BROOKHAVEN

Sometimes a thing that can happen, if you are a character on this show, is that you can be led by a red duffle coat to a destroyed man who sends you all the way to another town, and in that town there is a location, and near that location there is a... Creepy Doll Hospital. That is like a hundred years old, from that long-ago surge in the popularity of doll injuries. One of those popular places.

And in the window of this place, the dolls are not just resting, rehabilitating, taking the waters, no. They are hanging from their own eyeball holes at crazy angles, they are crouching behind each other with wild-eyed clown smiles, they are armless and legless and upside down. A Cirque du Damned of raucous, unmoving, decade-spanning doll hell. Wheelchairs and leg braces and amputations. Cracked and aging porcelain and filthy rubber. Ipana commercials abutting Chuckies, Bozos hanging all over American Girls, Big Blinking Eyes frolicking with No Eyes At All. Music boxes and xylophones.

The ladies shiver and quiver and think about how dolls used to be good things, like childhood itself, before it got all gross and complicated, and Aria heads back to Spencer's trunk to get the red riding hood coat. I cannot help wondering if perhaps to live in Rosewood is, in some ways, a blessing.

"Yes, all authority figures and all men whether above or below the age of majority will eventually try to roofie you, but at least it's not Brookhaven, where the dead men lost their bones. At least we don't live there."

And Aria turns her back, for one brief second, to put on the coat, and as she does so -- as she becomes Vivian Darkbloom, with hair to match, as it suddenly seems was always the intent -- she hears a fairly young man's voice behind her, belonging to yet another Dramatic Face of the sort common to this show, a mysterious fellow named Duncan: "Vivian?" A-TAG

A purchases, slowly and terrifyingly, a newspaper blaring about Maya's disappearance, in a pointed way wherein it's almost like she is the new Alison? Like, the girl that lived in that house and disappeared? And we never had to see her, ever again, even in flashbacks, making the obnoxious face that she's making right here on this newspaper? Or else no, because what would the fallout be? She has no friends. She is too awful to be relevant. Not even a vengeful hermaphrodite to knock her stump over.