PRETTY LITTLE LIARS: Recap 3.12: The Lady Killers

The words flying out of my mouth at the end of last night’s episode are nothing I would ever want my mother to hear me saying. I’m not sure what happened, but I had a word vomit of expletives, at a volume I’m sure my neighbors didn’t appreciate.

WARNING SPOILERS AHEAD! If you have not watched this episode of Pretty LittleLiars and don’t know who the “new A” is, then you might want to skip right over this recap. For the rest of you….let’s go!

This episode was nicknamed “The BetrAyal” for a darn good reason. I felt betrayed by the entire PLL writing staff after sixty minutes of feeling like I was on the verge of a heart attack! From the moment PLL started my nerves were on edge. It was dark, it looked like they were in the woods somewhere. You see flashing lights, like on emergency vehicles and hear someone crying. What is going on?! As figures come into view it just gets creepier, we see Hanna crying uncontrollably being flanked by Aria and Spencer who are attempting to comfort her. Emily is across the way somewhere being interviewed by a cop. She looks banged up and totally out of it. Someone is being taken away in a body bag, and someone else is being carted into an ambulance. And thus begins a night of “OMGs” and “Am I losing my mind?”

The cut comes and we are brought to two days before the midnight madness in the woods. All the girls minus Emily are in Spencer’s kitchen practicing what they are going to say to Emily for their intervention. I’ve seen an intervention on many things, but the “Your girlfriend is a psycho-killer so you have to give her up” intervention is a new one for me. Maybe it’s more common than I think, who knows?

Spencer makes an interesting reference to [easyazon-link asin=”B000IDJNJ8″]Basic Instinct[/easyazon-link], and Aria and Hanna remind me that I am totally old because they have no idea what that movie is.

Photo: ABC FAMILY/ERIC MCCANDLESS

Emily comes in not expecting an intervention, but an apology from the girls for the way they treated Paige. When she finds out what their little meeting is really about she storms out. But not before giving us this little gem, “Three against one, A wins.” Emily has a point, as long as the girls are fighting, they can’t come together and fight the super pact that is A.

At Rosewood High Aria is rocking some killer boots and contemplating what it will be like to be a step-mom, when Hanna comes over with the news that Emily was not in first period. It is so unlike our good girl Emily to miss school, so this is really big news. BAMF!Emily was definitely in control this episode.

Aria spells the beans about her future as a the girlfriend of a man with a baby mama. And Hanna tells her that she needs to tell Ezra because secrets “tear us apart.” Sage advice Hanna, sage advice.

Spencer is at her locker which happens to be just a few lockers down from Paige, and you already know the fists are going to be a flying. There is a lot of locker slamming, threats back and forth, and a strategically placed field hockey stick (I became a little afraid of Paige in this scene).

Paige is now at Emily’s house comforting Em in that fabulous window seat I love so much, when Emily decides to lay it out on the table, telling Paige about there being another A. Paige puts two and two together and realizes (or pretends to just now realize) that Emily’s friends thinks she is A, and therefore will do anything and everything they can to keep the pair apart. In the middle of their convo Paige gets a text.

She makes an excuse about having to do some family stuff, so she won’t be able to be with Emily this weekend, but when that is done she will be right with her. Or something like that.

Back at school all the girls (minus Emily of course) are in the courtyard, where we learn that Hanna knows how to butcher vocabulary in two languages. “Worser” and “Yo hablo sicko”, oh Hanna Marin how I heart you and your way with words. Aria brings up telling the cops, Spencer brings up telling their parents, and many people had to pinch themselves because for once the PLLs were thinking logically.

However, neither one of those things happen. Their phones chirp, and all three ladies get a text that threatens to hurt Emily is they don’t “Stand down.” How the heck  does A, always know what they are saying all the time everywhere?

Next we are given a beautiful little scene complete with a great soundtrack of Mona leaving Radley in a nurse’s uniform. I could have sworn nurses haven’t worn anything like this since 1972, but since I wasn’t around then, I could be mistaken.

At Hanna’s house the three PLL’s that are still speaking to each other, are sitting around talking about what they are going to do. Spencer gets an email from A, that has pictures of the girls from the night at Ali’s grave. The pictures are just of Hanna, Aria, and Spencer. They correctly deduce that A could set them up for being the ones that dug up Alison, while leaving Emily completely in the clear. This adds more fuel to the fire that Paige is A. One last pic, and it is of a body bag. If you weren’t terrified of A before, then you should be now.

The girls hear a noise and go all, I’ll bash your head with a pink furry lamp, but it turns out to be Caleb, so everything is cool. They show him the pictures from A, along with the message they got to meet A at Ali’s grave and he insists on coming with them.

Hanna and Spencer are in town at the coffee shoppe while Emily is at home packing for her trip out of town with Nate. Why Emily would agree to go out of town with a guy who showed you his crazy on more than one occasion is beyond me. However, we all know that Emily doesn’t always make the best decisions about where she is going. Anyone remember the barn scene from Season 2? How about the greenhouse? Yes, I think Emily likes to put her life in danger. Maybe she is an adrenaline junky. Hanna calls Emily using the phone of one of the girls that works in the coffee shoppe, because clearly at this point Emily is not trying to hear whatever Hanna or any of the other girls are trying to say. Quick convo, Hanna finds out that Emily is going out of town for the weekend, and quickly gets hung on by one of her former BFFs. The trip with Nate is supposed to be with his parents, as well as Maya’s, as a celebration of Maya before the trial starts and everything gets completely wanky (yes I am using a Glee term in a PLL recap, I like my fandoms to cross over).

Out of nowhere a Wild!Toby appears in the center of town and Spoby fans the universe over jump to their feet in celebration.

In Ezra’s apartment, Aria and Ezra are acting like an old married couple, when there is a knock at the door and who is it other than Alex Mack (Maggie, the mother of Ezra’s child). She if of course surprised to see Aria opening the door because she thought her Aria was Amy the Aspiring Elementary School Teacher. Maggie plays it cool and doesn’t blow Aria’s cover when Ezra reintroduces them. Later we find out that Maggie will keep Aria’s secret, if Aria will keep hers. There is “more to the story than you know” so Aria needs to keep quiet, while Maggie decides what to do with the information of the existence of Ezra’s son. Somehow I feel like all of this is going
to end very badly.

At Hanna’s place Caleb is packing for their rendezvous with A, including packing some heat. Hanna doesn’t approve of guns, but Caleb isn’t really giving her a choice.

Next scene is a pretty steamy Spoby sex scene set to music by Bear Attack. Nothing else to say about this scene except, IT WAS HOT!

Yes, I will take my Spoby nice and steamy, thank you.

At the A-lair we see Mona decked out in her black, along with another hooded and gloved accomplice. Whatever the plan was, it has changed. Whatever that means, we don’t know until later in the episode.

The next few scenes cut back and forth between the girls waiting at Ali’s grave, for who they assume is Mona or Paige, and Emily at the cabin with Nate. To make this easier, I will just recap what happens in each place individually.

At the cemetery, they wait. Okay, done.

At the cabin, Emily is sleeping then the phone rings and it is a modulated voice telling her she has one minute to get out. Of course this scares the beejeezus out of Emily and she jumps up looking for Nate. While waiting for Nate she notices his bags, gets curious and looks inside. Again, why would Emily go off in the woods some place with a guy she is so suspicious of that she feels the need to go through his stuff? This is all bad. Turns out to be a good thing she does go through his bag, because she sees an envelope with no main address, but her return address on it. Ummm, uh? Why would Nate have that? Nate returns all chipper with some firewood, then Emily notices some paint on his boots.

The boots of DOOM.

Why is this important? Because Emily has seen those paint covered boots before.
They were in a picture of Maya at True North. Uh oh.

It’s looking more and more like Nate is the evil stalker dude from True North, which makes me both happy and sad. Happy because it explains why someone who was supposed to be Maya’s cousin was so obsessed with her (for real, if he was her cousin the way he was acting was totally gross), but sad because that means Emily is out in the middle of nowhere with a crazy stalker by herself. I hope you can run really really fast, Em.

Emily tries to get a signal on her phone, but of course in the middle of nowhere you can’t get a bar, so she decides to go for a walk. Nate starts to show more of his crazy before she even leaves the cabin, but ultimately things don’t go completely Alfred Hitchcock horror movie, until she is in the middle of the woods trying to make a call.

Emily – gasp “You scared me half to death!”

Nate – creepy smile “No, but I’m about to.”

At this point if you weren’t screaming at your television, I don’t know what else you were doing.

Nate takes Emily back into the cabin, where we learn just how deep the rabbit hole goes. Nate shows Emily a video that Maya made for her, which is sad and creepy gives me all types of sad Emaya feelings. Nate reveals that since Emily took Maya away from him, he is going to take something she loves away from her. Reveal! Paige tied up and duct taped in the closet. WHAT?! When did she get there?

Back to the rest of the PLLs, okay so they didn’t just wait at the cemetery the whole time. Caleb finally realized this was all a set up. He tells the girls to go left, while he goes right. The girls end up at Noel Kahn’s cabin, which of course is completely empty, while Caleb ends up in the woods near Emily.

Emily escapes from the cabin, leaving a bound Paige, and Nate goes in hot pursuit after her. They end up inside the lighthouse, where they battle it out and Emily ends up stabbing Nate in the gut. I told you BAMF!Emily was in control this episode. She is seriously, no longer the weakest link. Caleb arrives just into time to see Nate’s lifeless body on the floor of the lighthouse, and Emily with a bloody knife in her hands. He hugs an understandably shaken Emily, while the camera pulls to an outside wide shot of the lighthouse. There is a gun blast, we don’t know what the heck just happened and now we are right back where we began.

Emily being questioned by a cop looking completely out of it, Hanna completely losing it, and now we see Paige giving a statement to the police also. Remember the text Paige received earlier? It was about Emily getting hurt is she didn’t show up to the right place at the
right time.

Next scene the girls are at the hospital. Caleb is in surgery, so that must have been Nate in the body bag? But then who shot Caleb? Was it Nate? Did he get off the ground and with one final breath shot Caleb? Did Emily forget a cardinal rule of the zombie apocalypse? ALWAYS double tape. Or was it a member of the A-team? At this point we don’t know. What we do know is that A is stepping up his/her game.

While sitting in the waiting room the girls receive an incoming call from a blocked ID all at the same time. One guess who it is from. The message, “Emily, I owe you one” seems to implicate Garret as being A or a member of the A team, as he was released from prison since everyone thinks Nate/Lyndon (his real name) killed Maya. Honestly, I’m not convinced it was Nate, but I also don’t think Maya’s killer and Ali’s killer are the same person.

The last scene, and the reason most of us have been losing our minds, was of Mona back in her nurse’s uniform walking some someone in a black hoodie. She is chatting all friendly with the person, so you know it is the “other A.” Apparently their plan for the evening was to frame Paige to get Garret out of jail. Now they are just plotting to get Maya’s cell phone back from Paige (who doesn’t even know she has it). The last shot, is the money shot. It’s where we get to see who the “new A” is and the one that has betrAyed them all…

This is moment where I lost all proper decorum, and words just came spilling out of my mouth.

OMG! IS THAT TOBY?! THAT CAN’T BE TOBY! SAY IT AIN’T SO! WHAT? NO! NO WAY! IT CAN’T BE!! NO, NO NO!!!!!

Plus a whole lot of other words that I can’t publish here on NiceGirlsTV. 😉

People are speculating on whether Toby was always a member of the A-team or whether he joined to help save Spencer. I tend to believe the former. Not because I think Toby is a bad guy, but because I think he (along with many others) really hated Alison. I’m one of the rare people that don’t believe that everyone on the A-team is evil. Don’t hate me for it.

So what did you think of THE BIG REVEAL? Did you scream? Did you cry? Did you throwing things at your TV and vow never to watch it again? Did you tape your reaction and post it on youtube for all the world to see? Let us know in the comments section. All ‘A’ theories are welcomed.

Pretty Little Liars airs on ABCFamily Tuesdays at 8/7c. This was their mid-season finale, so they won’t be back with new episodes until October.

What do you do until then? Well come up with new theories of course! Come here to NiceGirlsTV as we try to figure out this tangled web that Marlene has caught us all in.