Previously on Pretty Little Liars, Alison got arrested for the murder of Mona Vanderwaal. Hanna got arrested for the murder of Mona Vanderwaal. Spencer, Aria, and Emily got arrested for helping their friends lie about the murder of Mona Vanderwaal, and not one single Rosewood police officer bothered to care that Mona’s body had never actually been found or that some omnipotent texting ninja in a black hoodie had been stalking these girls for the past five seasons.
Caution: spoliers ahead!
This episode opens with the four Liars locked in a van as they’re being carted off to prison for being accessories to Mona’s murder. “An accessory is a necklace,” Aria helpfully points out. And if there’s one thing Aria “One Feather Earing Giant Spider Locket Disembodied Cat Head Jacket” knows, it’s accessories.
But then the van stops, the doors open and dun dun DUN it’s A! The creepy, shadowed figure of A holds up what looks like a giant GRENADE LAUNCHER that shoots out gas and knocks all of the girls out! It’s so scary, guys. But at the same time it’s the least scary part of this terrifyingly crazy episode.
The Liars all wake up still in their orange prison jumpsuits in exact models of their own bedrooms and soon realize that they’re trapped in A’s house. A’s underground dollhouse and they’re the life-size dolls.
Hanna because she is amazing and a role model to us all stares down the spy-cam and tells A that she’s not putting up with his/her creepy nonsense, but the girls still listen to instructions and come face to face with a girl in an Alison mask who is….Mona! Mona is alive and honestly we all knew she was way too hardcore to ever really get herself murdered. Mona reveals that A has been forcing her to dress and act like Alison (for months!) and if she doesn’t listen A blasts a loud siren, traps her without food, and even makes her listen to the sounds of people crying at her funeral!
This is the most dark and twisted this show has EVER gotten and considering last season’s finale ended with finding out the mother of a teenage girl buried her alive, that’s saying a lot.
So now the Liars plus Mona have to play the part of A’s dolls. Their first big assignment is to recreate the Rosewood Senior Prom from seven years ago, “A Night At the Opera”.
The next night Spencer stays up mentally rearranging blocks A placed in their fake play room, figuring out the blocks spell out “Charles”. She secretly tells the other girls that Charles must be A’s actual name. The next day while decorating Spencer and Mona combine their super-human intellects and devise a plan to build a machine out of wires and copper piping that will temporarily short-circuit A’s electronic system monitoring the house. This will allow them all time to escape. Over the next few days all of the girls fake cheerfulness while carrying out instructions and passing each other messages. “I’m SCARED!” says Hanna’s notecard. Us too Hanna, us too.
Spencer hides the control to her and Mona’s device inside a fake polaroid camera and instructs Aria to use the camera to activate the switch on Prom Night when Mona is crowned queen.
While the girls are acting out A’s House of Horrors, the Pretty Little Dudes (Caleb, Toby, and Ezra) try to track down the missing van. Caleb puts his teen hacker skills to use and tries to break into Rosewood’s police computer system while saying words like cyber-jacked. Toby tries to convince everyone that he’s an actual police officer in a town where the police are consistently useless, and Ezra gets mad and punches a wall.
Clearly getting nowhere, the boys decide to bring in some backup, Spencer’s Lawyer Mom and Lawyer Dad, who decide to go interrogate Alison in prison because even though she’s locked up for life “they all know what Alison is capable of”. (Sidenote: I love how all the adults on this show talk about Ali like she is the Joker rather than a blonde teenage girl trapped in jail).
When the Hastings confront Alison about the missing van she does what someone on this show should have done a long time ago and tells them that A is back and is responsible for torturing and kidnapping their daughter and her friends.
Now that everyone’s finally on the same page, the Liar boyfriends, the Hastings lawyer duo, and Police Chief Tanner team up to try to track down the missing van and arrest the actual bad guy of the show instead of their previous strategy of arresting literally everyone else.
Back at A’s Barbie Nightmare House, the girls enter the fake prom in fierce dresses and more perfect makeup than anything I could ever hope to achieve despite the fact that they have spent the past week as captives in an underground psycho lair. Natasha Beningfiled’s “Unwritten” plays (#tbt) and they try to spot ChArles in a crowd of mannequins that have been set up on the floor. When ChArles emerges, Aria uses the fake camera to shut down all the power in the house and all the girls make a break for it!
Spencer and Mona run into a secret vault where Spencer finds a home movie of Alison’s mom telling two boys (OMG Twin Theory) to kiss their little sister. Spencer suspects that ChArles is Ali’s and Jason’s brother and as she runs to join the other girls outside the house the power snaps back on and all of them find themselves trapped behind an electric fence!
A disturbingly cheery song appropriately titled “Don’t Fence Me In” plays over the speakers (Does A just have music prepared for every situation???) and the camera fades back to reveal that all the girls are completely alone in the middle of an empty forest. How can they ever hope to get free? We’ll have to wait until the season 6 premiere this summer!