Tuesday, July 12, 2016

Pretty Little Liars Rosewood Roundup ("The Talented Mr.Rollins") [Contributor: Megan Mann]


"The Talented Mr.Rollins"
Original Airdate: July 5, 2016

Okay, last week gave us too many questions and absolutely zero answers. So, let’s just jump right into it.

It’s clear that Hanna is wrestling with the idea of telling the girls that things are over with Jordan as she contemplates whether or not to slide her engagement ring on. But in the end, she decides to do so just as Aria walks in and sees her back. There are burn marks from whatever it was Elliot (I mean, presumably) used on her in the barn. She shuts down the conversation with Aria pretty quickly and they meet with the other girls to discuss what Emily saw at Welby. The girls don’t know why Mary and Elliot would want to avenge Charlotte’s death. How are they going to get Ali away from the situation?

At the end of last week, the final moments convinced us that Ali was being wheeled out of Welby and into a safe place. But that’s not what happened. What we saw instead was Elliot coming into Ali’s room and seeing the bed empty, only for Ali to jump up from behind him and try to strangle Elliot with an IV. He slams her onto the bed and jabs a sedative into her arm. As she drifts off, he not only puts her arms in restraints, but takes it one step further and puts a face mask restraint on her as well. That had to be a fun scene to film. Not.

Ashley calls Emily and offers her the job she had applied for at the hotel. She excuses herself and when Aria reaches out to grab Hanna to move forward in line at the brew, she flinches. When Aria asks how she’s doing, she snaps at her to not ask. Despite having been in the dollhouse with her, Aria doesn’t understand what she went through in the barn. Across the room, Emily asks Sabrina to dinner to thank her for their talk the other night and duh, because she’s super into her. Sabrina shoots her down and you’re like, “is Emily ever going to be lucky in love?”

Across town, Spencer goes to talk to Toby, but when the door opens, it’s Yvonne. Yvonne cops a serious 'tude with her and tells her that Spencer has already caused problems between her and Toby. She wouldn’t mind him helping her or the girls if only she knew what it was for. Sure, Yvonne. Get in on this and realize how stupid it was to even inquire about it. Sounds great! She tells Spencer she can’t have him disappearing anymore as now they’re engaged and she doesn’t want to deal with that. Instead of asking for his help, Spencer decides not to and leaves. Your only cop friend and you do that? Dumb.

The rest of the girls head over to Welby to talk to the director of the facility about Alison’s state and why they think that maybe Elliot isn’t the best choice to care for her. He assures them that everything is fine and that Elliot is doing a great job, but the girls don’t buy it. They demand he look in on Ali and see the state she’s in or they’ll report him for neglect. The group heads toward Ali’s room and find her sleeping soundly. Elliot follows them in and hands Dr. Freedman her file. All of her vitals are stable and within normal limits. Elliot turns to look at the girls as if to say, “Yeah, you thought you had me, didn’t you?” Gross.

Caleb is making a sandwich in the kitchen when Spencer comes in to tell him the news about Toby and Yvonne. It becomes the catalyst for a conversation that Spencer has been avoiding entirely about their relationship. She thinks that he still has feelings for Hanna after all that happened the night she was taken. Caleb tells her that they kissed because old memories had gotten stirred up. Spencer asks if he still loves Hanna, but he can’t answer as her phone rings. It’s Jason.

As it turns out, Jason had no idea that Ali was being treated at Welby. Elliot never got in touch with him and lied to the girls. He probably knew that they were in the hospital and slipped into her room to sedate her and take off all of the restraints before they came in. Emily asks if Toby looked into Elliot and Mary and when Spencer tells them she didn’t ask, the girls all had the same reaction I did: the only cop friend and she let a silly thing like an engagement ring get in the way. When Emily says it’s their fault Ali is stuck like that, Spencer snaps back that it’s her own fault for killing Charlotte. Chill, you don’t know that, crazy pants. Even if she didn’t, she doesn’t deserve the treatment she’s getting. Since Jason is out of the country and can’t get back for a few days, it’s up to the girls to get Ali out.

But how? They all stare off until Spencer remembers Aria saying that she saw Elliot unlocking a trunk in Ali’s bedroom. “Maybe there’s something in there that he doesn’t want anyone to see.” Maybe that’ll give them some clues. Emily still has the key to Ali’s house and when she goes to grab it, she sees Mary Drake’s file in Spencer’s bag and takes the opportunity to put it in her bag. Spencer also mentions that Jason had no idea Ali and Elliot had gotten married. Yikes. Emily gives them the key and heads to work.

Spencer and Hanna keep an eye out, conveniently placing themselves in front of the Hastings home so as to not look all that sketchy, as Aria sneaks into the house to sleuth. Spencer asks about Jordan and Hanna offers up some lies about the state of their relationship. Spencer gets all middle school and says Caleb mentioned the kiss and that Hanna shouldn’t have lied about being over him. Then Hanna lies again about Jordan being her future. Ugh.

Aira grabs the key from the left light and opens the storage ottoman at the foot of the bed. In it, under a few black hoodies, she finds medical tools, a contact case with blues contacts, a recipe of some sort, a couple of syringes, and two medications. She starts to snap pictures when Spencer tells her that Elliot is outside. She begins to take pictures of the myriad of bottles of prescriptions as Spencer and Hanna walk toward Elliot. He tells Spencer the girls made a spectacle of themselves at the hospital, but she bites back with, “I just think it’s amazing how much better Alison has gotten overnight.” He assures them he’s doing all he can, but Hanna doesn’t buy it. He asks them to stop visiting Ali as they’re disturbing her and that they’re going to destroy her health more. Pot, meet kettle.

Aria hurries to put everything back the way that she had found it. When she stands up, she notices something on the dresser. It’s a statement of some sort and she snaps a quick picture. Spencer tells her to very quickly get out and in her haste, Aria makes an incredibly huge rookie mistake: she places the key back into the right side light when it was originally in the left. Aria, girl. You’ve been at this too long. Mistakes like that can’t happen. She races back outside and comes out the Hastings gate. Elliot looks out the window and sees all three of them get in the car. Whoops.

For some reason that I can’t quite work out, they drove off, but still somehow ended up back at the Hastings house. They look through the pictures that Aria took and realize that they don’t know anything about Elliot. They scroll through until they reach the credit card statement Aria found on the dresser. She notices a charge for an Amish bed and breakfast the same week that they “went to visit Elliot’s family farm.” If he has family there, why are they staying at a B&B? It’s only an hour away and Aria wants to see if they can find any answers there, but Spencer doesn’t think it’ll be very fruitful. She doesn’t care and asks if anyone is coming. Hanna goes with her so Spencer can hang back and try to make sense of the other photos.

Over at The Radley, Emily is in training behind the bar. Personally, I think she looks like she works at a Bennigan’s rather than a cute, boutique hotel, but that’s minor. She looks up and sees Sabrina walking in. Awkward.

Hanna and Aria find themselves lost. Hanna takes the opportunity to ask about Liam and unlike Hanna, Aria is honest and tells her that they broke up. “I thought everything was going great with you guys.” It was, but then she was spending so much time with Ezra (and then they banged) and realized how much she missed him. She says they’re both lucky to have Ezra and Jordan and asks if Hanna will ever tell him what happened in the barn. (She would probably need to open with, “Remember those 48 hours I was unreachable? Funny story, I was kidnapped,” but you know.) She doesn’t want to involve him in any of it and even though Aria points out that as her fiancé, he would understand, she snaps and says she never wants to talk about it with anyone as it will permanently break her.

Emily decides to take the drink Sabrina ordered over to her and Sabrina is a little confused. She didn’t know Emily worked there. Emily goes to walk away, but decides to go back and tell Sabrina what really happened with the whole stealing Ezra’s key thing and that she really likes her. She’s giving this big speech until someone walks in and kisses Sabrina. This takes Emily by surprise and hastily makes an exit.

At the Amish B&B, Aria is somehow surprised that no one would give them any sort of information. They don’t know how to help Ali at this point, and then a little girl comes onto the path behind them and looks at them with something like admiration. They don’t know what to do, so they continue on.

Emily calls Spencer to vent about what went down with Sabrina and then asks if she’s made any progress on the pictures Aria took. Not much progress has been made, but the recipe she found is used to make latex. Not gloves, but rather masks like the one they found on bell tower Hanna. She sees the picture of the blue contacts and remembers that Ali said she was seeing Wilden. A quick Google search and she sees that Wilden had blue eyes. Well, things just got a whole lot more interesting now, didn’t they?

Aria takes another approach to the B&B and suggests looking at the furniture in an attempt to get someone to talk. Hanna hangs back and sees the little girl from earlier walk into a barn. She follows her and the girl says she’s not allowed to talk to the English. She tells Hanna she’s pretty, just as Aria walks in and tells her that Elliot lied and that there is no family with the name Rollins in the county. Hanna thinks he’s been lying about a whole lot more. The little girl looks between the two of them and says, “You look like my dolls.” Aria asks which dolls and she replies, “The ones Charlotte gave me.” RED ALERT.

The little girl, Eliza, pulls a handful of dolls out of her bag. Hanna asks if they could play with her and when Aria picks one up with long brunette hair, she tells her that’s Emily and the one she’s holding, her favorite, is Alison. Hanna asks why and she tells her it’s because she looks the most like Charlotte. They used to come all the time and Charlotte would play with Eliza. “I saw them kissing once, but I’m not supposed to tell,” she admits. An elder comes to find Eliza and Aria wonders how much progress Charlotte could have really made if she was still naming dolls after them.

When Sabrina’s friend heads to the bathroom, Sabrina approaches the bar. She starts to talk about Emily’s earlier speech, but Emily cuts her off saying she didn’t know she had a girlfriend. “She’s my ex. We’re just friends,” Sabrina insists. She then says that she judged Emily too quickly and that’s not who she is. I want to believe Sabrina, but she judged Emily a lot already, so jury’s out on that one. She offers a dinner date during the week and Emily happily accepts.

Aria can’t believe the revelation that Elliot and Charlotte were involved, but Hanna makes a good point saying that they went to Amish country knowing no one would see them. If he was in love with Charlotte, it makes sense for him to be working with Mary, but the girls haven’t worked out that he married her and drove her mad to get control of the Carisimi group for Mary. As they walk, Hanna stops cold and sees a cattle prod hanging from a fence. She has a flashback to it being what gave her the marks on her back in the barn and finally opens up a little bit and tells Aria, but quickly shuts herself off. They need to focus on Ali.

Spencer is still looking over the photos when Caleb comes in. Things are still tense between the two of them. Caleb admits that there is always going to be a part of him that loves Hanna, his first real love, but he doesn’t want to be with her. He wants to be with Spencer. He says he likes everything about her, but he only likes her whereas she loves him. He asks to make it right, that he wants to make it work. “I don’t know that it can,” Spencer whispers.

Toby toasts to the future Mrs. Cavanaugh when Emily interrupts the party. He asks if they can talk tomorrow, but it can’t wait. She needs him to look over Mary Drake’s file and see if there’s anything he can find on either Mary or Elliot that they haven’t found yet, a connection they didn’t see. He takes the file and Emily reminds him that they don’t have a lot of time.

Elliot walks into his room and notices the key isn’t there. He looks around and sees it’s in a different spot and immediately looks to see if anything is missing. There isn’t, but he decides to take all the medical tools and prescriptions out of there and into his medical bag just in case.

Next door, Emily and Spencer are trying to figure out how they can expose Elliot with what they’ve found. It’ll be hard since Ali doesn’t seem to be on any other medication, but Emily wonders why he had all of those bottles locked up. She notices that only one of the bottles from the trunk has been used and Spencer notices that it’s a stimulant. She looks over her notes and sees that frequent use can cause delusions, thought disorder and paranoia. Even though the doctor said Ali was only on one drug doesn’t mean that Elliot isn’t giving her another. “She wasn’t crazy when she went into Welby, but he’s making sure she is now.” Sketchy.

The other two join them and they consider going to the cops with the information that they have. Even though it’s nothing concrete, it’s still enough to look into him. They’ll need to tell them about Mary too. When Spencer goes to grab the file, she only just then notices that it’s missing. Emily tells them she took it and gave it to Toby as Ali’s life and well-being sort of supersedes Spencer’s wants. Good point. Hanna stands up and says that maybe it’s a bad idea. After all, they have to tell them that they’re after Ali because she might have killed Charlotte. A phone goes off. “Uh, Elliot just sent me a text,” Emily says. “It’s a pin drop of his location.” Another text follows with an S.O.S. It’s clearly Ali and she wants the girls to follow her breadcrumbs.

Toby starts to look through the database for information on Elliot and Mary. He searches for Elliot first and sees an infraction from 1958. Seems unlikely that Elliot is a vampire, so it’s now safe to assume Elliot Rollins is not this chap’s real name. The girls are following the pin about a half a mile behind Elliot and Ali. Ali feigns sleep until they hit a bump. She takes the opportunity to push him and race out of the car. Elliot stumbles after her and the two are in a foot chase as the girls roll up and see Ali race across the road. Hanna doesn’t stop as Elliot runs across. The brakes squeal and all four girls jerk forward as glass shatters. When they sit back, they see Elliot’s cold, dead eyes staring at them through the smashed windshield.

Well, now at least we know who they were burying in the premiere, right? So that’s something. And the girls now know that he was driving Ali mad on purpose, but they didn’t know for sure why or what his connection is to Mary. Like the theme song says, “two can keep a secret if one of them is dead.”

How can the Liars get away with this? I have a feeling that season 7A is just about to go full force and I’m not sure any of us are ready. What do you guys think? Tweet me, @MissMeganMann, and let’s discuss!

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