Hanna
This season, Hanna is really into awkward hair, unsubtle lines of questioning, and t-shirts that show off her bra. The trouble is, she slept in this one, and I don't believe for a second that very many seventeen-year old girls sleep in their bras. Thirty-seven year old girls rarely do, and we even have gravity to fear.
However, Hanna is having a nightmare in this scene, so instead of finding her mother lying on the deck chair...
WHERE ARE YOU MICHAEL MANCINI?
She finds DR. KIMBERLY SHAW. Well, okay, it's a nightmare about her mother being in prison and having her head shaved, but still. It's CLEARLY an homage to the best show ever, despite the fact that PLL's target audience was probably barely even born when She Ripped Off Her Wig; now we just need Heather Locklear to stroll through the background of a shot alongside Jack Wagner's old face.
Hanna
To her credit, Ashley Benson delivers a very picturesque scream of horror. It's not quite enough to distract me from that dumb shirt, but it's close. I don't judge, though; lots of people sleep in dumb shirts. It's what dumb shirts are for, right? But this one keeps tricking me into thinking that the front is peeling open into a keyhole, and then I realize that no, it's just a cartoon person, peeling open my brain.
Sydney
I love you, Laura Leighton.
Spencer
Spencer is the preppiest of the preppy. The lines of her button-down shirt under a stiffly buttoned cardigan are a bit much, but then again, so is Spencer sometimes. She's still bummed out because she didn't get into Penn, but her mother is making her sit down with a college admissions advisor to try and "rebrand" her so that she can get into school and not just be Homeless Formerly Institutionalized Preppy Girl Who Does Weekend Filing For Her Mother.
Hanna
Easy there, Joe Thighsman, you might want to put those away while you're at school.
YES
However, Aria is wearing A SKIRT OF TIES, which is something that must be capitalized ever since Kelly Clarkson busted one out in "From Justin To Kelly." Which, during its next run on HBO or Showtime, will totally be a "Fug the Fromage" candidate because IT IS A REAL THING THAT HAPPENED and that still amazes me.
Aria
It takes a lot of guts to wear A SKIRT OF TIES to school, also, because the principal who knows you've a penchant for shacking up with your teachers MIGHT misinterpret this as a braggy tribute to all the fancy males whose neckties you've loosened over the years.
Aria
The killer is, though, that Aria actually looks super cute in A SKIRT OF TIES and that top and coat (and, Lord help me, the socks and granny shoes), because unlike this SKIRT OF TIES, it's actually well thought-out and not frightening. Unlike this storyline, which is: Aria's mom is having second-thoughts about going to Vienna because Aria's brother sucks, so A has decided to scare Aria a little...
Bzzzzz
... by unleashing a swarm of six whole bees into Aria's mother's car. Apparently all she can do is sit there and swat at them, instead of opening the door and getting the hell out of there like most people would do. If you're going to get stung either way, at LEAST get the bees out of captivity so that they have other people to poke.
Preppy Boy
This is the admissions counselor. Remember the BIRD WHO KNEW TOO MUCH, and that phone number it knew? Spencer and Aria figured out that the prefixes matched Cicero College, so Spencer uses this guy to get an interview there -- but Emily is also hanging around chit-chatting, and he offers to help her get into schools, too, since her bum shoulder means she can't swim, and also she's gorgeous.
Sydney
Over at Hellrose Place, Sydney has hired Spencer's mother to be her lawyer, because she's pretty sure she's up a creek without any kind of life-saving aids. Her sensible blue blazer makes her look marginally less like the murderous hussy the cops think she is.
Hanna
But seriously, bad things are afoot at the Circle K(eratin). If those aren't bad extensions, then she needs to stop combing her hair with a salad shooter.
Aria
Aria gets sidelined from the fun action this week because they paid for Chad Lowe, so instead she goes to him and tells HIM to sort things out so that her mom goes to Vienna for the year. (Her brother has thrown a wrench in the works because he thinks Aria is trying to shove her out of the way as a means to getting back into Fitz's pants.) Chad agrees and never once asks why she made this request while wearing a bloodthirsty tiger on her chest.
Spencer
Oh, girl. Bicycle kerchiefs work on you, and ONLY you. And even that might not be a true statement. Separately, I read that she's living with Patrick J. Adams from "Suits," and I love that.
Spencer
The rest of her outfit is COMPLETELY what I call Nantucket Hipster Twee.
I'm also going to pause here and ask if anyone else noticed the unusually punny dialogue in this episode. Spencer had at least two examples of forced wordplay and Aria had two as well; it went beyond quippy and into distracting. It's one thing to write those but it's another to make a person say them out loud, and then string them together in one particularly slow 42-minute episode of TV.
Emily and Spencer
The girls hit up a sorority party, which Emily is doing for fun -- she needs a college, and she looks totally foxy; watch out, Girlfriend Paige -- and Spencer is doing to get information. She's badmouthing the "podunk" school, so Emily snaps and tells her she needs to get in, and this devolves into a well-written squabble where Spencer accuses Emily of flirting with the admissions dude and deliberately withholding that she's a lesbian, and ends in Emily telling Spence she acts like a "snotrag" who can rest on her privilege, or somesuch, and it's well done. I like it when Emily gets cranky but also when both sides seem to be right AND wrong.
Hanna's Got A Gun
Guess what Hanna finds locked away in her mother's closet? She's panicking because the muddy pumps are missing and the wardrobe was locked, so she picked it and then went rummaging and found this. She ganks it, packs it into her purse, and takes off for Cicero College to talk to Emily and Spencer. This makes almost no sense, but I guess she just wants it not to be in the house, and can't give it back to her father because she believes it's a murder weapon, but: Bringing it onto a college campus seems like a dysfunctional solution. This show is one big long dysfunctional solution.
Spencer
Spencer finds a secret room in the sorority house and locates a strange curved pink plastic object with a curly cord coming out its ass end; this is apparently what ancient Egyptians called "a corded telephone," and apparently Dead Alison Di Laurentis used to dial this number all the time in front of her infernal bird. Spencer phones Aria to confirm the number, interrupting the riveting Montgomery Family Game Night that is helping pay Chad Lowe's bills this month.
Em
Em realizes she DID accidentally lead on the prepster, who is following her around like a lapdog now that he's off duty. What is wrong with the twenty-somethings on this show? He is presumably not in college, yet he's all, "Hey, let's relax at this frat kegger," and hits on a seventeen-year old girl. That is not sensible behavior and yet EVERY SINGLE MAN IN ROSEWOOD or a fifty-mile radius thereof seems to think you can shop for booty at the jailbait store.
Emily rejects him politely, and tells him she's gay, but he offers to go hunting for Hanna with her anyway -- in a way that's mildly creepy and made me think maybe he was going to turn psycho, but if that's happening, it's in another episode.
Hanna
Hanna, meanwhile, showed up at the party and then got bored waiting around for Spencer and Emily to find each other and help her dispose of the weapon, so she decided to go out into the woods and bury it. She has learned NOTHING from the end of these episodes, because not only is she not wearing gloves, but she actually pauses to fondle the pistol WITH HER BARE HANDS. If I thought she were doing this to implicate herself and spare her mother, that would be one thing, but instead I think she's just being unusually stupid. Oh, HANNA. Naturally, the cops find her, catch her, and arrest her, as A sends gloating texts to Em and Spencer. Poor Hanna. She is not going to enjoy wearing a prison jumpsuit.
House mother
This week's button was of the black-gloved person wiping dust off an old, terrifying photo of the house mother of the sorority where Pink Olde-Tymey Telephone was located. I was hoping it'd get all REVENGE 1.0 in here with a little red Sharpie action over her face, but no. There is officially not enough Sharpie in this show or even, in fact, in REVENGE itself.