Welcome to the annual Pretty Little Liars Halloween Spooktacular episode!! Well it’s sort of a Halloween episode… it takes place on our Halloween and there are some costumes. So that counts right? We know it’s not Halloween in Rosewood though, because if it were the Liars would totally be dressed as the Spice girls this year!

Did you guys know Halloween is my absolute favorite? I bet you did because we are such close friends. Almost close enough that if you thought I was dead and saw me a couple towns over you would dress up in ball gowns and break into a local masquerade. Which brings us right to the beginning of our episode!

Before we begin I want to apologize for the huge delay in this week’s recap! I’m just gonna fess up and let you know that this episode sort of had no plot and it was really hard initially to will myself to recap. It was basically a huge promotional event for Ravenswood aka Calebswood, a new one hour mystery drama which seeks to answer the question about what happens when a young lesbian boy leaves his girlfriend, six cats and Home Depot job to wear flannel and work as a small-town doctor in Colorado with his jaded teenage son and his bright pre-teen daughter.

Anyways back to the beginning. In case you’ve forgotten, the entire town of Ravenswood is entirely in technicolor ever since the great technicolor storm of 1812. The Liar line up prepared to go into a big spooky masquerade Founders Day Ball where Alison will totally totally no really for sure be this time.

They all look fabulous and, oh yeah, everyone has a huge hat.

Emily, who looks just lovely in some sort of menswear inspired pinstriped frock isn’t so sure though. What if seeing her dead best friend isn’t exciting and amazing?! What if it’s just terrifying and kind of awkward. But the other Liars are lie, “NBD it’s gonna be awesome.” I mean, YOLO right? Unless you’re Alison in which case… YOLT. Not quite the same umph to it.

Just as the Liars are walking in, EzrA calls Aria. They’re not technically back together, but he’s calling I guess because apparently EzrA does whatever the fuck he wants and is also probably A. So.

Aria tells EzrA she is so totally busy doing stuff in Ravenswood. Like tracking down his secret alias and also maybe some light shopping if they hit a sale.

Ezra is all like “Girl, please be safe and shit because I’m about to seriously come fuck with you and your friends and possibly murder your BFF.” Arias like, “Kay thanks love ya byyyeee.”

Except actually Ezra is directly behind the Liars staring at them in a creepy gas-mask costume.

Cue the Pretty Little Liars intro: Halloween Style.

We break away from the Liars to watch Caleb sit forever on a bus. He had thought this strugglebus would take him to A-camp but actually he’s just going to Ravenswood/his future. Getting to Ravenswood by car only takes 15 minutes but by bus it takes 525,600 minutes or possibly just your entire lifetime. On this bus he meets a chick named Miranda who also has no family and is searching for the answers/herself. For the purpose of my sanity (and yours) I’m going to skip the Ravenswood stuff because I watched the pilot and no one scissored so I won’t be recapping it. Also it was boring.

Elsewhere the Liars break into the Ravenswood Founders Day party which takes place in some seven-year-old’s sheet fort.

Amongst the Ravenswood crowd are all sorts of interesting characters! For example there are these two, who turn out to be Ravenswood characters so we don’t care:

And also these two who look maybe like blonde Red Coat twins. Or possibly French Red Coats with those sweet hats:

And this guy who’s giving Aria a run for her money on America’s Next Top Top Hat.

But most importantly, the girls run into Mrs. Grundle The Four Thousand Million Billion year old Old House Mother.

The Liars rush out to follow that chick in the wedding dress and, after a few completely unnecessary Ravenswood set ups, they see Red Coat/Ali and are back on the chase!

Please notice that somehow Aria already lost her hat. We are now 3/4 for hats.

The Liars continue their chase right through into a crypt. The crypt has a statue headstone which they manage to move and leads to a secret passageway. This marks the official point at which the episode just becomes the Liars going through a haunted house without “direction,” “character development” or “plot.”

Also I think the same sets were used for some of the haunted house as were used when Byron’s much much much younger girlfriend locked the Liars in Aria’s basement.

In the basement there’s a weird statue.

Everyone is distracted by the awesome statue of bird-lady love when suddenly there is a huge gust of wind! Tragically hats blow away and perfectly placed shiny shiny oh so shiny hair is tussled! Spencer and Emily lose their hats, so now we are only 1/4 for hats! Life is so hard.

And then Hanna’s gone and replaced with a marble statue. I think it’s maybe metaphor.

Venus de Hanna

Hanna, having been blown away by a wind so strong it instantly removed her from her friends but weak enough that it injured her in no way, wanders the tunnels alone. She walks along with seriously amazing cleavage I hadn’t noticed until now, but without a flashlight or even a fancy torch thing. She suddenly see something unnerving. A sign reading “Help me.” It was probably written by someone trying to make sense of this episode as anything other than a one hour ad for Ravenwood.

Fearing that whoever wrote “Help me” might return to explain why they had to use red crayon to draw on the walls, Hanna drops her hat and runs away. That’s right, we aren’t even halfway through the episode and we’re already 0/4 for hats. No one quite respects a hat the way they used to.

Anyhoo, Hanna starts idly running into the dark. Like most times when the Liars run idly,  she suddenly finds herself exactly where she should be. It is yet another stairway/door combo taken from the “Aria’s basement set!”

Normally when I find an unknown door it leads to a coat closet or maybe an occupied bathroom, but Hanna has better luck than me and she charges boldly into… a mansion? No one has dusted this mansion for about six months during which a dust storm and a serious spider infestation occurred. Yes. We are literally in a haunted house now.  It even has a creepy piano because nothing, and I mean nothing, is as scary as attending your music lessons when you haven’t practiced.

Elsewhere, Caleb and Miranda are off their long bus ride and hanging out in a graveyard. It’s unexplained why, but at this point I figure Ravenswood is actually just one large graveyard. Miranda says she’s off to her uncle’s house and Caleb says he’s off to find Hanna. The two say goodbye in exactly the way two people do when you just know they’re about to start a long term future together. I hope that after Caleb inevitably cheats on Hanna she goes lezzie with Naya Rivera guest starring as her love interest. A girl can dream.

Back in the mansion, Hanna hurriedly walks through the halls looking for Alison or maybe for a bathroom. Unclear.

She see’s a small telephone booth and, despite the fact I repeatedly yelled “DON’T DO IT” at my TV, she goes in. She tries the phone but it’s dead and, in classic Pretty Little Liars fashion, she gets locked in. When will the Liars learn to stop putting themselves in small boxes? They always get locked in! Always. 100% of the time, 100% locked in. It’s just science.

While she’s stuck in the box all sorts of scary things happen! There are lights coming towards the box! But then they go away.

Then she thinks she sees Alison. But she goes away.

Then it’s that creepy gas-mask guy! But he also goes away.

It has a pretty flat effect. Nothing ruins terror like repeatedly causing unfound, unsupported and unresolved  suspense.

We’ll catch back up with Hanna in a bit, but first lets see what the other Liars are doing!

Well… they’re still slowly crawling through that underground tunnel. It’s tough navigating without magical gusts of wind to push you through. Or possibly they stopped to upload pictures to instagram.

The Liars finally get to where “Help me” was vandalized on the wall and see Hanna’s hat nearby.

They assume the worst and follow her trail.

Elsewhere, Miranda is also in the mansion! I guess her uncle lives there.

Meanwhile the Liars finally pop up in the mansion.

They meander around The Piano Room where they spot some sheet music. Maybe Miranda’s uncle plays that piano and was also the one who composed all this A+ spooky music. It really is quite a spooky soundtrack.

Intern Grace informs me that the music playing is the same as the sheet music on the piano, entitled “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to be a Soldier.” For those of you playing at home you can feel free to play the video below to get the full spookiness for the remainder of this recap.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fhjT93Xa3U

Remember when I said we’d check back in with Hanna? Well we do because she gets rescued! Through a happy coincidence Miranda opens the phone booth door and lets her out!

Miranda quickly realizes that Hanna is Caleb’s Hanna and instantly becomes vindictive and jealous. JK she has no personality so the two just join up and lope along the mansion some more.

The two wander into a room full of coffins, at which point Miranda has a flashback to her childhood. I guess her parents’ funeral was here. Turns out this mansion is actually just an unnecessarily large funeral home. You know how Rosewood has their flashbacks in dim technicolor? Well Rosewood is always dimly lit through a grainy filter so here flashbacks are in grayscale!

Aria and Emily get separated from Spencer but fortunately the two find a room full of bottles. Thank god, because I think we could really all use a drink at this point. Also the room has an open jagged window at one end!

So what do you do with a jagged broken window just waiting to fall down? Duh! You stick your head out it!

Was I supposed to be nervous here? I mean, the writers can’t honestly think I would believe they’d kill off a main character via decapitation. It just seems unlikely. More likely than pairing Emily up with a hot butch dyke, but still unlikely.

Elsewhere, Spencer takes some time for self care and nurtures her love of horticulture. I was hoping that she would get accidentally injected with a gamma-radiated plant poison thus causing her to morph into her new super villain alter ego Poison Ivy League.

So there Spencer is just minding her own business trying to find her dead friend when she gets attacked by the Gas Mask Guy! Remember, we’re now pretty sure this gas mask guy is actually EzrA because Pretty Little Liars finally realized there’s nothing not creepy about a twenty-something year old sticking it to one of his students.

The two wrestle for a minute, and Spencer manages to cut Gas Mask’s right hand but, because of the patriarchy, he knocks her to the ground unconscious.

Gas Mask stands over Spencer with huge garden shears like he’s going to lop her perfect face off, but for whatever reason doesn’t do anything to her. Again, the threat of decapitation of a main character just doesn’t do anything to progress the story.

Outside, Miranda and Hanna reunite with Caleb. It’s pretty intense; Caleb and Hanna have been separated for like a full two hours.

Back inside the Liar terrarium, Aria and Emily find Spencer. They shake her back to consciousness (because that always works). Just then, the three hear Ali’s voice screaming for help and run towards it. They run all the way into an office in which there is, no surprise, just a recording of Ali screaming.

With impeccable timing, Mrs. Grundle chooses this opportunity to walk in. Turns out this is her office because every person in Ravenswood is required to have one normal job and one part-time creepy job. It’s written in the bylaws.

Mrs. Grundle informs the Liars than the recording of Ali was actually from “a session” Alison had with her in which Alison freaked out from contact with the spirit world or maybe trauma from her past. Remember, Mrs. Grundle is a psychic and this show has gone supernatural. No, but seriously.

Mrs. Grundle  is like GTFO and so the Liars shamefully sulk back outside. They try to leave this horrible awful town where only bad things happen. You know, as opposed to their normal town where only bad things happen. Unfortunately, the Liars soon realize that their car has a flat tire!

No one has AAA, so there’s only one option: Emily has to channel every ounce of dyke in her and get that shit fixed!

While the Liars debate whether or not Emily secretly attended a Butching it Up workshop at A-Camp, Caleb, Miranda and Hanna go digging around in a nearby graveyard. Hanna is super convinced she can get them all into the secret passageway, but instead they just find a grave with Miranda’s name and face on it.

With that, Caleb is all prepared to get the fuck out of Ravenwood and rededicate every minute of his day to Hanna. Instead, Hanna’s like “No, go with this pretty girl to find her family.” Yeah, said no lesbian ever. This is so out of character. Regardless, the two have a tearful lesbian goodbye and I do sort of miss Caleb already. Oh God, now I’m the lesbian.

Hanna lets Caleb frolic off and Hanna now magically knows where her friends are. She walks towards them and on the way sees the potential Red Coat twins. They are not Red Coat twins.

When Hanna finally gets back to the other girls, the tire is still flat and Emily is just repeatedly explaining that she can only change the tire if by “change” you mean “fuck” and by “tire” you mean “enormous strap-on dildo”.

Just then, EzrA drives up to the rescue! No one bothers to ask what the hell he is doing in Ravenswood or why he won’t take his right hand out of his pocket.

EzrA gives the girls a ride home and it’s sort of like, “Welp. I guess that’s over.” Except then it’s not! Right after he drops them off they see a Red Coat again! Right there in Rosewood Spencer’s backyard!

Who the fuck is it? Because if it’s another mask-wearing A I will seriously lose my shit!

And then it’s actually Alison! It actually is! For real! She’s alive/back from the dead/her own twin!Alison hangs around just long enough to say that she wants to come home, needs the Liars’ help and that her previous encounters with the Liars were real. To be honest, it was sort of anti-climactic. After years of viewers being like “Alison’s alive” and the PLL writers saying “She’s definitely dead” an then all of a sudden they’re like “Psych we TOTALLY got you!” Except everyone already knew, you know?

Before Alison can say much there’s a rustle in the bushes. It turns out to be Ezra just returning Aria’s cell phone. Notably, he STILL HAS HIS RIGHT HAND IN HIS POCKET! How did he drive home like that?!

Of course, when the Liars turn around, Ali is long gone. Because she’s scared of EzrA. Because he’s a bad guy. Because they really did trick us with that one.

That’s it for Rosewood this week! Thanks for trekking through this Ravenswood advertisement with me! Good luck crafting your Red Coat costumes and I will see you right back here in January where we’ll learn where the hell Ali’s been and what it means now that she’s back. Maybe.

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