The Inevitable Downfall of Pretty Little Liars

i'm just a girl who met man when he came in from the rain so once upon a yeehaw there was this show called pretty little liars and i used to like it quite a bit when i was a teenager it was my guilty pleasure show of choice and honestly it was kind of a phenomenon back in the day it had a very dedicated fan base and a lot of people were excited about it and i'm pretty sure that if you're watching this video and you've never seen pretty little liars you still have heard of it because it was absolutely everywhere during its run pretty little liars is known for its wacky mysteries and iconic characters and it was kind of a groundbreaking show at the time because along with gossip girl it was one of the first tv shows to use the concept of social media as a plot mechanic sit down we're going to talk about you another time this isn't about you however if you know pretty little liars you're probably aware that it's also known for having one of the most despised series finales of all time and when the show ended in 2017 there was an absolute uproar amongst fans but when i heard the show is currently being rebooted on hbo max i just felt like taking a look back at the original could be interesting because the backlash that followed the final season was brutal and i'm talking game of thrones how i met your mother levels of brutal it was a big deal like the show really [ __ ] up at the end so i wanted to figure out where it went wrong and because i like to torture myself i rewatched the whole show but why why would you do that why would you do any of that and as i went through it again i started to realize something kind of weird i think the backlash against pretty little liars in its final season was sort of inevitable see there were a lot of signs in early seasons that suggested the show was headed down the wrong path but we were all blind to them at the time for a reason that i'll explain a little later because the show went to [ __ ] for a very specific reason and once you rewatch all of it knowing how it ends it gets more and more obvious as you see the story unfold the show had a huge gigantic problem that was right in our faces the entire time and we didn't see it for seven years and that huge problem was marlene king marlon king is the creator showrunner and executive producer of pretty little liars she's also the one responsible for ruining the show she seems like a pretty cool person so it kind of pains me to be critical of her but i'm sorry she's just not that great at storytelling there are a lot of reasons and decisions that turn pretty little liars from a clever mystery to an absolute disaster and they all lead back to how marlin king handled the story over the course of those seven seasons but before we talk about that we need to take a look back at the show itself stop it just stop now if you've never watched pll here's a quick little breakdown of the plot three little liars is the story of four young girls arya spencer hannah and emily who find their lives flipped completely upside down when an anonymous individual only known as a begins to harass them and threaten their lives one year after their best friend allison mysteriously goes missing as they try to figure out what's going on the girls start to uncover a very large conspiracy in their little town of rosewood and they realize that a lot of people in this town have secrets and those secrets are all directly tied to allison now if you ask me that's a pretty badass premise and that right there is the biggest strength of pretty little liars as a show the intrigue it's very hard not to be drawn to the mystery aspect of this show and that's definitely what got me into it when i was a teenager the show was really good at setting up mysteries and people became obsessed with pll because of that fans would try to find clues in the show and try to solve the mystery before the finale and figure out who a is it was just a really exciting experience the plot was set up in such a clever way that people saw it as a masterpiece from the very start marlene king had this crazy plan for how the show would end she was always one step ahead of the audience and everybody was in for the ride people loved the story they loved the characters they loved the romance the drama and most of all people loved marlene the fans were so pumped about finding out what her plan was and seeing what it would all come down to it made the show phenomenon unlike any other at the time pretty little liars was an unstoppable force it was a perfect recipe so perfect in fact that it almost seemed too good to be true and it kinda was because you see somewhere along the line the show very famously stopped making sense but in a way that was increasingly difficult to ignore there's a highly visible decline in quality with pretty little liars especially when it comes to the main story because when you make your show a mystery and you get sloppy with it people are gonna know this that's kind of the point and those problems started to bug fans quite a bit a number of crucial storylines were introduced in the show and then were just abandoned with no explanation people started to realize a lot of characters just didn't make sense and the timeline of the show got way too convoluted to the point where certain backstories just didn't add up in other words people realized that maybe just maybe the writers weren't the clever masterminds they appeared to be on the surface and the more people noticed the plot holes the more people noticed that things didn't add up the more frustrating it got and slowly marlin king's perfect facade started to crumble a little bit i guess we could say that marlene king was the true pretty little liar oh lil i'm sorry that's not a good joke don't do that and as i was re-watching the show i definitely noticed those issues again big time and i can now say with confidence that pretty little liars is a story that does not make sense and the more you pay attention to it the less it makes sense it's one of those stories the mysteries and pretty little liars are all insanely incoherent and i mean that in the most literal way possible every single enigma in this show is so full of plot holes that it's impossible to piece what the story actually is so let's break down the territories in which the writing turned to [ __ ] number one the characters the characters and pretty little liars are what we could consider to be iconic and i don't like to use that word but i think it's appropriate here they truly marked a generation of teen television and rule with an iron fist for almost a decade the main five especially are really solidified in pop culture and i think a lot of people who fell out of love with the show over the years kept watching because they were invested in them enough to still want to see their story end but some of the bigger problems with the writing on the show also began with them because as the story went on and started making less sense so did the characters and it started getting a little frustrating after a while you'll see what i mean so let's take a look at the five main characters in pll arya montgomery arya is a strange character and i mean that in ways that are difficult to explain just like that in one go because in season 1 arya is kind of the main character of pretty little liars and yes i know pll is an ensemble but i do believe that every ensemble cast still has a dominant character at the center of it all and arya was definitely at the center of pll when it started the story begins when arya comes back from iceland one year after allison goes missing arya is the one who receives the very first text from a arya is the one who has the first allison flashback and the pilot as a whole is very much centered around her i mean hell she's doing the shush thing in the opening credits she's part of an ensemble yes but she is the main character or at least that was the case until season 5 when the writers decided that pll was going to become the spencer show but we'll talk about that more later i think that with allison arya is the character that has the biggest amount of abandoned plot lines in the entire show i have rarely seen a character with so much setup that went nowhere if you watch pretty little liars or you know the fandom even a little bit you're probably very aware of the fact that for years fans were absolutely convinced that arya was going to be revealed as the main villain so everybody myself included believed the writers were cleverly planting seeds to set up a major arya reveal in the final season and we weren't the only ones thinking this lucy hale herself who played arya said in an interview after the finale that for years she 100 believed a was going to be arya and she was ready for that to happen honestly i thought it was arya i thought for the whole eight seasons that they were eventually going to make arya a there were so many things that like led up to it she was always missing an action and i was wrong because some of the most intriguing mysteries in the show were centered around her for example in season 3 when arya visits mona in the radley mental facility mona tells her this miss arya you're a killer not ezra's wife and then the fans realized the first letter of every word in that sentence spelled the phrase maya knew which was clever and to this day it's one of the most popular mysteries amongst pll fans do you know why because we never found out what it meant what did maya know i don't know why is arya a killer no idea and also it turns out that maya's death was really random and had nothing to do with the main plot of the show so even solving her murder didn't give us any answers that massive storyline was just dropped at some point arya also learns from jason that for some reason alison had pictures of her sleeping before she went missing they set it up as this big thing but we never find out why alison had those pictures in the first place in fact the pictures are never even brought up again there's also an infamous scene in season 5 when a worker at radley eddie lamb recognizes arya arya looks visibly anxious when he recognizes her and this scene hinted at the idea that arya might have been a patient at radley at some point the writers were clearly building towards something with arya and made it very clear that certain things about her didn't add up and she was probably keeping secrets that we the audience did not know and then nothing happens with any of it so in the end we're left with arya just being there in the show for no reason really all those things about her being shady and having dark secrets are never explained and she's just a normal girl i guess and frankly i realized while we're watching that arya is not all that interesting i think it's about halfway through season one that i realized the only reason why i even remotely like arya is because she's played by lucy hale and i like lucy hale arya as a character is not that likable she's kind of an [ __ ] and in later seasons she's rude to everyone she interacts with for no reason i also checked and arya is the only character who cheats on every single one of her love interests throughout the show and if that's not enough she also makes out with ezra's little brother and she never tells them arya is a really bad person i also realize while re-watching season 5 that i completely forgot the gigantic fact that arya actually kills someone in this show she killed shauna in the first episode of season five and i quickly understood that i didn't remember it because she gets over it in like two episodes and it doesn't affect her character in the slightest moving forward she takes a life and two episodes later it's like nothing happened in fact i don't think shauna is ever brought up again after all she's only the third black character to be brutally murdered in this show and i think it's now time for me to address the ezra thing the fact that marlene king and her team of writers put so much effort in making audiences root for a very underage girl to have sex with her english teacher is absolutely insane especially because ezra also had a thing with alison when she was like 15 and he was in college so arya isn't an isolated thing he's done it more than once in fact there's kind of a thing with pll and underage girls being involved with adult people and the writers work really hard to make it appealing for some reason spencer has a thing with ren hannah has a thing with ren allison has a thing with ian spencer has a thing with ian arya has a thing with that step up guy even emily has a brief fling with an adult woman when she's like 16. it's kind of gross i hate that the writers tried so hard to make these relationships sexy and romantic and i hate that arya's happy ending in the finale is just being with ezra her english teacher who abused her when she was a teenager literally the series finale takes place on their wedding day so yeah i don't care about romantic storylines in these types of shows but this is just insane to me i don't know how that happened and nobody batted an eye at it but all in all arya is just a very strangely written characters with a lot of wasted potential and wasted storylines and i realized that i don't like her all that much okay we can talk about the boring one now emily fields alright so here's a hot take for you i think emily should have been killed off in season 4. emily is the most pointless character out of the entire main cast and i stand by that i would even go as far as to say that she has absolutely no reason to exist in this show after season 3. and even the storyline she has in season 3 with lyndon james is completely irrelevant to the main plot it's just here to fill time and i know she was an lgbt character and that level of representation was sort of groundbreaking at the time but aside from that i feel like the writers never quite figured out what to do with her after the first two seasons and her presence feels weirdly forced afterwards especially after the time jump in season six and it's not even that i don't like the character it's just that she's boring i kind of don't care about her i genuinely think killing her off in season four would have raised her stakes a little bit and would have given the show a real tension and was desperately in need of by the end i always said that a big problem with pll is that it never feels like the main characters are actually in danger there are no stakes in this story i know everybody is gonna be just fine nothing's gonna happen to them getting rid of emily would have made a so much more dangerous as a threat and it would have made a lot of sense given how her character literally doesn't matter for the rest of the show it's also fair to mention that unlike lucy hale i don't really care about shane mitchell in the role i'm of the opinion that shea mitchell has never been a great actress and she kinda plays the same character in everything she's in she was okay in you i'll give her that but every other project i've seen her in she was essentially a character with very little personality that she played the exact same way like they could all be emily as far as i'm concerned so yeah emily is a boring character and she should have died in season four that's it i don't have anything else to say next alison dilorentis this one is personal alison de laurentiis in my opinion is the biggest missed opportunity in this entire show and it infuriates me alison was one of the best characters in any teen drama ever but by the end of the series she was a really sad shadow of her former self the writers completely ruined her she was kind of mystical in the early years of the show she was this god-like figure floating above the story and since we believed her to be dead in the beginning we only ever saw her in flashbacks which was kind of cool seeing how people in the present still had fear in their eyes when the name alison de laurentiis was brought up was honestly badass she was this larger-than-life force to be reckoned with and she was [ __ ] evil she affected the lives of everyone around her and she's a big reason why the entire town of rosewood is so [ __ ] up she caused a lot of damage and she enjoyed every minute of it honestly for a while allison was the best part of pll she was an incredible antagonist and the love-hate relationship she had with every single one of the main four was really interesting to uncover alison is abusive manipulative heartless and she's actually dangerous even years after going missing she's still haunting everyone in town she's kind of the boogeyman of rosewood she's voldemort she who must not be named and i absolutely love the concept behind the character and how she functioned many of her personality traits suggest that she's a sociopath and she's extremely calculating in everything she does she's a master at exploiting people's weaknesses to manipulate them in her favor and she'll even go as far as blackmailing them if she doesn't get what she wants she's like 15 years old but even adults and parents in rosewood are terrified of her she will break you from the inside out just to see how you handle it and some of the characters she has mentally tortured have been so damaged that they have lasting psychological issues way into their adult lives i mean hell mona develops a dissociative personality disorder from the never-ending bullying alison put her through and she becomes a murderer alison is a very charismatic character and that's mainly thanks to sasha peterson her performances alison which is even crazier when you find out she was only 12 years old when she got the role alison is very intelligent but she's also a bit of a control junkie power is kind of a drug to her and she needs to feel like she has power over everyone around her to feel at ease and she's ready to do unspeakable things to make sure of it alison is an awesome villain i just love the idea of the dead girl who never really died because she still lives in every person in rosewood she has terrorized it's [ __ ] cool and as soon as the show starts arguing that she could still be alive i immediately called that she was going to come back and we were going to find out that she's a and she was behind the whole thing this entire time and everyone was going to have to bend together to take her on because she's just this unstoppable force of nature yeah i was wrong i was so wrong when alison returns in season 5 the writers suddenly decided that the right way to go with her character was to give her a redemption story so instead of this mythical villain we've known since the very beginning who was going to come in and shake rosewood to [ __ ] hell we spent the last few seasons watching alison become the most boring character in the entire show she comes back in this massive twist that changes everything and then she does absolutely nothing for the rest of the series the whole story was about her and her insurmountable power in the first few seasons alison was the point of origin every single thing that happened in the show was directly linked to her but by the end of the show she barely has anything to do with the story anymore she's just there she's not this strong badass individual anymore she becomes kind of weak and dependent on other people to function it really pisses me off how they ruined the character allison was this godlike figure this trickster mastermind type of character she was sort of the show's version of the joker but from season five onwards the writers turned her into this lame boring and whiny character who doesn't really contribute all that much to the plot but that's not the only thing that bothers me one of the biggest intrigues in pretty little liars was trying to figure out what alison was trying to do before she went missing we know she had a lot of secrets and it's implied that she was running out of time to do something before she disappeared but that's also never explained in seven seasons the show never gives a proper explanation for why alison did the awful things she did she lied threatened blackmailed and attempted to kill people and it was always alluded to that the things she did had a point they often give you this impression that she's like doing something she's trying to get to something but no there's never any sort of motivation given for why alison was so evil and dangerous it's never explained so it all just comes across as alison was doing all these things just because and i think that ruins a lot of the intrigue friendshare secrets that's what keeps us close i also hate that the writers never bothered to give us an insight on her time away allison was missing for two years but the show never really tells what happened to her during those years where was she why did she leave what was she doing during all this time no one ever questions that not even the police we know she was in new york but what went on there there's so much story that was just completely ignored especially because revealing she was alive came with massive plot holes like detective wilden terrorized the girls for years because he was absolutely sure one of them killed allison but then we find out he knew this entire time allison was alive so why did he spend years trying to solve a murder he already knew never happened you know it's not that hard to make sense right alison de laurentiis had so much potential as a character and i hate that the writers just threw it all out the window she should have been the big bad of this show but because marlin king was so hell-bent on outsmarting the audience we didn't get that let's move on before i get even angrier hannah marin there isn't much to say about her hannah's the funny girl of the group she has a lot of jokes and that's kind of it ashley benson embodies the character perfectly fine but as i was watching the show i quickly realized that like emily hannah doesn't really need to be in this story she doesn't have a lot to do with it especially after season two the most interesting part of her character is her relationship with mona everyone sees mona as a monster and a crazy weirdo but hannah is kind of the only one who sees her as a person she understands that mona has issues but she goes out of her way to try and help her get better and it's kind of cool it's a nice message to have about mental health but after season 4 hannah doesn't really have much to do in this show the writers force her into a bunch of storylines that in typical pll fashion have nothing to do with the main plot she becomes a way for the writers to put more filler in the show and waste time like that useless storyline in season 5 when she becomes an alcoholic for like two weeks so while fans are waiting for the story to move along the writers use hannah to do [ __ ] like this jesus christ literally if you take hannah out of the show completely after season five the story doesn't change at all she has no impact on it hannah also kills someone in the show and just like alison arya or emily who have all killed someone after an episode or two she's completely fine and it doesn't affect her character in any way moving forward so yeah honestly hannah is fine she's a little pointless but when the writers remember she's the comic relief she's a fun presence to have in the show i can't really picture anyone other than ashley benson playing this role alright we can talk about marlene's favorite now spencer hastings spencer is by far the most intriguing character in this show not because of her trait as a character she's fine don't get me wrong but because in season 4 and 5 the writers just decided spencer was going to become the main character and the last like three seasons of the show are entirely about her and it comes out of nowhere seriously after the time jump in season 6 she's the only one who actually has ties to the main story the other four all fall in the background many people have speculated that this change came when marlene finally realized what she had in her hands with troy and belisario i think it's a pretty recognized fact amongst everyone that troyan is by far the best actress in pll she's way too good for this show her talent is just unspeakable so yeah like i mentioned earlier the end of predictable liars is pretty much the spencer show arya is no longer the main character like in season 1 spencer is alison is no longer the point of origin of the entire story spencer is the villain isn't after all the girls anymore just spencer and every single twist in the show from that point on relates to spencer directly it turns out that she's probably the most important character in this whole story but it's not really made clear until the final season it's kind of weird because for most of the story spencer is never presented as a key element of the plot she's just one of the main four but by the end she's quite literally carrying the entire show on her back but story aside as a character i think spencer is quite all right she has cool character traits and she's the only one in the main cast who has flaws that actually have an impact which i think makes her character feel more human her obsession with perfection and her fear of failure is actually really compelling and seeing how she's willing to go to dangerous extremes in order to excel is something that i think a lot of people will relate to yes her pill addiction storyline was cheap and felt exploitative but overall i think spencer is the most interesting character in the show it took the writers five seasons to figure it out but better late than never that said though there are some aspects of the character that annoy me a little bit first off i hate how the writers make her randomly quote literature all the time i get they're doing it because spencer is supposed to be the smart one but it makes her come across as so pretentious and snobby and she does it so often that it becomes funny after a while like she'll just drop an entire quote in the middle of a very serious conversation and i can't help but think how annoyed i would be if someone did this while talking to me in real life we just found out that ali's at the police station she's talking to the cops and you don't know what she's telling them a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on i was hoping you'd be happy for me you know what they say about hope breeds eternal misery i'm also of the opinion that spencer as a character regresses quite a bit after the time jump character development isn't really a thing on pretty little liars but something about spencer becomes kind of unlikable in season seven but i can't quite put my finger on it but with that said she's the most coherent character out of all of them and again troy belisario is just amazing in the role there isn't much more to say so yeah those are the five main characters of pretty little liars and with that down number two so many plot holes like i mentioned earlier in this video marlene king is kind of a champion when it comes to abandoning storylines and the reason why it's so frustrating is because she always does a great job at setting them up if you can compliment one thing about marlene's writing it's her ability to grasp you with a mystery but the fact that the writers kept forgetting storylines and leaving things unresolved is what started to create a frustration with fans let me give you a little example here's a list of major plot points in pll that were never explained who was sarah harvey and why did she work for a who was the beach hottie and why was he so important what was inside of the barrel in mona's storage unit what was the point of the nat club cece drake in general what the [ __ ] why did alex drake want to replace spencer what did maya know what was the point of the black widow how did ian die and if he committed suicide why why did arya have a file at radley who was leslie jones and why was her car full of fake pairs of glasses i'm not done why was the number 214 brought up all the time what's the deal with a and candy who the [ __ ] shot spencer why did alex drinks ate hannah so much who was the blonde girl in maya's bedroom what happened to allison's dad after the cc reveal what was the point of the dollhouse and why did we never find out what the girls went through in there who hurt allison in the halloween flashback why was shauna working for a and why was her murder never investigated and what was the point of noel khan the guy literally killed people kidnapped people and tortured people more than once but we never find out what his motive was and that was just a little part of it and there is a reason why all these shortcomings in their show are so frustrating because lots of shows and movies have plot holes and broken timelines that people can easily forgive i'm fine with hermione saying she's never tried a memory modification spell despite using one on her parents earlier in that movie i'm okay with eric foreman turning 18 years old two years after turning 17 in that 70s show it's fine because none of those things are important and integral to the story we're following the reason why it's so unforgivable for pretty little liars to be so shamelessly drowned in plot holes is that it's a show that literally asks of you to pay very close attention to every single detail you can possibly put your eyes on the dna of the fandom is rooted in that very concept all the theories the writers and the cast fed via social media or in interviews telling fans to look for clues and pay attention to everything happening on screen that is how they kept the audience under their spell they cultivated this culture of fan detectives around the show and made viewers believe the story was full of hidden secrets all wrapped up in this master plan they've been concocting since season one there was nothing there there was no plan there were no clues they were smart about it because of how they built the episodes pretty little liars is a show that is really good at making you feel like something is right around the corner like you are on the verge of a huge discovery they always give you the impression that the answers are right there and if you just keep watching a tiny bit longer you'll get them all but no that's all a very elaborate illusion eventually people came to realize that pll's true talent as a show was not mystery it was stalling the writers designed a perfect formula to keep people watching without actually having to tell the story and when taking another look at the show you quickly realize that an overwhelming majority of the seasons are composed of episodes where nothing happens and don't get me wrong they give you the illusion that things are happening like maybe spencer is going to find out she was being followed that day or maybe arya is gonna get a cryptic text from a or maybe a is going to drive their car into emily's living room or maybe hannah's going to discover that a left her a note in her tooth yeah that actually happened but they're all things that never really impact the plot it's just here to fail time and when you really take a look at it you realize that episodes of pretty little liars that actually move the story along are pretty rare i made sure to count while rewatching and it's about five episodes per season and there are 160 episodes in the show total that means that just about 22 of pretty little liars is the part that's actually worth watching the rest is just filler and that says everything you need to know about the writers and how they constructed their story this show is not designed to craft a mystery it's designed to waste your time pretty little liars thrived on the idea of never-ending build-up and for all intents and purposes warning king and her team were really good at it at least until the stalling had to end because yeah after a while that concept slowly started to turn against the writers themselves in an effort to build entire seasons out of filler to buy themselves more time they kept backing themselves into corner and forgetting major plotlines that ended up being dropped without any resolution i mean hell it got so ridiculous that when the final episode of the show aired marlin king had to do a 30 minute long interview with entertainment tonight to explain the twist and attempt to tie up all of the loose ends the finale never addressed and it's really awkward to watch because when people ask her questions you can see marlene struggles to remember what storylines they're talking about and she's just kind of fumbling through her answers as she tries to explain the dozens of storylines that were left unresolved and at one point she gives up and straight up admits that they never talked about finishing certain mysteries in the writer's room can you talk about the decision mark to make that a dream sequence well i'll be super honest when we first shot it we didn't know who it was right there what do you mean that's literally your job it is so embarrassing that a show that demands its audience to laser focus on every aspect of its story didn't actually have a story planned and it's significant because marlene king was considered an absolute genius during the show's a day by fans by the media you name it because people truly believed she had everything figured out and was always one step ahead of the audience the same way kevin feige is with the marvel cinematic universe pretty little liars as a show worked because people believed in the plan and the big problem here is that marlene and her team operated on a very strange philosophy see they knew people loved the show because of the mysteries and the crazy twist and so they just started throwing an endless amount of those at the audience but it was stupid because they were setting up those big mysteries but they had no idea where those mysteries were going and as a result the story became more and more convoluted to the point where it just stopped making sense the reason why the clues about the identity of a were so misleading and nonsensical is because the writers themselves had no idea who a was but how does that happen you ass well i think there are two very specific reasons one they didn't actually have a plan and were just making things up as they went without much consideration and lied to the audience constantly but two when they had to get to the answers because you can only stall for so long the writers became obsessed with the idea of outsmarting the audience instead of crafting a twist in service of the story in other words marlene king absolutely wanted their big twist to be something the fans had not already guessed or theorized about online no matter how far she had to go with the story to do so that also came with the show's habit of retracting major storylines marlene does this thing where she will introduce something shocking that drastically changes the story for the sake of drama but then when she's done milking the drama out of it she will take it back and reset things to how they were before making the entire plot line devoid of any lasting consequence and therefore rendering it a massive waste of time let me give you a few examples in season 3 we find out that ezra had a secret child this entire time and it creates a lot of drama between him and arya but when the drama is done they shift the entire thing and ezra learns the kid wasn't actually his and things reset to how they were before massive waste of time also in season 3 we find out that toby is working for a and there's a lot of drama with spencer and then when the drama is done it turns out he was just going on the inside to help spencer so she forgives him and things reset to how they were before massive waste of time and there are a number of storylines like this that take the majority of the show and amount to nothing the writers always use that same formula a big twist drama and then take back all of it so you don't actually have to deal with the consequences big twist jenna isn't really blind drama but then she's blind again so it doesn't matter big twist mona is dead drama craziness except no she's not really dead because the writers don't actually have the balls to off a main character even if it serves a story better the writers in the show are unwilling to commit to anything that could have lasting consequences on the story they always find a way to write themselves out of it and i actually think doing that as much as they did really hurt the quality of the show mona's death was one of the darkest scenes in the entire series and honestly i think it's one of the best cliffhangers they've ever thrown at us because i didn't believe she was dead for real but in the very final scene you actually see her dead body in the trunk of the car and it was genuinely shocking i fell for it i truly believe the show was raising the stakes big time and i was really impressed but they just couldn't stick to it and he just had to make it a fake out and mono turns out to be alive by the end of the season and i love mona just as much as the next person she's a great character but her being so beloved is exactly why the death was so effective and i guarantee you that if they had not decided to randomly bring her back her death scene would have been solidified as the most iconic moment in the show and unfortunately marlene made a habit of doing that with every aspect of pll since the audience was paying attention to every detail in the show and came up with all of the most plausible possibilities around the chosen plot line the writers started to stretch the logic of the plot in outrageous ways in order to force an incoherent twist into the story and then they patted themselves on the back believing to have outsmarted the audience and this worked for a while with mysteries surrounding characters like the red coat ezra's evil turn in season 4 and even allison's return from the dead halfway through the series however there were only so many reveals the writers could handle that way it was becoming kind of obvious that the plot twists in pll were not in service of the story and that doesn't work if you decide to throw all sense of logic out the window to get a cheap gas from the audience it was clear that their lack of planning was not sustainable and at that rate there was inevitably going to be the one twist that would make the audience see the cracks in the wall and that twist finally came in season five in the form of bethenny young now let's be clear here pretty little liars always had its weaknesses even in earlier seasons when it was at its best however i'm of the opinion that season 5 is where the show officially becomes too long this is truly the point where people started to feel like the show was kind of overstaying its welcome and that's mainly because season 5 is a season that is entirely made of filler it is 100 designed to waste as much time as possible there's barely any storytelling in it that drives the plot forward but in the fifth episode of season five we hear the name of bethany young for the very first time you see in season four it's revealed that alison isn't actually dead so one of the big questions that was raised with that revelation was well if alison is alive then who's buried in her grave and the answer to that question is bethany young so who is bethany young we never really find out the bethany young reveal is the one that started the snowball effect that slowly made audiences turn against the show it was the beginning of the end for pll and when we take a closer look at it it's not difficult to see why bethany young as a character is a really lazy cop-out the writers never truly figured out she became a bit of a red herring and her existence in the show itself was a gigantic plot hole that led to what i think was the breaking point of the show [Music] don't be so dramatic ally cece not dead yet god i [ __ ] hate it number three cece drake and the broken timeline in season six it's finally revealed that a is none other than cc drake a secondary character who has been in and out of the show since season 3. now it's a very well-known fact amongst fans that the cca reveal made very little sense not only because cece's story up to that point never justified that twist but also because the reveal completely destroyed the show's timeline the timeline of pretty liars is just so [ __ ] up it's actually one of the elements of the show that i find the most frustrating if you actually try to break down the chronology of the show well don't do that you're going to give yourself a heart attack but to make it short the plot stretches time in a way that makes the story way bigger than it actually is and it's kind of hilarious let me give you an example of what i mean in the season 3 premiere the girls started their senior year in high school so it's around september 1st however the mid-season finale of season 5 takes place on thanksgiving of that same year that means that everything that happened in season three season four and the first half of season five took place in less than two months that includes get ready because this is gonna be a lot the murder of wilden jenna marshall not being blind and then being blind again toby and spencer working for a spencer being locked in radley the girl's having another blackout and emily vandalizing alison's grave as we're discovering he has a secret child getting to know the child and then learning that's not actually his child melissa faking her pregnancy arya and hannah pushing wilden's car in the lake emily meeting lyndon james discovering he's the one who killed maya and killing him the halloween train that ends in garrett's murder arya being drugged by her new stepmom jason's disappearance the red coat fire willen's car being pulled out of the lake hey planting bees in ella's car emily injuring herself while almost being run over by a car as there's a reveal in ravenswood arya and ezra breaking up and getting back together emily and paige breaking up and getting back together caleb leaving for ravenswood ashley marion being arrested for murder spencer finding a dead body in the woods and thinking it's toby cece drake being revealed as one of the redcoats alison returning to rosewood cece being arrested for wilden's murder the murder of jessica delaurentis the girls escaping to new york as we're getting shot arya killing shauna alison returning to school and faking the cyrus kidnapping a blowing up toby's house sydney and whatever the [ __ ] that was alison almost being killed by a and the fake murder of mona and that's not even half of it all of it took place within two months and that also puts back in question a lot of major plot points that are now completely devoid of any coherence because by that logic ezra gets shot in the stomach almost dies but then he recovers from it in a couple of days arya says the relationship between her brother mike and mona was pretty serious when she died but according to the timeline they only dated for about a week hannah becomes an alcoholic and cures herself in like three days toby joins the police academy and becomes a police officer in less than a week and emily and arya both murder someone within three weeks of each other and they both get over it in about 72 hours the timeline of the show doesn't make any sense and the cece drake revealed in season six was the final nail in the coffin for the timeline because the story behind why cece is a is just impossible it doesn't add up the writers gave her an origin story that is so poorly thought out that it became obvious to everyone that marlene did not plan this several years ago it seemed more like a last-minute choice they forced into the show here are a few reasons why the reveal doesn't make any sense cece witnessed bethany young killing toby's mother when she was a child but we see toby's mother very alive when toby and alison are already teenagers so that's not possible because that would mean cece is younger than allison but we already know she's six years older than alison so there's no way she witnessed that murder as a child also cece had a roommate at the university of pennsylvania except no she didn't she was a patient at radley she lived in a mental institute that's her whole backstory and speaking of which there were a number of times where we saw cece visiting people at radley but how again she was a patient at radley why would she ever need to visit people she already lives here and if she was doing it under another identity how did nobody recognize her and why the hell did she date jason if she knew he was her brother why are you like this it's not that hard to make sense but wait there is more one of the biggest mysteries in pretty liars is figuring out what exactly happened the night alison went missing every season we learned a bit more about what went on during that crazy night that was the most important point in the timeline of the show we were made to believe that all the answers we are looking for were present that night and everybody kind of assumed that when a would be revealed we would get to see the whole night play out you guess where i'm going with this right we never really find out what happened that night we have bits and pieces but it's never fully explained in a way that's coherent and a lot of information we get create even more plot holes in the timeline why was bethany young wearing the same dress as alison and how did she get her bracelet miss gronwald pulled allison out of the ground after she was buried alive but who dug the other hole for melissa to bury bethany how did cece kidnap sarah harvey that night if wilden took her back to radley after hating alison mona killed bethany young after mistaking her for allison so why did she help alison when she saw her injured later that night somebody explain this to me please okay i could do this all day but you get the point long story short the cc reveal was the moment in the show where fans collectively understood without the shadow of a doubt that marlin didn't actually have a plan and it broke the hearts of so many fans seeing the reaction to this finale online was kind of sad and it changed how the fandom saw the show moving forward it quite literally broke the fandom but unfortunately marlene wasn't done if you don't know the cca reveal in season six was originally supposed to be the end of the show but when season five premiered we got the announcement that pll was gonna end after seven seasons so apparently there was more pretty little lying to do but even the writers knew that attempting to stretch the story even more was just unreasonable so they decided to come up with a new mystery after this original one ends and this is where we officially meet the death of pretty little liars number four the final season what the [ __ ] happened what is wrong with you guys why did you have to make this to this day the final season of pretty little liars is a weird anomaly that just pisses me off and it still bothered me when i rewatched it it's so bad what the [ __ ] happened i'm gonna go through it very quickly because i'm gonna get angry so the final season which is kind of a mix between the second half of season six and season seven takes place five years after the cca reveal there's no a anymore the girls have moved out of rosewood they finished college and they're all grown up now but then cece gets murdered and a new a arrives and wants the girl to find out who killed cece with the board game that tortures them somehow anyways there's a new a and we gotta find out who killed cece that's the plot now i need to say something so open your ears because it's really important any mystery plot whether it's a movie a tv show a book anything with a mystery element to it is exciting because of one very basic concept and that's the concept of the answer to the mystery hiding in plain sight right that is what's so cool about a whodunit murder mystery you know the killer is one of the characters you already know that's why you're looking for clues and information someone is acting innocent but isn't you have this whole picture in front of you but you're not seeing everything yet you have to really put your eyes on every detail to see what's being hidden right in front of you that's what it was like to be a fan of pretty little liars you had all of these characters they were all sort of suspicious for different reasons they could all have a motive at times some appear to be more guilty than others and fans relentlessly tried to figure out what was hiding in plain sight that was the entire fun of this show so imagine the reaction from the audience when it was revealed in the series finale that the final villain of pretty little liars the resolution to the ultimate mystery of the show was a new character we had never met before you believe me now when i say the backlash over the ending was brutal the series finale of pretty little liars was one of the biggest slaps in the face ever given to an audience because you can say whatever you want about the show but it had a very loyal fandom and even when people lost faith in marlene king after the cc reveal i don't think anyone expected something that insulting to come along because the final villain is not only a new character no that's already bad enough on its own but that's not it the writers really went all out with the laziness and pulled one of the most tired tropes in the history of television they pulled the evil twin car yeah the final villain of the show is revealed to be spencer's secret british evil twin alex and if that's not enough they're the daughters of alison's mother's evil twin because evil twins are such a good twist everybody knows that anyways the end of pll was lame and full of plot holes and it left so many story lines on resolve fans were just disappointed beyond words to me the worst part of it is that in the end we never get a coherent reason to explain why the girls have been tortured so much it's never explained they just were and that's that i guess there was a real uproar on social media after the finale and marlene and even some of the actors had to address it in interviews like it was bad they really dropped the ball and i think they know it well there's yeah there's some there are some uh there's i'm sorry but if you have to do a 30 minute interview to tie up loose ends after your finale it's probably because you didn't do a good job at wrapping things up in the show look i love pretty little liars i know it doesn't sound like it because i've been renting for the past like 6 hours but i did enjoy watching the show week to week and seeing what fans had to say about it was it a great show no especially not in the last few seasons but i do think it has some merit when it comes to its impact on pop culture despite everything i believe pretty little liars has beauty as a show because it created a real sense of community with fans the experience of being in this pll community was genuinely exhilarating it ended up really badly but there was a significant period of time where the ride was really fun and endearing i think i can be honest with myself and admit that it's not a good show but it accomplished so much and was so groundbreaking at the time that i would disagree with anyone who says it doesn't deserve its place in pop culture that said you didn't have to brutally kill off every single black character in the show that's just kind of shitty you couldn't let one live just one marlin king seemed to be really bummed out that hbo max moved on without her with this new reboot and despite the fact that i'm highly critical of her writing i kind of feel bad for her pll was her baby for almost a decade and it can't be easy to see it slip away like this and yes business-wise it makes sense because every show she has created during and after pretty liars was cancelled very early on ravenswood was cancelled famous in love was cancelled and she was also teaming up with shane mitchell to make a new show called the harrises but the project died in pre-production and they never even shot the pilot and after the cancellation of the sequel series pll the perfectionist i think it became very clear to warner brothers that audiences were no longer willing to put their trust in marlene so they decided to make this reboot with another team it sucks but i get it apparently it's going to be called pretty little liar's original sin and it's both a reboot and a sequel it's going to have new characters it takes place in a different town but it's also been confirmed that the story will be set after the events of the original show and even if marlene isn't running it i was personally still excited for the reboot and then i found out it's being made by the showrunner of riverdale so i'm not excited anymore so yeah pretty little liars is an iconic show that wasted a whole lot of potential and took a lot of wrong steps love it hate it it is what it is but i hope it serves as a lesson for the future iteration of the show because like game of thrones taught us you can get everything right but bad writing never wins it's still better than emily in paris though [Music] you

Channel: Friendly Space Ninja

Views: 2,861,661

Keywords:

Id: nYOSRLSPYS0

Length: 48min 39sec (2919 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 13 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Tomas-T]

Best PLL video ever

the writer's will to outsmart the fans was annoying

but he did not talk about how the ships ruined everything with taking over the plot as the time went by just to please the horrible fandoms of them (Emison and Ezria)

I think all the things that went to nowhere were becasue all the type 2 retcons in this series

[u/rosewoodlliars]

yeah somebody posted this the other day lol

[u/JSaw8]

As mentioned, this video was posted already but I didn't bother to watch until now. The creator brings up some good points and raises a lot of issues I had sort of forgotten about, although he gets some facts wrong. But his video is not as character-biased as some other PLL videos out there which is a definite plus (he's pretty harsh on each of them). I think overall PLL had a ton of potential, great characters and set-ups but suffered from a lack of follow-through. So many storylines lead nowhere or lacked any significant payoff. And I agree that the writers seemed more concerned with outsmarting the audience than making the show make sense, that's why I never really put too much effort into coming up with theories while watching because I quickly learned the details didn't matter. The writers clearly favored shock value over cohesive story-telling and bailed out of plots they seemed to be building towards for one reason or another. Or maybe they didn't even know what plot they were building towards.

[u/ador3delan0]

I watched it yesterday, it’s good but the “plot holes” are not plot holes at all

[u/stuffguy97]

This man saying is literally everything I’ve been thinking bout PLL for a decade