On Pretty Little Liars: The Perfectionists season 1 episode 5, Alison finally gets a face-to-face meeting with the infamous Taylor Hotchkiss, but she doesn’t find what she’s looking for. Meanwhile, Mona gets some answers from Ray Hogadorn.

Pretty Little Liars: The Perfectionists 1×05 is the perfect example of how this series can shine. With Alison and Mona at the forefront, there’s a potential for their starring roles to help illuminate the other characters, rather than forcing the newbies into the spotlight, stumbling over themselves as they try to beat each other out for their moment to shine.

As the season goes on, the series genuinely becomes stronger. The pilot episode, while I deemed it to be a very strong start to the series, I now look back on as a very frail beginning. It was quite possible that the show could have fallen apart afterward, especially without Nolan’s antagonistic presence (and the lack of flashbacks), but it’s actually quite interesting to see how the world is moving on without him.

Unlike Pretty Little Liars, which had Rosewood never recover from what happened to Alison AKA Bethany, Beacon Heights is moving on (rather quickly) without Nolan Hotchkiss, who will soon be a distant memory as the secrets he held against our Perfectionists are just the beginning of their downward spirals.

Alison and Taylor

Picking up immediately where The Perfectionists season 1, episode 4 left off, Alison is taken for a ride in Taylor’s locked trailer as she proves how off the rails she’s become in her absence from Beacon Heights.

It’s interesting how similar Taylor and Alison are, yet they’re so different. Their personalities don’t quite fit together; at least Taylor’s current personality doesn’t, but we couldn’t know how she was acting before she became paranoid and faked her death.

In the near future, viewers are definitely going to need flashbacks of Taylor. Right now, her personality is, kind of, one-dimensional, which is making it very hard to be concerned for her or to care about the circumstances leading up to her fake death.

Plus, we saw all of two seconds of Nolan and Taylor interacting, so we need scenes of the siblings together, even with their mother, to feel the weight of what they’ve lost.

And, as much as I love Pretty Little Liars, I really do not want to see the same story play out as Taylor reintegrates into Beacon Heights (when it’s inevitably revealed that she is alive) when we’ve already seen the same story—or a very similar version of it—with Alison.

From Taylor’s version of events, someone tried to kill her before she had the idea to fake her death and lurk in the shadows to discover the secrets that Beacon Heights University is hiding. Like Alison, she ran away after someone attempted to murder her, managed to be officially ruled dead, and is now hiding to discover who did it.

We get it, they’re supposed to be a lot alike (and look alike, which is definitely no longer the case), but this is a bit unnecessary.

Waiting four seasons to reveal Alison was alive might have been excessive, but it was powerful. We felt the weight of her absence hang over all five of the girls, the town, and Rosewood High. We felt Alison’s sadness and disappointment on everything she had missed out on and what she had lost in her time away. With Taylor, there’s nothing.

Ava, Dylan, and Caitlin

Unlike on Pretty Little Liars where we would sometimes see the dramatic aftermath of an event, the little tease at the beginning of The Perfectionists season 1 episode 5 gave us a glimpse at the middle of their intense fight. How did the three character get so far from their burgeoning friendship in one episode?

Logically, I can understand that the relationship between the Perfectionists isn’t supposed to be tight. They’re not really friends, at least not totally, and they know just as little about each other as other students at BHU do. However, I’m already exhausted at the back and forth between them.

Dylan’s… well, how can we explain Dylan? Annoying. It was nice to see Dylan more in his element with the music, but I wish he would have been more supportive of Caitlin after she told him what she accidentally did to Ava. Without Andrew, Dylan seems like a bearable character, but it’s clear that he’s going to be the Aria of the show, so we should expect very little from his future (other than romance).

Ava is, honestly, the worst, and it’s so hard to feel sympathy for her with how she treats other characters. I acknowledge that Caitlin fucked up, as did Caitlin, but Ava’s grudge against her seems entirely misplaced. Why isn’t she angry with her father for putting her in the mess in the first place?

With Caitlin’s recent accident, and the lengths she went to in order to protect them all, Ava better be hand-delivering an apology to Caitlin’s bedside in the next episode.

Caitlin has genuinely apologized to her, has made every effort to grow close to Dylan and Ava, yet they continuously treat her like shit. If there’s anyone on this show that deserves better than what they’ve been given, it’s Caitlin.

It’s been said before by other writers, but Caitlin is already the Spencer Hastings of the show. The person being tormented the most, with the most to lose, and a level of intelligence that makes the faceless foe feel more threatened. And now Caitlin’s been hit by a car because of her actions, which isn’t the least bit surprising, but still was a bit shocking.

The most shocking part of the episode wasn’t the car, but was Caitlin taking a swing at Mason with a fire poker. What kind of crazy bitch does that? If it were self-defense then, yeah, I would have done it, too. But Caitlin did it almost entirely unprovoked, so it’s interesting to see that she has a bit of a violent and reckless streak.

However, I have my doubts that Mason was the one driving. Sure, she hit him over the head (and, somehow, luckily didn’t kill him) and stole his phone, but I suspect there was something on the phone that whoever is stalking them didn’t want the Perfectionists to see.

If it were Mason driving the car, the writers would have put less effort into making sure the person behind the wheel was impossible to make out.

During the last episode, while Andrew and Dylan were fighting, Dylan became very aggressive with Andrew, grabbing his arm in an unusual way that really stood out to me. Now this mess with Caitlin… it’s like the writers are trying to make each of the main characters a suspect (aside from Alison and Mona), and it’s working.

I sincerely think everyone in Beacon Heights, excluding Mona and Alison, is shady and could have killed Nolan for one reason or another. We have yet to figure out what Nolan had over Ava, but it seems that behind their relationship was a darkness as Nolan couldn’t put his mischievous ways behind him. (Kind of like Emily and Alison, it seems!)

Mona and Ray

The mysterious Ray Hogadorn is none other than… a janitor? It’s a confusing twist that has to mean something, beyond the faint connection to Taylor. The man behind the message on Alison’s walls, originally meant for Taylor (and I’m quite disappointed that she didn’t write it), and Taylor’s idea for her suicide attempt is already revealed, but what relevance does he have?

Ray clearly knows more than he let on, and I’d be surprised if Mona accepted Ray’s story at his word. She knows, more than anyone, how people can twist the truth to come up with a better story. I’m desperate to hear Taylor’s side of the story and what Ray Hogadorn truly was to her.

ALSO, how can we not talk about that Mona twist? I knew that Mona was caught with Alex and Mary Drake in France in some capacity! Is Mona hiding out from the infamous A.D. and her murderer of a mother now?

I’m so intrigued by this story, and it definitely feels like they wouldn’t mention the Drakes (twice!) if there wasn’t a plan for Mona’s story to intersect with theirs’ once more.

What did you think of The Perfectionists season 1 episode 5? Leave a comment below!

Pretty Little Liars: The Perfectionists continues Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET on Freeform!