Boston Tea Party. Not mad at the act of rebellion. Mad that people had the audacity to waste that much tea. He tells some “jokes” about philosophy, and Spencer’s like, “I Kant stand philosophy jokes. Get it? Kant? Like Immanuel Kant? Kant stand philosophy jokes.” Professor Tweed and Elbow Patches laughs and laughs. He likes Spencer a lot.

And then her purse starts bleeding. No for real. He’s points out that her bag is doing something weird, and she looks over and her bag is leaking actual physical blood all over the place. The chair. The floor. Blood, blood, blood. She can’t think of an excuse, so she just grabs her purse and runs out the door like a maniac.

Emily dances at school. It’s real sexy and everything, but I sort of prefer Hanna’s velociraptor hustle. Don’t judge me. Talia prefers Emily’s sensual samba. She gets so sprung on it, in fact, that Emily pulls her onto the dance floor for some lessons. She’s like, “No, trust me. Let the rhythm get ya. It got Hanna last week and it was like a decade of therapy in 45 seconds.”

Talia tries but she falls down, literally falls down and hits the ground, and the symbolism is too much for her. She starts sobbing, and so Emily pulls her up and wraps her up in a prom-style slow dance because Emily is honest-to-Mona the change we want to see in the world. What a goddamn angel. No one deserves her. (Only Hanna deserves her.)

Spencer rushes back to Wren and Melissa’s flat and tries to call Aria to freak out about her bag bleeding, and how it means there was blood in her carry on all along, and what if TSA had caught her transporting blood across the ocean, and she’s lucky she’s not in British prison right this very second. Colin comes in and sees her flipping out and I don’t know where these motherfuckers are coming from this year, but this wanker goes, “When the school children I teach are having a bit of a nit, I make them take a nap and eat a snack and they feel so much better.”

Hilariously, though, he says, “You’re having a panic attack!” And Spencer legit shouts back, “No, this is what it looks like when I pack!” (She’s looking for more blood in the nooks and crannies of her suitcase.)

I’ll tell you what, next time I see Toby, I am going to kiss him full on the mouth. I don’t even care. I have loved him since he cried in the alleyway about those kids not sharing their ice creams with him, and even though I’ve been tetchy with him this season because of how he expected Spencer to quit being a criminal cold turkey just because he became a cop, juxtaposed with every man Spencer has run up against these last few months, ol’ Abs Cavenaugh looks like a damn Fitzwilliam Darcy.

Claire Handleman finds Talia and Emily at school, sharing a peanut butter sandwich.

Claire: You can’t be in the pageant. I’m sorry, we just realized what kind of people you hang out with.
Emily: EXCUSE ME.
Claire: You keep company with degenerates.
Emily: Okay, you listen to me, lady, no one has gotten homophobic on me since Paige’s dad in season one and I’m not about to sit here and listen to this shit when marriage equality just became a reality in the 38th state of this great nation.
Claire: What are you even talking about?
Emily: Uh. What are you talking about?
Claire: Alison DiLaurentis.
Emily: In the “I boned her” sense, or…?”
Claire: In the “She murdered a girl” sense.
Emily: Ohhhh.

They kind of chase her out to her car and Talia comes up with some kind of blackmailing scheme on the spot, like if the Glass Slipper Foundation doesn’t cut Emily a check, she’s going to post on Tumblr about how they cut her out of the pageant and you bet your ass Tumblr is going to think it’s because she’s gay. Claire’s face is like, “Well, I never.”

Aria returns home and nearly gets herself killed climbing all over Mike’s workout equipment like a spider monkey. Because of how A loosened all the bolts last week with the same trick he did to Toby with the scaffolding back in the day when Toby was just a millionaire handyman. Andrew comes rushing in to make sure no bones are broken; comforts her by letting her know if she’d been trying to use the bench press she would be crushed dead under a pile of free weights right now; and kisses her on the mouth. Is that creepy or romantic, I can’t tell. It turns out every potential boyfriend besides Toby and Caleb on this show makes me want to set myself on fire.

Veronica has decided to take on Ali’s case. She’s going to coach her on how to look like she’s telling the truth. While she’s rifling through Ali’s files, she stumbles upon a thing that startles her so badly she calls Spencer up and leaves a voicemail and tells her to never come home.

And finally, after a chat with her mom about how sometimes you gotta forgive people and forgive yourself, Hanna goes to visit Ali in jail. Honestly, does it not look like they are sitting in front of a mirror? I love whatever is going to happen because of that (as long as it is not either of them being mistakenly murdered like a couple of Bethany Youngs.)

Ali: I really did think I was helping you guys with my tough love, you know. I was just trying to fix y’all so you could beat the system you didn’t even understand existed. It’s why I gave you an eating disorder, forced Aria to face the truth about her dad, made Emily own up to her lesbianism, and did a whole bunch of stuff to Spencer that we have not even begun to unpack. I was the voice you needed, even though you didn’t want to hear me. And now I don’t have a voice at all.
Hanna: Cool, let’s start over.
Ali: Thank you, Hanna.
Hanna: Who is Varjak?

The Risen Mitten stuffs 20-dollar bills into Bibles.

Thank you one million times to Nicole (@PLLBigA) for her screencaps and her friendship and her bestness.