6 Questions "Pretty Little Liars" Needs to Answer ASAP
Or I'm quitting the show and not looking back.
On Tuesday night, Pretty Little Liars returned for its sixth season, which has been heavily advertised as the "Summer of Answers." By now, longtime PLL viewers know to never, ever trust anyone who claims that an episode will offer closure of any kind, but still, we hold out hope. Case in point: The writers' idea of "revealing 'A'" in the season five finale amounted to them — spoiler alert from here on out — introducing a character named Charles that no one had ever heard of before, and still, we watch.
The season premiere was entertaining, of course, but this time, something felt off. After 121 episodes of the Liars making terrible, no-good decisions and coming no closer to solving the central mystery of why these awful things keep happening to them, a new question has become unavoidable: How much longer can you take this? Watching Ali give the cops the slip yet again so she could go meet a psychopath in the woods gave me so much anxiety that I started screaming out loud at my TV for her to stop it. The cops in Rosewood aren't corrupt anymore, so just do what they say, you stupid teenager!
When the Liars were forced into their rooms to find their "surprises" that apparently gave them all PTSD but were never explained, I realized I'd had it. Enough! No more mysteries. This show has always involved murder and plot twists, but it also used to feature fun things like teens sneaking up to their friends' cabins to hook up. Whither that Pretty Little Liars? The show has become so impenetrable that it's almost Lost-like in its opacity. (And in its locales – the Liars were just trapped in a Dharma hatch for four weeks!) I am so desperate for any fun on PLL that I actually rewound the part where Caleb hugged Hanna while she asked him to never let her go, because it was literally the only moment of quasi-joy in the episode. So if the show doesn't answer the following six questions by the end of season six, I'm out, and I'm not looking back.
1. Who is Charles? This might be the unsolved mystery I find the most unforgivable. After all of the years viewers have spent wondering who "A" is, the fact that the writers had the nerve to "reveal" him as a hitherto unknown character is un-fucking-believable. Who is Charles DiLaurentis, and why has no one ever heard of him? What does he have to do with Ali? Is he really "A," even? (This last point, believe it or not, is still up for debate among PLL fans, because even obsessive viewers can't keep track of who "A" was at any given time, and we still don't know who Red Coat/Black Widow was/is.)
2. What in the name of all that is holy is wrong with him? "A" in all his/her forms has always been a stalker nutjob, but the past few episodes have gone beyond in their insanity. This dude is keeping six teen girls imprisoned in an underground bunker decorated to look like their childhood bedrooms, and when they misbehave he shoves them in an "it rubs the lotion on its skin" pit straight out of The Silence of the Lambs. Somehow this bunker is located right in the middle of a state park and no one has ever seen it. That mysterious sixth girl (more on her later) has possibly been there for years. Threatening text messages about your dad's affair, this is not. So what's his damage? What could they possibly have done to him to merit this kind of rage? What hellacious combination of mental disorders is Charles dealing with that he thinks this behavior is acceptable? This has to be something more than "they accidentally set a fire that left me blind," right? RIGHT?!
3. What does Andrew have to do with any of it? The cops think Andrew is behind the whole kidnapping, and while it does seem like he has something to do with some of it, it's clearly not that simple. I'm inclined to believe Andrew actually is Charles, but the Dollhouse seems far too complicated to be a one-man operation and Andrew, despite his Adderall-dealing tendencies, doesn't seem quite crazy enough to have masterminded it all. Side note: How have Aria and Spencer never discussed that they've both made out with Andrew? That seems like the sort of thing that should have come up by now.
4. Who is that sixth girl? Yes, Tuesday's episode ID'ed her as Sara Harvey, one of the girls who went missing at the same time as Ali, but that doesn't explain how she ended up in the Dollhouse or what she has to do with the other girls. What does Charles want with her? "A" wasn't always Charles, either, which means that Charles has been doing bad things for longer than the girls realize. So again, this so-called "reveal" raises more questions than it answers.
5. What were the so-called "surprises" that scarred the Liars so badly? Based on the promo for next week's episode, this is going to come up again, but because I'm so tired of unsolved mysteries on PLL I refuse to be teased on this point for very long. The writers are going to have get pretty creative with this if they intend to come up with something worse than "being stalked for years for unclear reasons then being imprisoned in an underground bunker by a faceless man who may want you dead."
6. Whose body is in the barrel? It wasn't Mona; she's alive. So whose body was it? Plot threads get left dangling all the time on PLL, but this isn't the same thing as "what ever happened to that cute waiter from the country club that Spencer dated in season one?" This is a dead body decomposing in a barrel hidden in a storage unit held in Hanna's name. For the love of god, don't let this one go!
Wednesday, June 3, 2015
