Emily and Hanna meet up with two friends of Runaway Sara for a Who’s In The Box coffee date. Immediately, before anyone could say anything, I paused the show so my girlfriend and I could ogle one of the girls.
I mean look at this fucking dyke. That plaid shirt. The short, unpainted nails. The leaning on her elbows. The crooked smile.
Look at her.
Seriously just look at her. 
This actress has like tenth degree congenital gay face. She is TV lesbian gold and if she doesn’t have sex with Emily I will just die.
I suppose I should point out that I think that other girl is also supposed to look a bit like Hanna. Like this is supposed to be a doppleganger situation. In my conspiracy theory world these girls were paid off by A to pretending to be in the same situation as the Liars. Like those little girls with the dolls.
Anyways Runaway Sara was last seen on her bike the day after Labor Day the weekend Ali went missing. The important takeaway there is that she was last seen with her bike and is therefore also a lesbian. Just kidding, the important takeaway is that the cement was poured over whoever was buried in Ali’s place ON Labor Day. In other words this chick is not in that box.
Elsewhere MonA runs into EzrA.
She has some really impressive side buns I would have been jealous of back in junior high when I used to rock such a hair style.
Anyways MonA lays it on thick with EzrA that the Liars just love him and she’s jealous of the attention he gives them. I can’t tell if she wants to fuck him or team up with him. Potentially both. Hey it might work out for her, EzrA just loves high school girls.
MonA and EzrA scurry off to have coffee. MonA is a little heavy handed in her suggestion that EzrA is A. She points out all the books about masks and secret identities and how EzrA keeps making the girls write essays on the topics of Why Aria’s Boobs Look So Good In Leather and Why It’s Sometimes Okay For High School Teachers To Date Students.
But EzrA is not having any of it. Not one lick.
EzrA then delivers such a sharp, sinister and manipulative monologue/threat to MonA that I made my girlfriend let me rewind it three times to watch it. It was that good.
  
It was so aggressive, sneaky and deliberate that it really, for the first time, made me so happy that EzrA got put on the A Team. Since Mona, this the first time someone has been revealed as A who I thought actually displayed the cunning, malice and megalomania to pull it off.
An arbitrary distance away, Hanna comes home and to everyone’s joy Jessica DiLaurentis has just hired Ashley to work in her real estate office. You see, even though Ashley has never worked as a real estate agent even once on this show, she’s actually been keeping up her license for years.
Then Jessica says Ali showed up in her dreams and suggested the whole thing. I’ve always thought she was a little cray.
Hanna runs off to tell Caleb about her encounter with Jessica, but unfortunately he’s not so great at distinguishing between dream and reality anymore. Caleb explains that he can’t explain anything about Ravenswood but that he definitely has to go back. That is Hanna’s least favorite idea ever.
A hop skip and a jump away, in the middle of nowhere, EzrA pulls up in a car. Aria does her best impersonation of Autostraddle’s Viral Bear asks if they can go somewhere and talk. EzrA’s like, “Fuck yes, I’ve got the perfect place. It’s sort of more of a lair but you’ll get used to it soon.”
OK drive safe I hope I didn’t make you late.
EzrA and Aria pull up to some Mystery Cottage. EzrA is quick to point out that it has no internet or cell service. How convenient!
Aria asks EzrA what he wants and for a second I think that she knows he’s A. It was a good second. But actually she’s just talking about all the feelings.
She points out that she’s still with Sensei Hot Stuff even though we learn something new she doesn’t like about him in every episode and he’s out of town and he’s basically just a really good-looking chimp. Plus everything is super confusing right now, what with constantly being threatened and her friend maybe not being dead. EzrA’s like nbd I don’t care. Here let me make it up to you by giving you the keys to this apartment. Wait what? I literally cannot fathom how having the house makes any sense or helps her any more than handing her a bushel of kale.
He tells her it can be their little secret. EzrA loves a little secret.
At the Life Cafe Emily closes up the shop alone. There’s a creepy creepy pounding at the door. Who’s at the door?
Is it Paige looking for some backdoor loving? How about that  hot plaid-wearing lezzie one from earlier?
Nope! It’s Claire! The Hanna lookalike from earlier! Bummer.
Emily and Claire talk late into the night even though Emily knows she’s probably going to get an earful from Paige about emotional cheating. Claire explains that her friend Sara wasn’t a wonderful, kind friend. She was beautiful and cruel and in the wake of her disappearance she and the other Fliars (get it? fake liars) are unable to move on. Sounds familiar. I hope she and Emily bond over this. In their pants.
Across town Caleb tries to leave but Hanna does her best to keep him. He explains, yet again, that he can’t tell her anything about Ravenswood, it’s complicated, she wouldn’t understand etc etc etc.
Here’s the big misstep abcFamily made by with the Ravenswood spin off: Caleb really can’t ever tell Hanna what’s going on. Like ever. All of the supernatural stuff on Ravenswood breaks the rules of Pretty Little Liars’s reality. Sure on Pretty Little Liars your best friend can spend years tormenting and threatening you as a masked killer, your best friend can have faked her own death, you can break into any office building in the middle of the night and high school lesbians are beautiful abundant. But there are no ghosts and nothing that seems supernatural can’t be explained by trickery. Those are the rules of Pretty Little Liar’s reality.
If Caleb goes and introduces fantasy into that reality than the whole fabric of the first four seasons falls apart. Plot lines can be explained away with ghosts and side elements added for effect and spook factor becomes suddenly potentially important. All that is unfair to the viewers and would make the show sort of… pointless. Unwatchable.
So Caleb’s got to go. Unfortunately he’s one of the more beloved characters on the show and my favorite TV portrayal of a teen lesbian. These are sad times we live in.
Then Hanna does some crying that’s about Caleb but probably also about her day. Fortunately her mom is there because the moral of this story is that men are terrible and you can only count on women. And you can take that one straight to the lesbian bank.
Over at Spencer’s, Papa Hastings further muses about getting Radley shut down. He points out that it’s basically the reincarnation of Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane and probably should get torn down. Also it made him feel sad when Spencer was an inpatient and sick there. Knowing Papa Hasting it probably also hides a big family secret no one wants to talk about.
Over at the Mystery  Cottage Ezra lies in bed staring at Aria staring out the window. They’ve maybe had sex or maybe just felt like taking their pants off and getting into bed and snuggling.
EzrA looks over to the floor where there’s a door. I think that’s the door to where A’s stuff it kept. Or maybe where someone’s corpse is. I hope it’s filled with EzrA masks and we discover EzrA is actually Samara who has been posing as EzrA this whole time to sleep with Aria. Just a thought.
Just when I thought this was going to be a light on the Paily action episode, Emily swings by Paige’s house.
Let the lesbian cage-fighting begin!
Not really/I wish. Actually Paige was really good about it because she’s a sometimes one-dimensional love-Emily robot who defies every high school lesbian by being completely not jealous of Emily’s former dead lovers at all, even though dead former lovers are the BEST former lovers to be jealous of.
What Emily ends up describing is basically the idea that Ali never really loved her. Maybe she never even cared about her. That she was manipulated and taken for granted. Even the fact that Emily phrases it “let me kiss her” indicates that it wasn’t something Ali wanted to engage in or was part of, it was something she allowed Emily to do, probably in exchange for something else.
Even though Emily’s reflection comes on the coattails of discussing Claire’s experience with Sara, and is in a lot of ways specific to having one super manipulative friend, I think what’s she’s expressing is actually a common phase in growing up as a lesbian. A lot of us all, at one point or another, have to reflect on that first straight girl crush and what it meant to her versus what it meant to us. It’s important to stop beating yourself up and realize that it’s not your fault that some straight girl didn’t like you. That’s not a reflection on who you are.
Emily is realizing that it’s not her fault that Ali didn’t have feelings for her. That there was nothing she could have done, even with a time machine, that would make Ali love her. It just wasn’t in the cards for them.
Then Paige and Emily kiss. Just kidding lesbians don’t kiss. They hold hands and have feelings.
Across town Hanna hangs out next to Caleb’s car. I don’t know how she tracked him down but she insists she needs a better goodbye.
The two had a moderately less dramatic farewell and Hanna passes him his tea through the car window and he tells her he’s not going to forget anything.
At this point this has already secured itself as an even more lesbian scene than the lesbian scene before it until, wait for it, Caleb drives away and starts crying in the car.
Well, what else should we expect from my very favorite lesbian on the show.
The Liars reconvene the next day at Ali’s crypt again. Fresh off her emotionally trying breakup, Hanna finally comes clean about the diary. She explains that she hadn’t told them sooner because of what the diary said about all of them. I guess Ali had a lot of secrets to tell.
In the final creepy A scene someone heads right into EzrA’s Mystery cabin and lifts up that floor door. Unfortunately we don’t get to see who it is or what they do. Shocker.
Also usual this episode left me about 45% satisfied and hungry for about 100% more lesbian content. Maybe we’ll have better luck next week when, fingers crossed, we’ll get to see Paige kick over a trashcan again or something.
