Pretty Little Liars Recap Episode 422: Let’s Just Randomly Make Up Who “A” Is

PLL422-00134

Sitting on the dock of the bay, waaaatching the tiiiide roll away.

Aria and Riley sit on a dock and talk about why they’re at Syracuse. Aria says a guy broke her heart into a million pieces. Riley also speaks but no one listens/cares.

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Ugh, never trust someone who gives you a wet forehead kiss. It means they hate you.

Later in her hotel room, as they’re both leaving prospective students week early, he gives her a coupon to beat up the man who broke her heart.

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Pro tip: love coupons suck.

Awww unnecessary violence just hits you right in the feels, doesn’t it? This makes Aria realize that she can just go beat up Ezra herself. Okaaaaaay…. we’ll see where this goes.


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No one suspects Mrs. D because she wears a nice button-up and a cardigan. You’d never see this woman in a black hoodie.

At the Hastings, Mrs. D stops by to ask Mrs. Hastings if she can come to her little party, a wedding charity event thing. Mrs. Hastings dodges that bullet, but Mrs. D makes a remark about Spencer’s nice, clean sheets. Creepy, but not murderous, right? Or so you may think. This feels like the very first instance where Mrs. D is anything dangerous, anything above being a grieving mother who has gone a little strange in her sorrow.


PLL422-00169

Did you just call my sweater ugly?! Come at me, bro!

Mike comes into the Brew and asks Emily where Aria is, because she mos’def broke up Mike and Mona. Ah, the dramatic inner-workings of teen angst. I just love it.


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So then it’s just a skip, jump, kick-ball-change, pirouette, pirouette 2-3-4.

Spencer is off running with Dean because she can’t go to school, so she might as well exercise. I mean, this doesn’t sound too bad, but having to spend any kind of time at all with Dean seems like Spencer’s personal hell.

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PLL422-00181

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Sooooo…. this can’t be good.

As she runs, something triggers a flashback and we see her chasing Ali through the woods with a shovel. Ali trips and falls, the shovel comes down, blood spatters on Spence’s face. What the fuck? Did Spencer fake-kill Ali? This freaks her and the rest of us out and she talks about it later with Dean, and by “talks about it”, I mean ambiguously cries and vaguely hints that she has some regrets in life.

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He gives her a letter from Toby, postmarked from London. LONDON?! That is not in Pennsylvania, I’m pretty sure. We get to see Spencer reading the letter, but we don’t know what it says. Any guesses? Think it’s a Dear John?


PLL422-00199

I’m only on a date with you so that everyone can see how great my hair looks tonight, jsyk.

On Hanna’s date (can we just all agree that Hanna’s hair looks amazing in this episode, what is her secret? I just love it so much), Buzzcut actually seems like an okay guy, so naturally let’s all take bets on how many episodes we have to go until we believe that he might be A or on A’s team. One? Two?

PLL422-00202

Sorry I’m creepin’ on every scene tonight, just gotta stay relevant enough for the writers to act like I’m A.

Mrs. D comes by and is super duper sketch, asking Hanna how she’s doing and speaking slowly and with maximum seediness.

PLL422-00206

Aw shucks, Mrs. D, this tie was just somethin’ I had laying around.

Mrs. D walks off and Hanna watches as the cops step out of nowhere to question her.

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Ever noticed how the Liars never save any messages on their phones? It doesn’t pop up with anything recent, really? Not even a “Check out this cat pic I found” like all of my messages to my friends are?

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Hansen

Hansen is the former DIY & Food Editor of Autostraddle.com and likes to spend most days making and cooking and writing. She teaches creative writing at Colorado State University and is pursuing a Masters of Fine Arts in her free time.

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16 Comments

  1. Okay, what the fuck with Jessica being A. WHAT THE FUCK. NO. WHY. EZRA MADE SUCH A GOOD CREEPY VILLAIN. WHY CAN’T WE HAVE A VILLAIN WHO HAS NO ULTERIOR PLANS OR BACKSIES OR REDEEMING STORIES. FUCK. WHY. JUST. UGH.

    I’m incensed that they backtracked Ezra as A.

    • They can’t reveal who A is to the audience until the very end of the series or it defeats the entire purpose of the show.

      • Not really. I mean, *we* can know who A is before they do, and that would add another level of tension as we watch the girls try to figure out what we already know.

        • But for an entire season? That’s a really long time. Audience will get bored. Maybe like halfway through the last season.

        • You mean the audience will get bored moreso than the constant teasings of who A really is? If I didn’t like the characters so much, I would’ve given up on this frustrating game years ago.

  2. A is clearly Ali. It’s not just me who sees that right? I don’t watch the show a lot (I sorta keep up with it bc my little sister watches it and it gives us something to talk about) but I don’t get why the writers keep trying to lead people on as to who A is. It has to be Ali.

    • I think it’s Ali, too. She’s kind of awful and pathologically manipulative and thrives on drama. She may have gotten caught up in some scheme of hers where it was in her best interest to fake her own death to escape consequences, but I would still totally believe she’s hanging around fucking with her friends just because she can.

      • No she’s pretending to be in danger. She’s definitely just doing one really long “fucking with you” to the liars. She got a lot of money out of it. Also any other ending would feel like an ass pull.

  3. i hate it that ezra isn’t A. There are all these older men preying on young girls and i remember from the train episode, the one with adam lambert, when ezra burst in from nowhere and he was supposed to have been out of town for a job interview that he was all kinds of suspect. him being A i thought had been set since then and i thought it made a heck of a lot more sense than this journalist crap. as far as mrs. d,…i mean when emily stayed over at her place the sense of how unstable she was was so clear, her being dangerous is not a big leap. but my problem with the show are all these stupid red herrings, we’ll come to the end of another season and mrs.d will claim to have been spying on the girls to make sure they ate all their vegetables or something.

  4. I’m still wondering if they’re eventually going to go the way of the books, and have the ‘Ali’ who was killed actually be Alison’s identical twin sister Courtney, and A be the real Ali, who blamed Courtney and the liars for ruining her life.
    Sometimes the books were weirder than the show.

    • Wait, that’s really what happened in the books? Holy shit that is amazing. Like, completely bananas. I’m in!

  5. i’m really glad to once again have a male love interest named Riley on TV to be bored by/loathe!

  6. is anyone else really really enjoying the enlightened way they are portraying addiction as something that makes ppl crazy and violent? just because pills. and the spencer is back to normal what a trip! that time i accidentally maybe killed somebody! THANKS PRETTY LITTLE LIARS

  7. “The pic that launched a thousand Jessica DiLaurentis/Spencer Hasting shippers.”

    HAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAA ultimate levels of wrong.

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