'Pretty Little Liars' recap: Don't forget your imaginary friends

Spoiler alert! The following contains spoilers for Tuesday's episode of Pretty Little Liars. 

Now that the Liars have spent an entire episode on the post-kidnapping issues, it's time to get back to the things that matter: Sleuthing and the paragon of education that is Rosewood High School. But unfortunately things in the post-Charles world aren't the same, and it's no use trying to go back to business as usual. Because Charles won't let them.

Let's break "Songs of Experience" down Liar by Liar.

Spencer

For an episode that contained as much classic Liar sleuthing as this one did, there wasn't that much from Spencer Hastings, Rosewood's most effective detective. While Spence let Aria take the lead on the investigation, it gave her more to to berate Alison into asking her father about Charles, to argue with Toby about Alison, and to argue with her mother. Pretty much the classic Spencer trifecta. And by the end of the episode, after all the stress of Charles' surprise at the Dr. Sullivan appointment and Andrew being released, Spencer turns to her old standby: Drugs. Hope you enjoy that good night of sleep, Spence, because you'll probably have on hell of a hangover.

Aria

With Spencer too busy arguing with people to take up her usual role as sleuth-in-chief, Aria Montgomery is here to pick up the slack. Her "coping mechanism" of trying to pin the whole thing on Andrew kind of backfires as he is released this episode after his alibis check out, which makes the information about him being adopted that she and Ezra illegally got from his doctor pretty much useless. But Aria does prove to be useful in the search of the DiLaurentis house when she decides to check the button jars, of all places, and finds a family photo of Jessica, baby Alison, Jason and Charlie/Charles. We'll pretend for a second that that makes up for lying about seeing Andrew in the Dollhouse of Doom.

Emily

OK. before we talk about anything else we NEED to discuss Emily's camouflage sweatsuit. Emily usually has my least favorite fashion sense, but this was beyond. Take your own advice and get some new clothes, girl. But anyways, Emily is channeling her mothering skills (and Pam's) into taking care of Sarah, who is understandably super messed up after her ordeal (more on her below). She also really doesn't want to talk about what went down in the Dollhouse of Doom, which is OK except they really need to talk about what went down in the Dollhouse of Doom. Which brings us to...

Hanna

Thank god for Hanna Marin, amirite? This girl continues to be the most well-adjusted and smartest of the bunch, and she never gets any credit. She's the only one who actually makes it to school when they all swear they're going to go, she's the first one to ask for help (they ALL need help), and she's the one to finally get them to talk about the "game with switches" (aka torturing each other) from the Dollhouse of Doom. It's comforting to know that the girls didn't actually torture each other, even if they thought they did. Hopefully now they can start to heal? I doubt it, since Charles seems to be so against their therapy sessions.

Everyone else

Sarah Harvey continues to be really creepy. There's not much else to her. If she were actually friends with the Liars she would be immediately ostracized by them because her inability to use a curling iron after having been held hostage for two years. The shame. Good thing Pam Fields was around to give her a rad pixie cut, even if she does like to sit in Emily's room in the dark. So now she's just creepy with short hair.

Alison, meanwhile, continues to flirt with her own personal age-inappropriate man (aka Toby's new partner), much to Toby's chagrin. Lorenzo wants Ali to be a joiner-inner, but she's afraid everyone will hate her, and for good reason. They flirt. He's still shady. That's all I can say about them this week.

Jason provides the Liars with the most pertinent information about Charles yet. He explains that he had an imaginary friend name "Charlie" when he was little, but one day his father told him that Charlie was going away, and Jason never saw Charlie again. Since parents don't really have control over imaginary friends, I'm guessing that "Charlie" was a whole hell of a lot more real than Jason remembers.

The episode ends with Mr. D fessing up about Charles/Charlie to Alison and Jason (although we don't get to be privy to the information as the camera conveniently pulled away from the scene just as he started to say the good stuff), while Charles looks in on the family drama from outside the window, as per usual wearing his black hoodie and gloves.

I'm pretty sure this episode only served to confirm what the fans had been thinking since the season five finale: That Charles is Jason's twin brother who somehow left the DiLaurentis family when he was young. Other than that and Andrew's release, the episode was mostly just spinning its wheels, waiting for something to happen. I don't even have a good list of quotes, because the sass was just not there in "Songs of Experience." Let's hope we do better next week.

Missed last week's recap? You can read it here.