Episodes 3.04 & 3.05: "I'm Too Depressed to Work a Zipper"

We are joined by special guest Leslie to talk about 3.04, “Birds of a Feather”, and 3.05, “That Girl Is Poison”! We discuss unrealistically fast party preparation, how horrible and racist the Nate storyline is, and whether the wine moms should just date each other (yes). Leslie educates us on the past and present of psychiatric incarceration in Pennsylvania, which is full of infuriating facts, and we struggle to figure out how Mona got into Radley in the first place. Cameron tries to sell us on her yacht doctor show, and Deepa shares ideas for PLL fanvids that will never be made. Shout out to Leslie’s friend Riley, one of our favorite DFTC fans!

Theme song by Ashok R. Chandran and website by Rainbow Forge.

Chickpeas Oh My Gosh!

Leslie’s Chickpea Cobbler: a Leslie original recipe!!
Socca: the pancakes can be cooked using a few drops of oil in a stainless steel skillet with no issue, and half the chickpea flour can be substituted for all purpose flour if you want to stretch the chickpea flour

Psychiatric Incarceration in Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania has the dishonor of being home to many firsts in the history of American psychiatric incarceration…
Benjamin Franklin experimented with proto-electrotherapy and is rumored to have published a zine written by psychiatric survivors in Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania Hospital, a public hospital founded by Franklin and Thomas Bond in 1751, tortured psychiatric patients by chaining them up in the basement, letting the public watch them for entertainment, and hiding mercury in their bread rations
Friends Asylum, the first private psychiatric hospital in the US, has been open since 1817 and popularized “moral treatment” that had many facilities moving mental healthcare away from city centers
Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane, the first hospital to follow the Kirkbride Plan (which aimed at using architecture and design to influence mental health) opened in 1841; most Kirkbride hospitals are now closed, but Kirkbride Center, an addiction treatment facility, is currently at the same location
Involuntary commitment: civil commitment is when people in mental health crisis can be brought to a hospital and confined for various lengths of time, while forensic commitment is when someone who has been charged of a crime (but not yet convicted) is deemed as mentally “incompetent”, so they’ll instead have to undergo forced “treatment” until they are considered ready to stand trial
Pennsylvania currently has a “restoration center” and six state hospitals for civil commitment; here’s more on how people can be held involuntarily even in after voluntary admission in Pennsylvania
Two of Pennsylvania’s state hospitals are also used for forensic commitment, and Allegheny County just started an in-community “competency restoration” program; in Pennsylvania, “competency restoration” can also take place in a jail
You can learn more about psych abolitionist approaches to involuntary commitment in No New Washington Prisons’ An Abolitionist Guide to Western State Hospital Expansion
Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT): an involuntary “treatment” ordered by courts, but doesn’t necessarily mean being in a facility full-time, usually for mental/behavioral health diagnoses or substance use; as of 2019, Pennsylvania has an AOT law that was met with opposition and is not funded

Deepa’s Literary Analysis

The book that Nate is reading is The Blunderer, by Patricia Highsmith, which is about a man who is obsessed by the idea of killing his wife…but unfortunately the even more apt connection to the Nate storyline is that Highsmith was apparently super anti-Black! What the fuck!
The theme for Jenna’s birthday was Mad Hatter’s Tea Party from Alice in Wonderland
Hot tip from Cameron: to avoid getting bed bugs from used books you bring home, try putting them in the freezer for an indeterminate amount of time!

Things We Referenced Related to PLL

Various PLL actors being in other things: Sterling Sulieman (Nate/Lyndon) in The Vampire Diaries; Steven Krueger (Emily’s first season boyfriend Ben) in Yellowjackets and The Originals; and Melanie Mayron, (photographer Laurel Tuchman) in Jane the Virgin
Why is everyone who owns the Rear Window Brew and its successors horrible
The Katy Perry documentary that Emily and Paige almost see was a paid promotion! Wow
If you have Ashley/Ella fic recs, you should probably email them to us at hello@chickpeaspod.com

Things We Referenced Completely Unrelated to PLL

Fake pregnancy plotlines on Glee, Harlan Coben’s The Stranger, and Doctor Odyssey
Not-fake pregnancy plotlines on teen shows like SKAM
Steven Krueger and Joshua Jackson have not in fact acted together, Leslie just thought that the other dude in Doctor Odyssey (Sean Teale) was Steven Krueger
Bon Iver is more than one person and, for some reason, also the musical partner of the WNBA team the Minnesota Lynx??
Church roofs are always failing in British murder mysteries
Leslie’s PLL psych abolition memes (which we will link to in the future if she posts them online) are inspired by Saved by the Bell Hooks

Fashion Analysis

Leslie had a “spite” best outfit – Hanna’s perfectly acceptable shirt and sweatpants that everyone kept giving her shit for – while Cameron liked Emily’s uniform for Jenna’s party, and Deepa enjoyed Aria’s geometric print dress, but was ambivalent on it being paired with the denim vest

Hanna sitting on a couch wearing a fitted light gray shirt and black sweatpants

Emily on the phone in the kitchen of the coffee shop wear she works, wearing a white dress shirt and black necktie

Aria on the sidewalk with the other Liars, wearing large hoop earrings and a long-sleeved dress with an intricate asymmetrical geometric pattern in black, lilac, white, and blue, topped with a dark gray jean vest

For worst, even the leopard-print couldn’t save Aria’s dress with the giant butterfly necklace, and we also disliked her other blouse with a weird necklace at the top and boots with fringe

Aria standing in a classroom wearing a leopard-print dress with puffed short sleeves and a gathered waist, along with necklace that has a large metal butterfly pendant

close-up of Aria where the butterfly necklace is more visible

Aria sitting on her couch wearing a tank top that has a large metal necklace on the hem, along with patterned black tights and brown boots with fringe

Spencer wore a shirt with tiny owls on it! A different one even than her previous shirt with tiny owls on it from episode 2.02! Also, Leslie thought that Spencer’s knee socks and platform Oxfords made her look like a goat – which is fine if that’s what she was going for, but Spencer, despite loving to wear animals, probably was not