Pretty Little Liars: In Defense of Mona
[...] there you are, staring at the smashed corpse of your sort-of best friend's husband, a man whom you believe to be sociopathically abusive and grossly violent, as his busted head rests on your steering wheel.
Despite always being around when they need her to clean up a crime scene or instantly operate a Star Trek-like holodeck, Mona is, no matter the situation, forever on the short list of suspects with Jenna (Tammin Sursok), Ali, and whichever creepy dude one of them just picked up at a bar the night before.
Mona rolling up in Hanna's fixed car and schooling the Liars on the finer points of being criminally stealth is just the latest in a long line of Mona trying to find ways to make up for her (now ancient) reign of terror.
Recall the Season 5A finale when the show psyched us all out (#NeverForget Season 5's narrative betrayal) by showing Mona's presumed dead (but actually just paralyzed) body, lifeless in the trunk of a car, just before she was carted off to the same "dollhouse" in which the Liars would soon find themselves naked and afraid.
The Liars will only occasionally accept Vanderwaal assistance in spite of reluctance, hesitation, and negative bias -- even though Mona has been baptized in the same sacred flame of torment as the rest of them.
Which is why it's no surprise during this episode that Mona reacted to Aria's tired disdain almost as if this was a normal conversation pattern.
Because by now it is normal.
[...] Mona quips back with confidence and no small amount of sass, fully detailing all the things she's done to help her friends and thereby making the Liars' schemes look like they were constructed by babies.
A dynamic theme to "Hit and Run, Run, Run" was the focus on how these women surrendered nice, quiet lives under their own deserved fig trees to retake up the arms against familiar, cruel (if soapy) enemies.
The unfamiliar parts of this heavily-tread territory should be enough for