‘Pretty Little Liars Original Sin’ Episode 4 Recap: “The (Fe)male Gaze”

Slashers wouldn’t be slashers without their final girls. As Tabby points out in Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin Episode 4 (“The Fe(Male) Gaze”), gendered violence and power dynamics are key to the genre. It makes Original Sin’s decision to lean into the horror of these girls’ secrets a fascinating entryway, and one with which the show continues to meet head-on.

“The Fe(Male) Gaze” opens with the show’s first substantial Angela flashback (finally!), which sees her being screwed over by a teenaged version of Noa’s mom, Marjorie. After she offers Angela a drag of her cigarette, Marjorie is eager to blame Angela when a nearby teacher takes notice. She tries to make it up to her new “friend” later by gifting her a teddy bear sporting a “Best Friends Forever” T-shirt. Clearly, Marjorie letting Noa take the fall for her drug use is the latest in a long string of deflections.

In the present, A is more than happy to put the heat on her. During a hospital shift, Marjorie gets a present: A nearly identical teddy bear with a “Best mom ever T-shirt.” This bear comes with an added gift, bearing the very prescription pills that got her and Noa in trouble in the first place. And she’s due to get her ankle monitor off in just a few days! Someone cut this kid some slack.

Back at Millwood High, the girls are wrapping up their two-week “Karen video” detention, which has been blissfully A-free. A persistent Imogen is distracting herself from her childhood home’s impending sale by going full teen detective, phoning her mother’s entire graduating class for hints about Angela. No one is keen to mention the incident, which suits Faran just fine — despite seeing a creepy masked guy at the end of last episode, she’s happy to believe that the Liars’ troubles are behind them.

But when Faran is forced to attend one-on-one ballet rehearsals with Kelly to catch up on all things Swan Lake, she proves even more willing to put on her tinfoil conspiracy hat than Imogen. Although Kelly is a much less renowned ballerina than her late twin, Henry insists that she’s made so much progress recently that rehearsals feel like dancing with Karen. To make matters more confusing, Kelly is wearing her sister’s leotards and silences Faran’s complaints with the exact same phrase Karen used to threaten her: “Just be a queen, girl.” What did I tell you?! If there’s one trope Pretty Little Liars loves, it’s an evil twin. Remembering the razor blade that A put in Karen’s ballet slipper, Faran begs a disbelieving Henry to check Kelly’s feet for scars.

While Faran waits to hear back on the twin switcheroo front, she takes on another leading role, starring in Tabby and Chip’s latest film class assignment. They’re tasked with recreating a scene from an iconic director’s filmography, and slashers have rightfully been on Tabby’s mind. So she decides to put her own spin on things by remixing one of the most famous slasher scenes of them all: The shower scene from Psycho. This time, they’re ditching the “transphobic shit” in the original, casting Faran’s Marion Crane as the killer and Greg’s (yes, Karen’s smarmy boyfriend) Norman Bates as the victim.

Tabby has been spouting film references since the moment she first appeared onscreen, but “The Fe(Male) Gaze” effectively recontextualizes her cinephile habits as the way that Tabby makes sense of the world — and, more specifically, her own trauma. She’s clearly thrilled to be behind the camera for their new Psycho, but that excitement turns to anger when Greg continues to make lewd remarks about his shower scene, and horror when he proceeds to strip nude, flashing them out of nowhere. 

An overwhelmed Tabby runs outside and begins to hyperventilate, looking towards the woods as flashes of boys’ blurry faces leering at her around a bonfire come back to her. When she comes back, she’s stunned to see that Chip has taken over her directorial duties and sent their actors home. Whatever happened to our favorite cinephile in the past, it’s clear how much horror has helped her cope with (and rage against) it. I have no doubt that Tabby’s film knowledge will play a pivotal role in masking A, and hopefully she’ll get one hell of a catharsis from doing so.

But first, Imogen hopes to exorcise some of her own demons at her creepy childhood house, on which Sidney has finally scored an offer. Imogen finds herself unexpectedly emotional while packing up some old things — while A lurks under the basement stairs, because what else would they be doing? She’s startled by the new prospective owners, and makes Sidney’s day job a whole lot more difficult by claiming that a woman was murdered there.

Sidney encourages Imogen to move on. Instead, she invites her four besties over for a good old-fashioned Ouija Board session with Mom. Imogen’s curiosity soon turns to anger as she finally tells her late mother everything she’s wanted to say. Did Davie really commit suicide, or was someone else in the room with her? And if there wasn’t, how could she leave her only daughter alone to deal with this? Imogen admits to her friends that she feels like everything in her life — from her body to her house — is slipping out of her control. It’s a predicament that slasher heroines find themselves in all too often, which makes me curious how Original Sin plans to subvert horror expectations of the young pregnant woman at its center.

A certainly has big plans for all five Liars, and closes out the episode by closing in on Margaery. After Sheriff Beasley conducts an impromptu sweep of the Olivars’ apartment, Noa is horrified to find those stolen pills in her mom’s purse, just a day before her ankle monitor comes off. Cue the text from A: “She never learned her lesson. Mommy was going to throw you under the bus again, just like she did to Angela Waters.”

Things take a darker turn when A themself turns up to pursue Noa through her apartment complex, Michael Myers-style. She thankfully manages to escape onto a nearby roof, but when she screams for an explanation, “A” replies that they want to “Punish the guilty.” In this case, that means Margaery. So a sobbing Noa calls her mom’s hospital and finally admits that she’s been stealing from the pharmacy there, looking up to find that A has vanished.

She’s finally freed from her monitor the next day, but there’s no joy in admitting to her friends that A is back and wants justice for Angela Waters. And with Halloween around the corner, there’s no telling what Millwood’s premier masked killer has planned next.

Abby Monteil is a New York-based writer. Her work has also appeared in The Daily Beast, Insider, Them, Thrillist, Elite Daily, and others.