'Pretty Little Liars' Recap: Toby And Caleb Team Up; Emily Breaks Into Wilden's Apartment, Ends Up With A Car In Her Living Room

by UInterviewJuly 24, 2013, 12:00 amNews >

The girls’ families continue to be under attack, while the guys go on the offensive against ‘A’ in Tuesday’s episode of Pretty Little Liars, "Crash and Burn, Girl!."

Ashley (Laura Leighton) is still in prison as the main suspect in the murder of Detective Wilden (Bryce Johnson), and things are getting serious – Spencer (Troian Bellisario) overhears her mother saying that it would be better for Ashley to plead guilty of voluntary manslaughter and get a 25 year sentence instead of maintaining her innocence and being found guilt of first degree murder, which could mean life in prison or the death penalty. Hanna (Ashley Benson) is barely keeping it together, and, after Spencer tells her what she heard, she’s off to the prison to ask her mother to plead guilty. Hanna is desperate to be reunited with her mother, even if it means waiting 25 years, but Ashley refuses. She tells Hanna that she will not allow Wilden to make her a criminal.

While Hanna is bedridden with grief, everyone else is teaming up to find anything that might help Ashley’s case. For Emily (Shay Mitchell), Spencer, and Aria (Lucy Hale), the mission to clear Hanna’s mother involves breaking into Wilden’s apartment. Emily swipes the key from her mother’s desk at the police station and skips out on an important doctor’s appointment for her injured shoulder to search the apartment for clues. Aria discovers Wilden’s extensive porn collection (she is less than impressed) and Emily and Spencer spot an unopened package. When they open it, they find a box full of meat (now gone bad) with a note from ‘A’ about a barbeque. All in all, nothing extremely helpful. However, their foray into the sleuthing business did have one, big, negative consequence: Emily’s mom, Pam (Nia Peeples), got suspended when the key went missing. The Fields family is already struggling for money, and with Pam promising to pay for Emily’s experimental shoulder treatment (insurance doesn’t cover it, naturally), things are looking worse for Emily’s family. As if things weren’t bad enough, the liars’ trip to Wilden’s apartment has upset ‘A’ so much that she/he gets revenge and runs a car into the Fields’ living room, narrowly missing Pam and basically destroying their home.

On a lighter note, Aria’s family remains in tact after Mike (Cody Christian) gets blamed for the vandalism of Connor’s (Michael Grant) car. Faced with possible expulsion (not to mention criminal charges), Mike maintains his innocence, and Aria is sure that ‘A’ is setting her brother up. Lucky for her, Ezra (Ian Harding) swoops in to save the day. After talking to Aria, he reminds the Principle that there is no evidence against Mike, and, should he expel Mike, it would be based on his mental health (the Principle asked Aria if Mike was still taking his medication)– something parents would not stand for should they find out. The threat, while weak, worked its magic, and earned Ezra a personal thank-you visit. Ezra pledged his loyalty to Aria, and the pair appears to be trying to move past the awkwardness their break-up has caused. Before anything inappropriate can happen, Aria leaves.

Finally, Toby (Keegan Allen) and Caleb (Tyler Blackburn) teamed up (finally) to conduct their own investigation sans their girlfriends. Caleb will do anything to help Hanna and her mother, and he and Toby agree that there is only one way to find who killed Wilden: find ‘A’/Red Coat. (‘Where Is A?’) After finishing off Toby’s nifty ‘A’ crime map, the boys start with the airplane that Red Coat was on the night of the fire (last season finale). Spencer only caught a few digits of the plate number, but her freakish memory is dependable (says Toby), and the boys take turns looking it up on the computer. Caleb fails (weird, considering he’s the hacker), but Toby finally sees that they have a hit – it’s a private plane based out of a small airport nearby. Mission accepted. Toby and Caleb go to the airport and bribe the guy at the front desk, Nigel Wright (Wyatt Nash), for information on the plane’s flight plan that night. The plan doesn’t say anything about landing near the lodge where the fire was set, but, Nigel tells them that they could have changed their flight plan without alerting anyone, though, the odds of the pilot landing in the middle of the woods were slim considering the fog on the night in question. As soon as the boy leaves, a shifty Nigel picks up his phone to call somebody…

Back in Toby’s apartment, the boys feel like they’ve reached a dead end. Toby can’t stop fiddling with the lighter he found at the scene of the fire – and then he makes the connection. The lighter is engraved with a compass where the initials for North and West (N and W) are bigger than the other directions, and those letters just happen to be Nigel’s initials. That could just be a coincidence, but put together with the fact that Nigel mentioned the weather on the night of the fire, the boys were convinced that Nigel was the pilot that had flown Red Coat to the forest that night. When they go back to confront Nigel the next day, he insists that he knows nothing about the fire, and tells them that Cece Drake (Vanessa Ray) was the one who hired him to fly that plane. Though, we later see him talking to ‘A’ and apologizing, so, he could have easily been lying. (Another thing that’s suspect about Nigel is that he attended Wilden’s funeral with Jenna (Tammin Sursok) in the season premiere, a fact that was not addressed in this episode.)

Nigel gets away before Toby and Caleb can ask him anything else, but he’s not fast enough for Caleb, who manages to get Nigel’s phone out of his pocket during the struggle (A plus for Caleb!). Caleb uses his hacking skills on the phone and determines that Nigel made a series of calls to New York City.

So, what does this all mean? Spencer’s working theory is that Cece’s involvement in the fire was motivated by her fear of Wilden, and, after that night, she killed Wilden to get away from his evil clutches.

With Toby and Caleb officially joining forces, all that's missing is for Ezra to get in on the anti-'A' train. And, based on the promo for next week's episode, it looks like Mr. Fitz might be on track to do just that!