5.3 Surfing The Aftershocks This episode, Surfing The Aftershocks, was pretty much a mixture of the old and new PLL, with the good stuff mostly counteracting the bad. Alison’s arc remains the most interesting thing about the season, lending a human drama to the lunacy going on everywhere else, and the effect her return is having on each Liar has a lot of potential that hasn’t yet been squandered away. But then there’s Ezra, and Aria, and Paige. There’s just so much mess that the writers are still trying to clear away. Or a more accurate description might be brush under the rug, since the Ezria arc has gone from creepy to vindicating to enraging to ludicrous in just half a season. The epic love story between a teacher and his student was something I could ignore this time last year, but then the show made it into something so much worse and is now trying to backtrack as fast as possible. Aria being in the same room as Ezra is enough, but to openly confide in him about Shana weeks after the big reveal? Then you have the “scene of the crime” line coupled with Alison’s rousing character recommendation. Sheesh. Spencer’s hunt for both Alison’s attacker and the secrets her family are keeping hasn’t yet reached a point where we can talk about it, but the look Spencer gets when she’s on a mission is one that every episode would be amiss without. The show has a Melissa problem just as much as it has a Jenna/Lucas/Noel/Wren problem – unavailable actors on a huge, expansive ensemble show like this can really hurt the narrative – but maybe her recent return will mean we get more Hastings drama this year. I also hope it involves Jason, another oft-missing character, as he’s always a welcome presence. And we know A wasn’t Shana, since we discover this week that Ezra’s iron-clad evidence was as circumstantial as the fact she was following the Liars while wearing a hoodie. She may have been one of the minions, but she certainly wasn’t Big A. That leaves it open to all of our previous suspects, including Jenna, Wren and Melissa, but the altered A tags featuring various unmasked people (so far including Shana, Alison and Mona) suggest that the show really is doing something different with the villains this year. If nothing else, that’s intriguing, and I like that Mona is back in full baddie mode. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
