‘Pretty Little Liars’: This is a Dark Ride (Halloween Special) 3.13 Recap

Oh boy. The PLL Halloween episode. How do I even begin?? It. Was. Amazing. Last year’s episode worked for what the show was going for, but this year’s absolutely blew the last one out of the water! Maybe it was the fact that it wasn’t an entire flashback episode where Ali getting letters from ‘A’ was never discussed again? I just felt like while the last one didn’t really move the storyline along at all, this one shoved the story forward. So on to the recap! As a heads up, because there was SO much going on in this episode, this is going to be VERY long. (You know if I could write papers as long as I write some recaps I’d be doing great in some of my classes!)

The episode opens with Mona singing and painting a paper mache bust and talking to ‘A’ (who I’m assuming is Toby) about Halloween and how much she loves it. She then gives the person bullets and says that “this is going to be the best Halloween ever. I bet somebody’s life on that.”

The girls see a decoration that says “RIP Allison Dilaurentis” and when they go to tell the person off, the person jumps out of the box with a mask and long blonde hair.

Spencer goes home and Garrett is there. He tells her that he is leaving “find closure” and “start the healing process.” She tells him to go ahead and start the healing process by telling her what he knows. Toby comes walking in and tells him that he is leaving. Spencer tells Garrett they will talk later and he says “don’t wait too long.”

Ezra can’t go to the Halloween Party because he has a meeting in Philadelphia about ghosting an autobiography. The way that he tells her he can’t go just seems odd, almost like he was searching for what to say to get out of going with her.

The ghost train starts at the Brew where Lucas is taking pictures of the big Halloween party as the guests arrive. Hanna shows up as Marilyn Monroe and meets up with Aria who is dressed as Daisy from The Great Gatsby. As the girls are talking about their dates not being there, Noel Kahn walks

Noel tosses food in to the air and begins chocking. Toby asks him if he is alright and while Noel is making the chocking sign, Toby just stands there. When he does the Heimlich Maneuver, Toby doesn’t really seem to care what he does and lets Noel fall to the ground. When Spencer gets down beside Noel to try and help him, a devil pops out of his chest and he starts laughing.

After Emily walks up, the girls see Jason walking in. They have no idea when he got back to Rosewood or what he is doing there.

Adam Lambert is in the “performance train” singing dressed up as a vampire.

At Radley, you see a nurse peeking through the little window in to Mona’s room and she sees a head on the pillow and walks away. As the camera pans out though, you see that it is actually the bust that Mona was painting at the beginning of the episode.

While the girls are dancing up by the stage, a person in a white mask shows up behind Hanna and touches her. She threatens the person and the person retreats.

As Spencer is walking through the train, Jason comes up behind her. He isn’t happy that Garrett is out of jail. As he is talking, he sees Lucas who gets a surprised look on his face and ends up leaving.

A young girl shows up in Ashley’s kitchen asking to call her mom. Something is very off about her. She talks about how people make scary things and they aren’t fun anymore.

Back on the train, Hanna walked out of the performance car to the outside of the train and the person who touched her walked out behind her. After she gave the person a lecture about following her, she tried to kick him and it turned out to be Caleb!

Something worth noting, as Aria was talking to Adam Lambert, he asks what her name is and he can’t hear her because of a train so she writes it on the window. The first A in her name is written normally, but the second looks all too ‘-A’ like. It could be just a filming thing because of how the cast/crew types with a capital ‘A’, but that just didn’t sit right with me.

Watching the girls all night has been the baby faced doll (which they decided not to pay any attention to because it is “only a costume now”) and a costume that kind of looks like a joker. After Adam leaves, the person in the joker costume lifts up a cover on one of the rings and there is a white powder in it. As he/she walks by Aria, he/she covers Aria’s cup and dumps whatever was in the ring in to her drink. She, of course, then grabs the drink like she is going to take a sip of it, but the camera then cuts to Emily and Paige where they are making out and a shadow is watching them.

Spencer is walking out of a compartment when she hears humming which sounds like Mona. Then, out of nowhere, the person in the baby face costume grabs her from behind. When we come back from commercial, we see that it was Garrett trying to lay low. He tells Spencer that she is the one that he wanted to keep safe. He says that he had no idea what “the game” was all about and he will tell her everything he knows, but then he is gone and not coming back and doesn’t want Spencer to go looking for him. He begins telling Spencer about the night of Ali’s death starting with what Spencer knows from the video. She stops him saying that she knows that part and he tells her that he and Jenna left the room so Ian and Melissa could talk and went behind the Dilaurentis’s house. When they were there, Ali showed up and started harassing Jenna. She pushes Jenna back on to a lawn chair and she grabs a field hockey stick. Garrett takes it away from her and in a moment of rage starts swinging the stick. Jenna, being that she is still blind at this point, is screaming each time the stick hits something, but we are then shown that Ali is sitting on the ground. When Jenna asks if she is dead, Ali puts her finger up to hush him and he says that he took care of it and suggests that he and Jenna leave. Spencer is pissed at him that that is all he wanted to tell her, but there is more to the story. He went back to Ali’s house and when he is walking around the side, he sees Ali talking to someone hiding behind a tree. She tells the person that she isn’t the one making anyone do anything and that if “youdon’t pay for your mistakes, how can you become a better person?” One of the most shocking moments of the night is when Byron (Aria’s father) steps out from behind the tree. Ali tells Byron that he doesn’t know what she is capable of. Garrett then makes a noise as he is trying to hide better and ends up running. Spencer asked him why he didn’t tell anyone when he was arrested and charged and he said that he was going to had her mom not had him cleared. She tells him that she is going to go get Aria so he can say it to her face.

Spencer goes racing through the train cars and when she finds Hanna, she asks if she has seen Aria. She points to a seat saying she was just right there, but the seat was empty except for Aria’s purse. On the window, all but the first ‘A’ has been erased and the girls receive a text on Aria’s phone saying:

We then see Aria slowly coming to and it she is trapped somewhere with duct tape over her mouth and her hands wrapped in duct tape, too.

Emily comes up to the girls saying that she couldn’t find Aria either and that she doesn’t seem to be on the train anymore. Spencer points out that she has to be on the train, but Emily points out that she might not be if it truly is ‘A’. Hanna asks Spencer about all the crazy stuff Garrett told her, which Emily doesn’t know about, so Spencer fills her in saying that they have to find Aria. Emily wonders if they believe him and Spencer does, but Hanna doesn’t know for sure saying that anyone can mess with them and they’re so good that “you can get a varsity letter messing with [them].” After Hanna tells them that Caleb is on the train, Spencer tells her that she needs to warn him and she is going to keep looking for Aria on her way back to Garrett. Back to Aria, she is rocking the wooden box that she is trapped in to get it to lay down and finally gets it down.

As Hanna is looking for Caleb, she grabs a person in the same costume as Caleb and tries to talk to him about Aria and Garrett but he doesn’t listen. As she turns around, she sees that Caleb is actually not the person in the mask as he is getting a drink about halfway across the train car. She pulls off the top, white mask to find another mask under it with blonde hair.

At Hanna’s house, Ashley is looking for the little girl who wanted to call home and ventures upstairs looking for her. Ashley finds her in Hanna’s room and asks her if she called her mom. She did, and her mom was mad at her and began to cry. She begins to tell Ashley that she and her sister never get along and they fight all the time. When Ashley went to touch her hand to console her, she noticed it was very cold and put a blanket around her. Ashley goes to get Ted to bring him to the little girl, and when they get in to the room, the girl is gone and the blanket is perfectly folded in the middle of the bed. Is Ashley seeing a ghost?!

Spencer, on her way back to Garrett, is walking through a train car and sees the scary baby faced mask on the floor. She opens the door to get to the next train car and someone in a crazy joker type mask jumps out and begins to strangle her and hold her over the edge of the train like the person is going to throw Spencer over. Spencer kicks away and goes running through the next train car to a locked door and the fight begins again. Paige hears, or sees, or somehow knows that Spencer is being attacked and comes in to save her. After a short fight, Paige is thrown to a corner and the person in the mask runs away. In Spencer’s hair is a fake nail that may have come off the attacker.

Aria, still locked in the wooden box, has gotten the duct tape off of her mouth and is working on getting her hands freed when she looks to her left and sees Garrett, dead and wrapped in a blanket. Aria then uses a nail or something sharp sticking out in front of her to cut off the duct tape around her wrists.

Hanna and Spencer are talking about ‘A’ and what is going on and discuss that the double costume was warning them that they aren’t getting by with anything, especially the fact that Caleb and Hanna are still together. They talk about what Garrett said and Spencer brings out the fake nail and Hanna points out that it was a “big girl” and Spencer says that it may not have even been a girl at all. Emily and Paige show up and Spencer gives Paige instructions to go meet up with Caleb and Toby at the front of the train and the other girls are going to go back to where they last saw Garrett.

Aria is still trying to get her hands freed when all of a sudden the box starts moving.

While Paige is walking towards the front of the train, she see’s Jenna and starts questioning her about Aria. Paige stalks off after Jenna is of no help and when Jenna looks down, you see Lucas’s camera just sitting on a table.

Back to Aria, when the box stops moving, she uses the chance to try and get her hands free again and you see the door to the car open up and hear a voice. The box then begins to get pushed towards the open door. Spencer, Emily and Hanna are still walking through the train looking for Aria and when they get to a locked door, they were going to turn around until Spencer found something, Aria’s necklace. Hanna grabs a fire extinguisher and they use that to break the window so they can move to the next train. Aria is still trying to get her hands untaped and as the box is still being moved towards the door and gets stuck on a large bolt. The voices say to “push dammit” and the other responds “no!” Aria finally gets the tape off her wrists just as the voices get the box over the bolt. Aria finds a screwdriver in the box with her (seriously? What attacker would be stupid enough to leave a screwdriver in the box?) and when she sees that someone is close enough to reach, she stabs the screwdriver up through the cracks and hits flesh. A male sounding voice grunts and the two voices run away as the box is teetering on the edge of falling out of the train. Just as the box is about to fall, Spencer, Emily and Hanna come running in and pull the box back in to the train and Aria is screaming bloody murder. I would be too if that was me! When the girls get the lid off the box, you see Garrett slumped over Aria and Aria races to get out of the box. The other girls finally realize that Garrett was also in the box and can’t believe it.

Back at Ashley’s, she and Ted are talking about the little girl and Ashley says that she doesn’t recognize her from the neighborhood and Ted says that nobody is outside their house or wandering around the streets alone. She points out that the girl was in Hanna’s room and that she would’ve had to go past the two of them to get out of the house but they were not far away at all and would have seen her pass thru. Ashley points out that she was very cold, to the point where she could still remember how cold she was, and asked Ted if he believed in ghosts. Ted says he isn’t supposed to believe in ghosts, but his tone implies that he just might.

Back on the train, the girls are all being questioned about what happened. Toby tells Spencer that the troopers are calling parents to come pick up their kids. In the background, you finally see Lucas walking by again with his camera in his hand grabbing a drink. Aria comes back to where the girls are with her wrist bandaged and tells them that she is fine. They wanted to take her to the hospital but she doesn’t want to leave her friends there. Aria doesn’t believe Garrett. They all think that ‘A’ killed Garrett but don’t know why. They believe that ‘A’ pushed them to do things that would get Garrett cleared and out of jail so that ‘A’ could kill him. “Two members of the N.A.T. club – dead.” “Two people that were there the night that Ali was killed.” Hanna tells the girls that the cops have already figured something out, everyone who is in that car had something to do with Garrett Reynolds. Ezra then comes thru the doors (wasn’t he supposed to be in Philadelphia?) saying that he went to the end of the line to surprise her, but heard that someone was hurt on the train and followed the train track to find her.

When Noel begins to berate the girls telling them to tell the cops everything that happened, Toby steps up and begins to threaten Noel pushing him back against the drink holder. When Noel grabs on to the box holding the drinks and then falls, the whole thing ends up crashing down with the ice and drinks spilling out the end and a black bag with the words “Charon & Sons Funeral Directors” being uncovered. Every person in that car stares at the bag in disbelief.

Back at Radley, a nurse in checking in on Mona, who rolls over in her bed, and moves on. As soon as she does, Mona rolls back over, opens her eyes, and the camera pans down to… the second mask that was shown when Hanna ripped off the one looking like Caleb’s.

The episode ended with a flashback to the night of Ali’s death showing the area where the gazebo was being built and a hand reaching up from the ground.

 

 

Next up for Pretty Little Liars? Check out the Season 3B premiere (“She’s Better Now”) airing January 8th!