'Pretty Little Liars': Birds of a Feather 3.04 Recap
This episode revealed answers to many secrets that the fans had all been dying to know. The bigger two being the identity of the Black Swan and Melissa’s weird timing of losing her baby.
The episode starts off with the girls talking about who the Black Swan could be and Melissa was brought up as a possibility because of how skinny she is for just having lost her baby. This sets Spencer out to find what really happened with Melissa’s baby and she begins to really question everything she thought she knew about the pregnancy.
At the restaurant, Jason DiLaurentis walks in and harasses Veronica, Spencer’s mom, because she is representing Garrett. After he stalks out of the store, the girls run after him and find him putting up fliers offering a $50,000 reward for Alison’s remains. The girls then all get a text from ‘A’ saying, “Imagine what I could do with fifty grand… -A.” Oh ‘A’. You really are everywhere.
After school the next day, the girls all go their separate ways. Emily got a job at the coffee shop below Toby’s place and Hanna tried to go visit Mona. After signing in to go see Mona, the attendant lets Hanna know that Mona isn’t allowed visitors anymore since the doctor ordered it. While at her job, Emily meets Nate, Maya’s cousin. Something about him doesn’t seem right. And after watching the Derek storyline on One Tree Hill, I’ll never trust members of a family that just randomly show up again. When Hanna gets back to her house, she calls Wren and he tells her that Mona had flipped out after someone visited her. After she tells Caleb this, he tells her that he was the one that was there when Mona flipped out. Hanna did not like that he went there to tell Mona to leave her alone and after they got in a fight he stalked out of the house not happy with Hanna at all.
After Emily gets out of work, she walks across the street to meet up with Nate again. They get to know each other a little. She brings up about how she wishes they had a service in Rosewood and he says that they just had a little service for family but that Maya left something for her. It was a shirt from the movie they saw on their first date. It was delivered a few weeks after the funeral…
Back at Radley, the investigator that keeps questioning the girls and believes that everything is their fault goes in to see Mona with a warrant to talk to her.
When the girls all go back to Spencer’s place, they talk more about the idea of Melissa being the Black Swan. They talk about how Melissa had a reason to torture them like ‘A’ because they had the video tying her to Ian and the others. To look more in to it, the girls all plan to go to Philadelphia to sneak through Melissa’s apartment looking for any clues on when she went to the hospital or doctors. When they get there, Spencer gets her out of her apartment inviting her to dinner, but as the girls are in her apartment searching for clues, she had to turn around because she forgot her wallet. When the girls see her out in front of the apartment, they rush to hide from her and hide in the closet. Melissa finds a book on the floor but doesn’t really think twice about it. After she leaves, the girls come back out of the closet and as they are getting ready to put clothes back that fell, Hanna notices a costume bag in the closet. When they open it up to find nothing in it, Aria finds a feather at the bottom – a feather from the Black Swan costume.
The girls then get back to Rosewood and when Spencer got back, they showed her what they found. Hanna brings out one of her infamous wrong quotes in saying that “if the feather fits…” But in this case, she honestly doesn’t care what it really is. She just knows that something is up and they need to figure it out.
When Spencer goes back home, Melissa is there waiting. Spencer blindsides her with the feather and tells her that she knows she was the black swan and that she didn’t lose the baby in June. Melissa tells her that it was the night after she found Ian’s body that she lost the baby and that she faked it because losing the baby and Ian was too much and she didn’t want that getting out in to the papers. Spencer asks Melissa why she was at the Masquerade Ball and their mom then comes down the stairs saying that she would like to know the answer to that, too. Melissa explains that she got up one morning and opened the door to find a box on her doorstep with the dress in it and a note that told her to wear the dress to the ball or everyone would find out that she was lying about the baby. She was also told to distract Jenna at the ball and as soon as she saw Aria, Emily, and Hanna, she took off. The only people that knew about the baby were her father and Garrett. The reason that Veronica is defending Garrett is because the private investigator they hired to follow Melissa to find out anything about Alison’s death was on the list of witnesses. If the jury had found out that the Hastings had hired someone to watch Melissa and that she wasn’t pregnant anymore, they would immediately think that she was guilty of something.
While Hanna is on the phone with Aria, she gets a message and thinks it may be Caleb. When she opens it up though, it is something she was no expecting to receive – a picture from ‘A’ of a wreck in Montecito. Not long after, Caleb shows up telling her that his mom was in a car accident. She told him that “she felt like someone was trying to run her off the road.” Hanna had wanted to talk to him about something before she heard that but didn’t think that it would be a good time. Because of her lying now, he gets angry with Hanna and breaks up with her and he “feels like he only exists in half of her life.”
And Nate just makes me not trust him even more when he talks to Emily. After only being in Rosewood for a very short amount of time, he is thinking about leaving as all anyone talks about is Maya’s death. Why would he even move there if that would cause him to want to leave?
The episode ends with Spencer walking past Jason’s place where he tells her that he is withdrawing the reward because it was too much for him. Spencer tells him that the truth always comes out, one way or another. Jason is then seen making a $50,000 check out to cash. One funny thing I laughed at while watching this, was not to show a check on a tv screen with a bank teller watching. There were so many errors on that poor check. Jason then calls someone asking them to meet him in the parking lot. The detective on the case then drives past Spencer and asks her how far away her parent’s lake house is. He doesn’t tell her why, just “because.”
Of course, the very last scene of the episode is always something to do with ‘A’ and this one is no different. ‘A’ is in the Montecito airport leaving to head back to Philadelphia. Before getting up to board the flight though, ‘A’ is on the page for Radley Sanitarium changing Mona from not being permitted to having visitors to permitted. Someone wants to have a little chat with their doll.