They don’t have time to get into it. Kendra shows up at the backdoor in her jacket
I think Ali is washing clothes for everyone in every jail in Pennsylvania. She has not stopped doing laundry since she arrived here. She’s like the cinderella of juvie, only she already made her fairy godmother wish and it was to be pulled from the ground where she’d been buried alive by her mother. She tries to talk to Hanna about Varjak during laundry duty, and about Kendra from the playground tunnel, but the guards here won’t even let Hanna and Alison look at each other, so they have to hurt themselves on purpose so they can chat in the infirmary. It’s the most Alison thing you’ve ever seen in your life. First she presses a hot iron against her own arm, and then she’s like, “Okay, and you smash your hand in the dryer” like she’s asking Hanna to pass the salt and pepper, and when Hanna can’t do it, Ali’s like, “Oh good lord” and smashes Hanna’s fingers in the dryer for her.
I made such a strangled yelp when that happened, and curled up in a reflexive ball on the couch. Times like these you remember it wasn’t Ali just flying her personal airplane around, sipping champagne and occasionally pulling people from burning buildings when she was dead. She’s hard in the broken places, like what Ernest Hemingway predicted about what happens when teenagers go to war.
Lawyer Julie cannot. She is annoyed af when Hanna and Ali get out of the infirmary, all patched up, talking about Kendra.
Lawyer Julie: Let me repeat back to you what you just said to me. Your main defense strategy is to put a drug addled teenager on the stand so she can tell the jury she saw you playing on the swingset in the park — where she lives, I guess — all day the day Mona was murdered because she was tripping balls and peeping out at you from a sewer drain like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.
Ali: Or you could subpoena that witch I told you about! She reads literal minds, Julie!
Hanna: We’re going to be in jail for the rest of our lives, huh?
Lawyer Julie: Yes.
Ali: Have you found my old parrot Tippi, yet? Have you found Pepe? Both of those guys can vouch for my innocence!
Hanna: I wish Mona were here. She’d get me out of this pickle.
Ali: I CAN DO WHAT MONA CAN DO.
Hanna: No. You can’t. No one can.
But Lawyer Julie goes to Spencer’s to talk to Kendra anyway. Kendra is all, “Yeah, I saw Alison DiLaurentis that day. She was wrapped in rainbows and sprinkled with cosmic things. She was math. She was swirling, rippling water, like a gentle, purple hurricane. And like I knew her, you know? Not from the news, but like deep within myself, I knew her. The sphere of her spirit orbited my consciousness and I saw her pain. She was me and we were both on that swing, not murdering Mona Vanderwaal.”
Lawyer Julie grabs a grapefruit from Spencer’s countertop and reckons she’s going to call Ali to the stand, after all.
After everyone is gone, Toby shows up and he is so mad. He says he took the job as a cop to make himself feel better about how he can’t protect Spencer and the way she repaid the way he was making her misery about him was to kiss everyone else. Look, I love you, Toby Cavanaugh, but you didn’t just meet Spencer, okay? You knew her arch-nemeses were the police when you became the police. You knew her favorite thing was breaking the law when you signed up to enforce the law. You can’t marry a fish and be mad at it when you drag it out of the water and realize its gills won’t breathe air. So anyway, Toby’s willing to give it all up for her. His whole entire career that has lasted three weeks and cost him fifty dollars, a haircut, and one afternoon at some kind of online academy. He’ll go back to being a millionaire teenage handyman, because he loves her enough to give up a thing he has never cared about doing. Toby, shut up and use your mouth for kissing.
So while all of this is going on, Ezra does end up kidnapping Mike, but when they shows up at Ezra’s cabin, Caleb is sitting there in the dark, pissed as hell. Because if Mike doesn’t testify that Mona is just another death-faker in this entire town full of Tom Sawyers, Hanna is going to be in jail forever, and she deserves it less than anyone. Even less than Emily. Ezra says that Mike — who is the same age Aria was when Ezra seduced and started dating her — is a child and cannot be expected to make grown-up decisions. Ezra and Caleb scream at each other for half an hour, and when they stop to catch their breath, they realize Mike has stolen Ezra’s car and skedaddled back to Rosewood.
Or, well, that was his plan, but on the way back down the mountain, someone shot an arrow through his windshield and chased him out into the woods and sprayed bear spray in his eyeballs and tethered him to a pole and beat him up. And then when Ezra and Caleb start running through the woods trying to find him, someone shoots a thousand arrows at them like Legolas up in here.
The finally find Mike tied up to that pole, and before they loose him and drive him home, they take a bunch of pictures of him as “proof.” Proof of what? I do not know.
And neither does Tanner. When the boys show up with the photos and their tale of a Hunger Games-style chase through the forest, Tanner is like, “Did you call the police in the precinct where this alleged ambush happened? No. Did you take your friend to a hospital for medical attention? No. You were running for your lives and worried your friend was close to death, but you stopped — and took a selfie?” Caleb and Ezra yell and stomp their feet and pull their hair and gnash their teeth and cannot believe the fucking audacity of these cops. How can Tanner not believe them!? They have PROOF.
One of the best things about this show is these slick little moments of deeply subversive commentary about like, “Look what happens when these guys are subjected to five minutes of what the women in their lives have been dealing with for five years?”
Also, the fact that Ezra Fitzgerald can go into a police station and throw a tantrum about how there’s no justice or accountability in the world is just the truest, grossest thing I have ever seen.
Alison’s trial.
Lawyer Julie: I am going to throw a grapefruit at your face; try to swat it away.
Grapefruit: [conks Ali in the head]
Lawyer: The defense rests, your honor.
Prosecutor: If you really can’t keep a piece of fruit from hitting you in the face, how did you win this … ARCHERY AWARD at sleepaway camp?
Jury: [gasps]
A-text: Bullseye, bitches!
While they’re waiting for the verdict, Lawyer Julie asks Ali about the archery award, and she says her bunkmate won it, really, but they cheated to make it seem like it was her. But guess who else is an ace archer? Andrew, who shows up at court where Aria’s best friend is on trial for murder to ask her to proofread some kind of college application. That, alone, is enough to make him completely undatable. And I’m not even factoring in the Vanderblasphemy when I say that. So on his college application, it says he was a woodland ranger, and since no one told Aria that Mike was nearly shot to death by a huntsmen last night, she doesn’t think that’s weird at all.
The jury deliberates for three minutes, and then they find Alison guilty of first degree murder. And for some reason, that’s Tanner’s cue to arrest just everybody. All the Liars, cuffed and booked and mugshotted.
The Risen Mitten carts his Liar dolls off to jail. It’s amazing. It’s the best non-Tippi A-tag in this show’s whole history.
Next week: Big A, bitches. No, for real. NO FOR REAL.
Thank you, thank you, thank you to Nicole (@PLLBigA) for the screencaps and all around general perfection.
