Pretty Little Liars Episode 524 Recap: Oooh, Barracuda!

Previously on Pretty Little Liars, Alison went to trial for murdering Mona Vanderwaal and Hanna went to jail for murdering Mona Vanderwaal and Rosewood’s own prosecutor named the Liars as co-conspirators in the fake kidnapping of Alison DiLaurentis which lead to the murder of Mona Vandwerwaal, but nobody thought to say that it’s impossible for any of these people to be guilty of murdering Mona Vandwrwaal because Mona Vanderwaal can’t die. I will never believe Mona Vanderwaal is dead. I saw the body in that car trunk and I don’t believe it. I went to her funeral and wore a lei and saw Mona’s mom punch a child in the face and I don’t believe it. I saw the video and I saw the barrel and I even saw Mona’s glamrock Christmas ghost, and I don’t believe it.

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For a female perspective, we turn to a woman. Sara, who will be ruled The Gayest today?

The story of Perd Hapley covering the Alison DiLaurentis trial is that he’s the news anchor covering the trial. He calls on special correspondent Sara Shepard, who has “been with this case from the beginning” (ha!) and asks if Allison is going down, down, down. The story of that situation is that it’s extremely personal and only the business of Emily Fields. The main thing Sara Shepard tells us is that the prosecution is calling a surprise witness today and it’s got everybody shaking in their boots.

And that witness is bespectacled ginger-haired Vanderloper Leslie Stone, who came to town after (not for) Mona’s funeral claiming to be her best friend and confidante, a thing that had Mike and Hanna’s hackles in quite a knot. Leslie chronicles the things Mona said Ali said to her, including, “If you jibber-jabber the truth to Tanner about my fake kidnapping, I will feed you to some worms.” Lawyer Julie thinks this is hearsay, but the prosecutor produces a greeting card Mona sent to Leslie reiterating the worm thing. A greeting card! “Happy birthday, Leslie! I wish I could share ice cream and cupcakes with you today, but as you’ll remember from our previous phone conversation, I have lost my appetite ever since Alison DiLaurentis threatened to feed me to some worms if I tell the police the truth about how she staged her own abduction. Hope you get a lot of good presents! Love, Mona.” The judge says the greeting card is awesome/admissible.

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Frankly, I’m gayer than all these bitches. I know for a fact Aria and Spencer have never even kissed.

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You said you scissor twice a week!

Well, and then Leslie launches this invective about how the Liars stalked her all around town when she came to visit after (not for) Mona’s funeral. They wouldn’t let her rummage around in Mona’s room unattended. They wouldn’t let her pop all the heads off of Mona’s dolls and shine a flashlight down into their doll guts to look for … things. They wouldn’t let her play Mona’s records backwards. They wouldn’t let her steal Mona’s books. They wouldn’t let her try on Mona’s clothes and rifle through her old coat pockets, or spend just a few minutes poking around on her laptop, or even let her flashback without Hanna standing there watching.

Spencer runs out of the courtroom like a maniac to call Caleb for some reason, but she bumps into Officer Toby on the stairs and they feel weird about how Spencer keeps making out with everyone who is not him and he keeps not telling her top secret police business. He wants to know how the Oxford interview went. She wants to know why he didn’t fucking call her the second he found out Tanner had an arrest warrant for Hanna. He wants to know if she’s still thinking about going to college in Hawaii. She wants to know what/who the goddamn hell was in that barrel in Hanna’s storage locker that Tanner confiscated. Spencer barely even has a chance to explain that she had to ride a dolphin across the Atlantic Ocean because her purse came to life and started bleeding all over a thousand-year-old chair and she was scared to get on a plane, because Emily comes clomping down the steps hollering about how barracudas have duller teeth than Leslie and they need to get Hanna on the phone stat.

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These are the votes from the Lesbian Blogger Community about who’s the gayest.

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Let me see them and I’ll show you my bra.

There are always a couple of really standout episodes of PLL during every mini-season, but usually the one right before each mini-season finale is the most fun and exciting because that’s when all the chess pieces that have been moving around all season finally click into place at a frenetic pace. This next scene right here is the tops.

Alison is on a payphone at one end of the jail and Hanna is on a payphone at the other end of the jail and they’re conferencing in with the Liars at Spencer’s house to talk about Leslie.

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YOU’VE NEVER EVEN KISSED?

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I wonder if granola bars would make a cute skirt.

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Emily, you vouched for us kissing, right? Three times in real life, once as a ghost, and then when we had sex?

Ali: Who the fuck is Leslie Stone? Did she enroll at Rosewood High when I was dead or something?
Hanna: Yeah, and where does she get off saying I stalked her? All I did was not let her ransack my dead girlfriend’s bedroom. Emily gets it.
Ali: Whatever, what’s up with the “Varjak trail”?
Aria: Well, he definitely ordered some pizza.
Ali: Let Spencer talk.
Spencer: We texted him and he called Aria back and played Edith Piaf so we broke into Mona’s bedroom because that’s where she and Hanna used to have sex to the soundtrack of Edith Piaf and hidden inside a broken mirror we found a notecard with clues on it but we haven’t cracked them yet because we can’t find a decoder parrot.
Ali: Damn. Listen, I still don’t have a solid alibi because I didn’t see anyone when I was hanging out at that busted park by myself for ten hours waiting for Cyrus the day Mona was killed, but someone may have seen me and she probably owns a jacket with flowers on it.

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Heather Hogan

Heather Hogan is an Autostraddle senior editor who lives in New York City with her wife, Stacy, and their cackle of rescued pets. She's a member of the Television Critics Association, GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics, and a Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer critic. You can also find her on Twitter and Instagram.

Heather has written 1719 articles for us.

43 Comments

  1. – Two months? Did somebody forget that they’re on Rosewood time?
    – Somebody is jealous of Hanna’s relationship with Mona.
    – What’s in the box?!?
    – I thought that it was Paige that apparated in, not Piper.
    – Emily, are you wearing short shorts?
    – “How about you let me talk to her?” “Okay.” “Hi, have you-” “I’M GOING TO EAT YOU!”
    – I simply thought that the girl was homeless.
    – For once, I agree with Ezra. Caleb doesn’t give a crap about Mike. He’s rationalizing in order to help Hanna.
    – Mike just got the crap beat out of him, and Caleb is all, “This can prove Hanna is innocent.”
    – Ah, poor Alison. Is all of your lying and manipulation catching up with you?
    – It looks like next episode Spencer goes down the rabbit hole again, and takes the other liars with her.

    • Seriously though, we all know that Spencer tried to murder Ali because Spencer had sex with Aria, Aria told Ali, and Ali taunted Spencer, right?

    • I hope you’re right about the rabbit hole! A collective hallucination would be just the thing!

  2. aria’s face about the tongue and the craft supplies, that was hilarious, everything was but that especially. Do we know if season 6 will be the final season? We will finally learn who A is and season 6 will be proving it, right? Also the castle that a doll is placed in at the end, thats radley right?who’s the doll?

    im so with you about ezra,….i think he is this show’s greatest failing if they don’t have him held accountable.

      • Then isn’t the real Big A Reveal the end of season six? Cuz we were told we’d know before season seven. I mean I GUESS this time could be for real, but then what are they gonna do for two seasons?

      • oooh!!i read somewhere that lasts weeks episode had 1.7 mil viewers, “my sources” (read the internet), think season 7 might be shortened because of it. we’ll see if the numbers of the A reveal will pick up as a result. if its done well maybe the pick up can be sustained for the whole 2 seasons.

        • So I read somewhere that Marlene’s tweets say it’s going to be a “big” reveal about A, not a reveal of Big A, though Big A will be in the finale, ergo anyone not there we can cross off our lists. And that whoefur is Big A, we’ve seen in a hoodie befur, but then does that mean THE hoodie, or just A hoodie? Anyway, I think Marlene said after the finale, “we’d be able to put it together / have all we’d need” to deduce the identity of Big A, but there won’t be, like, a name or a shot of someone in a black hoodie and we just suddenly know who it’s been all this time. But then they said the reveal was happening befur season 7 – so does that mean THIS not really reveal, or an actual propurr reveal? Goodness knows… They do taunt us. I hope I’m wrong about this – I’ve not actmewally waded through the tweets myself to check.

          • If they do give us enough to figure it out, doesn’t mean the Liars will know who it is yet. They’ll find out sometime before season seven, but we may learn before six starts so we can be frustrated that they can’t figure it out, too. It would actually be really creepy to see them trusting someone that we know is out to ax murder them.

    • A few months ago the show got renewed for season 6 and season 7. It’s been pretty much confirmed that season 7 will be the end, but who the hell knows if that’ll happen.

  3. This is NOT in defense of Andrew, but it was his year book page that Aria asked to look at,

  4. I’m actually thinking Andrew might be guilty of SOMETHING, simply by the fact that SPENCER HASN’T ACCUSED HIM YET. But maybe that’s just because she’s been a little busy making out with every OTHER guy in her vicinity. Oh and getting arrested. But then again, he’s probably just another red herring.

    OH. ORRRRR. Mona faked her own death, per A’s instructions, then A instructed ANDREW to ACTUALLY murder her. In the woods. With arrows. And Andrew’s been working for A ever since trying to hide the fact that Ali didn’t actually kill Mona.

    My latest theory is that Jenna is Big A, and because she’s blind, she has to keep recruiting people to actually do all her dirty work for her – Mona, Shana, Toby (for a while), Caleb (for a while), Ian, Garret, Melissa, Lucas, etc. And now, apparently, Andrew. Just needed to put that out there in anticipation of the possibility that Big A might actually be revealed next week, so I can get credit for my genius :)

    • I said the same thing on the last recap! Great minds think alike. I think that Jenna is the only one with the motive to be A. Who else would have that level of hatred toward the liars?
      It’s also clear from her history with Toby and Shana that Jenna has Ali-level manipulation skills and disregard for other people’s feelings.
      The show tends to make people seem totally guilty and then reveal that they have been terribly misunderstood (think Toby, Melissa, Ezra etc). They have never done that with Jenna. We have seen Jenna suffer too, but even the scenes that were meant to humanize her never exonerate her the way that the other characters have been exonerated.
      But who knows it’s probably Ali’s undead secret twin sister who is seeking revenge for having been kept in an underground bunker for 15 years by Rev. Ted.

      • Toby has plenty of reason to hate them. He did time because Ali blackmailed him into confessing to blinding Jenna, when he was actually being raped by Jenna on a semi-regular basis. None of the other Liars spoke up to clear his name after they thought Ali had been killed. If that’s not reason to hate them, I don’t know what is.

  5. That picture of Church Guy’s face popping into that tunnel was eerily similar to when Johnny’s face was peeping in Spencer’s window. Same creeper smile. Same white dude face. I’m surprised Spencer didn’t make out with Church Guy on the spot.

  6. Awesome recap, Heather. As always!

    I recently read a theory that Toby is actually the one with a twin (Charles). Their parents being Marion and Mr. D. Charles killed Toby in season 3 and Spencer really did see his dead body in the woods (which drove her to a stay at Radley). Charles has been pretending to be Toby ever since.

    Mind blown

  7. “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.”

    Yup. Yup yup yup. Yup yup yup yup yup.

    Fuck this guy.

  8. Hilarious recap!
    that jacket thing was the silliest, like really? Ali described it so vividly they just recognized it instantly?
    Ezra really is the worst..

  9. Ok, when Spencer and Emily are in the Hastings dark kitchen drinking spaghetti sauce talking about how she’s kissing everyone because she just wanted a warm body to curl up against, it made me think about that Spencer Paige fic you shared w us on FanFic Friday.

  10. As the Bros Watch PLL Too guys put it, I think Mona is Gone Girling everyone. I’ve refused her death since we “saw” her in the trunk. I need more Ali/Mona slaps.

  11. A staged a breakin at Monas and planted the screwdriver with their prints on it at the scene. Possibly blood of theirs and monas too.

  12. Was anyone else a bit thrown when a teenage girl on this show made a mistake and she was worried about her parents finding out, not how her homicidal stalker was going to use it against her?

  13. Toby constantly wants to be the big hero by being a double/sleeper agent but forgetting that doesn’t mean he only helps the opposition. Joining the police force is the same thing from the liars POV as helping mona.

  14. Your best recap of 5B :)
    Gosh so many funny moments in this, but I laughed so hard at this:
    “whose name is Kendra (which is the name of the character Bianca Lawson played on Buffy and so therefore Maya is A)”
    because I just finished reading a whole lot of tumblr theories, and some of them are just as wacky as this, lol.

    Somehow I have managed to keep away from the Daisygate spoilers, or at least I think I have (maybe one of those crazy tumblr theories is real) but, I was just wondering if anyone is actually happy at what they say? because some people seem super unhappy about it.

  15. I’m not sure what it says about the influence this show has on me, that I didn’t even bat an eyelash at the poor use of the law and lawyering in this episode. One thing that did bother me, how was Ali unable to manipulate even one juror into finding her not guilty? She manipulates people all the time, with practically no effort. Why not now? Did she want to be convicted?

  16. Hilarious recap as always :-D
    This episode was great. Andrew is being too obvious, there’s no way he’s A. Not even A-team material; he’s just jealous of Ezria’s relationship. So, it’s only natural he would try and kill the dude. After all, it is the Rosewood way. I’ve put him in the cousin Nate-category..

    My money is on Aria all the way. Yes, it would suck, but it’s her. There are just too many clues pointing to her. I re-watched the pilot episode and found the last piece of the puzzle I needed to be 100% sure. Like I couldn’t believe I didn’t see that massive clue before, mind was blown.. And now we wait :-)

      • I’ll say this, just look at the text messages from “A” in the pilot. Really, really look at them, compare and find the differences between them. Seriously, it’ll change your life haha

  17. Ezra and his windowless white van, LOL. Sounds about right. Oh goddess, I’m like so ridiculously excited for next week!!!

  18. Just caught up with all the eps then came on here to read all the recaps. Heather, great recaps as always. Was LOLing everywhere. I am also commenting to say that the captions for the pics are HIGH-LAY-RIOUS! I love ’em. Thank you both!

  19. Okay but is the US even in the commonwealth cause I kind of thought that they threw too much tea in the harbour for that???? In which case the jury has literally no qualifications for anything

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