The guilty pleasure that just keeps giving, Pretty Little Liars, is chugging along in its winter season, offering up plenty of mystery, intrigue, saucy Heathers / Mean Girls meets The Craft mild bitchiness, disturbing older men / teen girl storylines and one terrific coming out story.
While the quartet of teen girls continues to unravel the mystery behind their collective blackmailer, a tech genius who goes by the moniker ‘A,’ Emily (Shay Mitchell) is getting a thoughtful, carefully plotted coming out story, and a mighty cute girlfriend to boot. While much of PLL expects the viewer to suspend disbelief – especially with the 16-year-old Aria (Lucy Hale) dating her of-age teacher narrative– Emily’s story is sensitive, sweet and mostly believable. But no wonder, since the cast recently made an ‘It Gets Better’ video and it turns out the creator and producer are lesbian and gay respectively.
But on to the good stuff – the re-cap of Emily’s storyline! SPOILERS ahead…
The center of the high school universe appears to be the cafeteria -- where love lives, egos and eating habits are made and broken. And that’s where we first encounter our ‘it’ couple Emily and Maya (Bianca Lawson) for this week’s episode. Per usual, Emily has been hashing out the who dunnit of ‘A’ with her co-conspirators Aria, Hanna (Ashley Benson) and Spencer (Troian Bellisario) when her girl Maya turns up to whisk her away to ‘study.’
And Hanna, being the first person Emily came out to – by default, as ‘A’ helped Hanna got a look of the blackmail photo of Emily and Maya kissing— could not be more supportive. It’s gotten to the point where Emily and Maya now greet each other with a lip lock when they meet up in the cafeteria and that’s about as open as it gets in high school. But in the Pretty Little Liar’s world nobody bats an eye. Emily’s friends just look on with what appears to be genuine envy.
Not one to hold back, Hanna asks the question that is likely on viewers’ minds – “Studying? Is that girl on girl code for romance?” As a side note, if you went to Mount Holyoke as I did, the answer would be ‘yes,’ but that’s a whole different sort of re-cap.
The typically all-business Emily plays with her friends by saying that she and Maya like to indulge in, "walks in the rain, picnics by the lake and dancing naked in candlelight," which again, does not sound unlike dorm life at a women’s college… But then Emily cops to kidding and says, “We go to dinner and a movie. Just like you…”
Later, the camera lingers outside of Emily’s bedroom with Emily’s mom Pam (Nia Peeples) peering through the crack in the door. And as we saw in the last episode, despite an effort to accept Maya, Pam’s not handling the gay thing with the greatest aplomb.
Meanwhile, the girls happen to be lying down side by side, studying while caressing each other’s feet. While the gay girls in the audience might let out a collective “awwwwww,” Pam is not having any of it. There will be foot rubbing in her house over her dead body.
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