Get this: The person running against Veronica has a daughter who is Spencer’s age and does Spencer’s job and is about to get married to Spencer’s ex-boyfriend. Her name is Yvonne (snaps for casting a woman of color here, PLL; don’t kill her!) and honest-to-Vanderjesus, right there in the info packet about Veronica’s political opponent’s family, it’s like, “Daughter Yvonne is dating former teen contractor Toby Cavanaugh, who has purchased an engagement ring to present to her over a family lunch of braised short ribs and goat cheese polenta at the family estate this coming Sunday.”
Spencer needs to have a think about this. Yes, she has moved on to a new fellow, but, well, Toby built her a rocking chair. She peeped him crying in an alleyway when those kids wouldn’t share their ice cream with him. He chased Emily through the Rosewood High chemistry lab and nearly killed her, but drove her to the emergency room and deposited her limp body in the doorway and rescued her growing-up chart from her bedroom doorframe when her mom tried to make her move to Texas. He was a good guy. A good boyfriend. She one time saw his dead body buried in a pile of leaves and lost her literal goddamn mind, staring up at the sky with her hair crackling like dark magic, whispering, “Follow me, end up like me. Follow me, end up like me.” She stole her sister’s engagement ring two days after her sister’s husband died while trying to murder Spencer, and pawned it and bought Toby a truck. The world spins madly on, a speck of insignificant dust in a magnificent universe, and she loved him wholly for a time. She’ll never touch some abs like his ever again, maybe she’ll never even see some abs like his ever again. And she mourns him.
Not for long, though, because some dillweed who doesn’t know how to work a camera rolls up in a limo and starts snapping pictures from inside the tinted windows with the flash on. They zoom off when Spencer sees them.
Caleb, meanwhile, goes to visit Toby and tell him what’s up with him and Spencer. Toby’s living in one of those little sardine can RVs on the property where he’s building a house for Yvonne. Toby doesn’t like the news of his former lovers becoming lovers. He frowns and drops his head and walks into his RV and sadly shuts the sad door behind him and cries.
It does not stop him from wanting to marry Yvonne and maybe it even gives him an extra push. He goes to the event Yvonne and Spencer are co-hosting at the Brew to try to get Millennials to vote, and paces back and forth with an engagement ring in his hand. Spencer sees him and so does Devil Emoji, who texts Spencer: ring emoji, crybaby emoji, laughing cat emoji. The event goes really well, though, and all the young people agree to participate in democracy. Afterwards, Yvonne and Spencer hug, because she comes from a “hugging family,” unlike Spencer, who comes from a “stabbing family.” The reason Yvonne doesn’t feel threatened, she says, is because Spencer is a city mouse and Yvonne is a country mouse and Toby also is a country mouse, and while country mouses might enjoy an occasional teenage fling with city mouses, when it’s finally time to settle down, country mouses always build little mouse houses with each other. Yvonne is really into retro TV.
Spencer and Caleb take off into the night to try to track down Devil Emoji’s phone signal. It’s pretty easy. So easy, in fact, that a similar plan of action at a different time might lead them right into an abandoned bakery where Devil Emoji had prepared a giant pie to bake them alive inside. Not this time, though. It’s just a warehouse with a garbage bin and inside it is A’s old Risen Mitten clothes and gloves and a Nokia 5160. Caleb powers it up and pockets it. Snake still works on it, at least. Devil Emoji texts to let them know he’s not gonna prowl around in the shadows, but is, instead, gonna wear a bunch of service worker uniforms and lurk around in the daylight and eavesdrop on them and serve them warm croissants smothered in honey butter and pick up their recycling and change their oil at the Jiffy Lube.
Hannah’s having a weird day. She tells Ashley about erasing the security footage and Ashley goes berserk because the footage isn’t just stored locally, okay, it also exists at a server farm, and Lorenzo’s gonna find it and see that Aria was shirking around the night Charlotte died, and that means Hannah is going to be a suspect, and that means Ashley is going to be a suspect. “Bleeding heck, Hannah!” is not a thing Ashley says, but a thing I like to imagine her saying. Hannah wants her mom to rob the server farm, but Ashley has robbed enough old ladies and killed enough of their fake nephews, thank you very much, and she will not do any more crimes to keep Hannah from going to jail for doing crimes.
So Hannah’s next step is to confess to her boyfriend Jordan, who tells her to stop beating herself up about making one little silly mistake, which, by the by, was motivated out of loyalty to her friends, an honorable reason to commit any crime (just ask Hermione Granger), and anyway he is rich and white and a man, and also the son of someone who is rich and white and a man, so this really shouldn’t be a problem. He rings up his dad, and his dad sends a lawyer to town, and the lawyer walks into the Rosewood Police Department and every officer and detective in there faints dead away. A lawyer! A real lawyer! In this very building! Who could ever have anticipated such a thing? While Hannah’s watching them keel over from shock, Devil Emoji sends her text that’s just a couple pig emojis and a cake emoji.
Lorenzo wakes up and tells Hannah she’s free to go because the server from the server farm went missing.
Because Ashley stole it, duh.
Ashley drinks her whiskey neat in her tailored dress in her pristine kitchen and sighs and rolls her eyes and stuffs that server down the garbage disposal, like so many iPhones before it.
The Liars go to NuRadley to talk about their days and their lives and how Sara is camped out in her room probably making a lair, and Byron is on the lam probably writing shitty poetry in a leather Moleskine, and Ezra is in Philadelphia probably stumbling around in a drunken stupor on the streets bitching to every one who will listen about how these women he’s fucking keep getting brutally murdered and ruining his life. Byron does call, though, and asks Aria to come meet him. He sounds nuts, like he’s speaking through a voice modulator translator or something.
While all this is going on, an elderly old bell hop leaves the hotel and gets into a limo and peels off his face. Coyotes howl. Glass shatters. Someone’s Samsung Galaxy S6 dings a text alert. It’s nothing but a grey parrot head emoji, from an unknown number.
My forever and always thanks to Nicole (@PLLBigA) for these screencaps and for staying strong in her enthusiasm for a show she loves so much.
