'Pretty Little Liars' 'She's Better Now' recap: Mona's return brings more drama

"Pretty Little Liars" season 3 returned to ABC Family Tuesday, Jan. 8, with the all-new episode 14, "She's Better Now," but if there's one thing that's true on this show, it's that Mona (Janel Parrish) is not someone who can be trusted.

"Welcome to Mona 2.0." Mona returned to Rosewood High, professing to be "better" and claiming her parents were forcing her to return. She played the helpless victim, first with Hanna (Ashley Benson) in her room and then with everyone else when she sent out a video to win everyone over. Things weren't easy for Mona, of course, and she even found a brain stabbed into her locker door with a note ("Takes one mad cow to know another"), but she didn't help her case when she walked down the hall holding the knifed brain to throw it out.

Mona's not alone. As "She's Better Now" showed, Mona had Jason (Drew Van Acker) in her corner. After seeing the two hugging at school, Spencer (Troian Bellisario) tried to warn him about her, but he said he liked to give people the benefit of the doubt. And at the end of the episode, it was Mona who was bandaging his side, where he had been stabbed.

From bad to worse. Aria (Lucy Hale) had a lot on her plate, from the mystery surrounding her father (Chad Lowe) and Alison (Sasha Pieterse) to keeping Ezra's (Ian Harding) son a secret to Meredith (Amanda Schull) being her new teacher, and this "Pretty Little Liars" episode dealt with all of that. "A" left an "It's a Boy!" basket outside of Ezra's that Aria had to deal with. Meredith called her out for being on her phone in class and told her they weren't in class to discuss her history. She originally told Byron that Aria handled the situation like an adult, but later, after a note sent her to the storage shed where she was caught in a fire, Meredith changed her story and Byron blamed Aria and her friends for the fire. Finally, when the girls snooped in Harold's (Travis Richey) office after they discovered he was the new school janitor and had Mona's stuff from the inn, they found Alison's journal and a flashbacks showed her blackmailing Byron with a threat of a phone call to Ella (Holly Marie Combs) about Meredith—and giving him until Labor Day weekend to make his decision. Byron was listening in as Aria talked to Spencer on the phone about the fire.

Creepy Toby. Is it just us or does every scene between Spencer and Toby (Keegan Allen) have an underlying "creepy factor" to it? What would've been a nice relaxing evening in the hot tub for the couple before was very much not and it was a relief when she went inside.

What does Lucas know? After Mona threw out the brain, she whispered something to Lucas (Brendan Robinson), which made Hanna suspicious—and that suspicion only grew when she saw him limping. However, that was because Toby had tried to run him over, and he told her it was just an accident skateboarding. Though he didn't tell her much, Lucas did finally tell Hanna that Mona had been out of Radley before her release, which led her to believe she was on the Halloween train.

There's an app for that. Emily's (Shay Mitchell) father was being overprotective, to the point where he decided she wasn't going to do the run she had been raising money for and had an alarm system installed, alarms on ever window that he controlled via an app on his phone. However, she just switched their phones in order to get out of the house to snoop around Harold's office during the run.

The "A" team is at it again. The "A" team was certainly busy in this episode, from Toby trying to run over Lucas as he skateboarded around town to the fire at the school to loosening the kid's bike so he crashed at the end.

"Pretty Little Liars" season 3 airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. on ABC Family. What did you think of "She's Better Now"?

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© Meredith Jacobs 2013

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