On The PLL Finale, Or: “Everything Makes Sense! . . . Wait, What?”
The Pretty Little Liars season finale finally untangled what was a pretzel with far, far too many knots. Like, if you dunked a pretzel in radioactive slime, that was the batshit craziness of plot twists PLL had become for the past, oh, five out of six seasons. (SPOILER ZONE from here on out. Oh, and enjoy navigating all the parenthetical asides in this post, because that’s what PLL’s insanity does to me)
(Image source: Wetpaint.com)
After revealing A’s backstory and finally making some sense out of the entire run of this series, I can only assume the writers threw all their pens/energy-efficient-laptops into the air and got wasted because instead of ending the series in a sensical way, they were [presumably] requested to find some rand-o excuse to keep the series going. And what they came up with was a flash forward to five years from now in which the girls are grown ass women (but Aria looks like she is wearing the same outfit?) who show up all flustered to warn Allie, now a school teacher, that someone is out to get her even though they supposedly resolved all that shit with A, who is Cece. And red coat is Sarah? … Back to that in a minute.
(Image source: Entertainment Weekly)
In other words, the powers that be at ABC Family just hit the restart button, if restart buttons typically involved flashing forward instead of backward. It was like they took a note from JJ Abram’s alternate universe Star Trek reboot concept, except with significantly less ingenuity. But perhaps that’s why he is directing the sequel to the original Star Wars with its original cast and ABC Family is… well, a teenage soap opera network.
Early on in the episode the director/writers/powers that be/etc stopped playing cat and mouse with us like A has with the girls, and reveal, as some had suspected seasons ago, that Cece has been A all along. When she was originally introduced to the series, her close resemblance to Allie had me thinking that perhaps she was the long-lost sister of Allie’s the writers had hinted at during a Halloween episode when a scary tale about twins (with one ending up murdered) is told. That story, as I have mentioned before, has a lot of weight to it, and seemed pretty purposeful.
(At this point I should say I will not explain who every character is/every back story because it would take hundreds of words. May I suggest Wikipedia. I am sure the PLL-obsessed legions of fans have ensured it is accurate. Moving on.)
Later on, Allie has a flashback in which she recalls finding a present hidden in her family’s piano – a present identical to one that her mother gave to her. Her mother then orders her not to tell anyone. "A-ha," I thought. "Surely this is evidence of her long lost twin!" And with all the seasons of chatter about some mysterious chick named Bethany who we didn’t ever get to see til tonight, and even then only in a flashback, I was sure it had to be Bethany. And I was pretty sure Cece was really Bethany.
Wrong! This season, we found out that A was really Allie’s long lost brother – not sister – named Charles. My theory no longer made sense and I, probably like many other fans, gave up. But lo and behold, turns out I just didn’t have an expanded enough mind to consider that perhaps the sister I had long suspected and Charles were actually one and the same.
As it turns out, Allie DID have a brother named Charles who ended up at Radley for dubious reasons, but that brother happened to be transgender, and later became Charlotte, who took the name Cece to further mask her identity or, you know, just to add another layer of confusion. As a child, Charles, who identified as a girl, grew up at Radley with Bethany, a disturbed young girl who also happened to be the murderer or Toby’s mother, a plot point which still doesn’t matter that much except to make Toby more sympathetic. But there you have it anyway. And as it turns out, every time Mrs. DiLaurentis gave a gift to Allie, she gave the same gift to Charles/Charlotte. So that explains the piano mystery.
(Image source: Entertainment Tonight/ABC Family)
All this makes sense. Good job, PLL writers. I didn’t think it was going to come out that cleanly executed.
But a few things are fuzzy. Cece’s motivation to screw with the girls as horribly as she had for the entirety of their high school existence just doesn’t seem well grounded enough. Sure, she and Mona both eventually ended up at Radley, and Mona said the girls were happy Allie was gone after her presumed death. Maybe Cece was a little fragile because she thought she was responsible for Allie’s presumed death, and flipped out a little too hard. But THAT hard? Enough to murder people? Enough to psychologically torture other girls close to her age, including her own sister, for years? Enough to build a weird Portal-esque underground labyrinth and keep the girls in it like they were mice? I don’t buy it. No dice.
Plus, the fact that Sarah turns out to be Red Coat is pretty weak. She only just got introduced, so it’s impossible to know how she knew Cece prior to all the A drama, and why she would be so indebted to her. Maybe that will be revealed in the next season where everyone has suddenly aged five years (conveniently closer to the actresses’ real ages). Although it turns out to be a cool excuse to see Emily punch somebody in the face.
Look, I love PLL. It’s gloriously nonsensical and dramatic and juicy and mysterious. But when a show has to do something as drastic as jump to an entirely different time period in order to keep plotlines moving, it’s usually not the best indicator of much more of a lifespan.