The TV Chick

It’s Homecoming time for the Pretty Little Liars, and it’s not without trouble. Aria is upset about her parents (and Ezra), and the girls stage an intervention. She’s says she’s not going to Homecoming, but her friends convince her. Spencer is bringing Alex to homecoming and Emily is going alone. Hanna thinks that Emily should ask who she really likes (in other words, Maya). While they are all trying to help Aria, they get a fortune cookie message from A: Lions and tigers and bitches, Oh my. There’s no place like homecoming. See you there. -A. Oh A, you will never disappear. Also, I absolutely adore Hanna, and how she has no filter. Ashley Benson is quite the wonderful actress.

In true Rosewood fashion, everything goes awry at Homecoming (a cleverly themed Carnivale dance). Alex seems like such a nice guy, but Spencer and her friends are concerned with Hanna getting Jenna’s file from her therapist. Melissa is a chaperone and ends up sort of oddly flirting with Alex, or at the very least rubbing it in Spencer’s face when he finally takes off. Toby Cavanaugh asks Emily to go to homecoming and she accepts. He also seems sweet, albeit slightly creepy. When Hanna finally gets to the therapist’s office, she finds Toby’s file. I knew this from the books, but Toby had a shady past with Jenna. From what I discerned, he molested her but I could be wrong. It was always sort of unclear. In this episode, Jenna tells him that once Emily finds out the truth about him, she’ll hate him. He has a tattoo (that wasn’t in the books) saying 901 Free At Last, which the girls take to mean the date Ali died. Of course, all the girls think Toby is the killer after they see that Jenna and Toby were having sex, and try to get Emily away from him. She’s in the chem lab with him where he’s about to confess something big (his past?) but she gets a text from the girls and pushes him into a glass cabinet and runs off, trips and falls. Oh Emily, Toby may be sort of weird but I’m pretty sure he didn’t kill Ali.

Hanna and Sean win homecoming king and queen but Hanna isn’t there to claim her throne. Aria almost tells Ezra everything about A and The Jenna Thing but stops herself. They both obviously still have feelings for each other but can’t seem to get past the student/teacher hurdle. Before the Emily/Toby debacle, her and Maya confront each other. Maya wants Emily to come to grips with who she is. Personally, I think she is confused and not sure who to like. Mona also had a bigger role in this episode, telling Hanna that she was not about to lose her social status, and being bitchier than necessary. At the very end of the episode, someone is painting the population of Rosewood sign to have one less person. So creepy!!

Homecoming in Rosewood was a lot of fun and very dramatic, as I expected. I’m still not sure how to feel about Toby because he’s much more developed than he was in the books. I was rooting for Spencer and Alex but it doesn’t look like that’s going to work out, and Melissa continues to be evil. There is a lot of family history there and it’s bound to come out soon. I loved seeing Ali back in some flashbacks and I look forward to learning even more about her. Pretty Little Liars is well acted and has more than met my high expectations. On the surface, it might seem like a guilty pleasure show about some girls whose friend went missing, but it is much more complicated than that. There is a ton to Ali that we haven’t even seen yet. We haven’t gotten into her relationship with her brother Jason, her other boy toys and her manipulative relationship with her friends. We haven’t seen why the girls drifted apart and of course A is still a big mystery. I can’t wait to see what happens!

And since this song has been stuck in my head for about a week, here is the full version of the theme song to Pretty Little Liars. It’s called “Secret” by The Pierces, and it’s pretty good!

Pretty Little Liars airs Tuesday nights at 8 pm on ABC Family.