WARNING: HUGE SPOILERS AHEAD!
Last semester, I wrote an article about why I still enjoy the show Pretty Little Liars, despite how ridiculous it has become in the past few years. On August 11, the mid-season finale for the show’s sixth season premiered, drawing in 3.09 million viewers, the show’s largest viewership since early 2014. The finale’s previews promised to reveal exactly who had been torturing Aria, Spencer, Emily, and Hanna for the past six and a half seasons.
Honestly, this finale was an insult. It was insulting to the dedicated viewers of the show with its gaping plot holes and to a certain minority community with its terrible representation.
Let this be a warning to you. If you have ever at one point watched Pretty Little Liars or at all wondered who this mysterious A was, stop reading now. I won’t be upset, and neither will Her Campus Kenyon. It is honestly better that you don’t know and live the rest of your life content with the obscurity.
This is your last chance.
Cece Drake is A. Cece Drake is the mysterious persona behind the black hoodie, the red coat, and the name Charles DiLaurentis. But if only it were that simple.
For those of you who did not see the mid-season finale and blatantly disregarded my warnings, allow me to give you a small recap.
The character known as Cece Drake was born Charles DiLaurentis. Charles grew up uncomfortable in his male body and became increasingly jealous of his younger sister, Alison. Kenneth DiLaurentis, appalled by his son’s behavior, convinced his wife, Jessica, to send him to Radley Sanitarium, Rosewood’s local mental institution. Jessica, more sensitive to Charles’s suppressed desires, convinced Kenneth that Charles had died, but allowed him to live out in secret his life as a girl, named Charlotte. Though Charlotte spent the remainder of her childhood years at Radley, she was allowed to take classes at the University of Pennsylvania. There she met her older brother Jason, disguised herself under the name Cece Drake, and started to date him to get close to the DiLaurentis family. On Labor Day, where the entire series starts, Charlotte/Cece hit Alison in the head, believing her to be Bethany Young, who blamed Charlotte for the death of Marion Cavanaugh (Spencer’s boyfriend’s mother, for those of you out of the loop).
Let’s get the immediate stuff out of the way here. This finale is full of plot holes, such as portraying Charlotte as a young pre-teen when Marion died, though a flashback from a previous season portrays Marion still alive when Toby and Alison (significantly younger than Charlotte) are teenagers. Also, how was Cece Drake Rosewood High’s prom queen if she never explicitly went to Rosewood High? Plus, the finale just throws in that incest factor of Charlotte dating Jason. Strangely enough, Jason had already had a relationship with someone unknown to be his sibling: his half-sister Melissa.
But of course, the real elephant in the room is the transgender situation. Not only is Charlotte’s transition completely unrealistic (as in, the show never mentions gender reassignment surgery, as if Charlotte just wakes up one day a confident and beautiful woman), but it also makes the plot more convoluted. The show’s producers swear that they had this entire drawn-out plot worked out since the show’s premiere. I would have been more inclined to believe this if the finale wasn’t so laden with plot holes. Instead I have a different theory.
From Laverne Cox to Caitlyn Jenner to Jazz Jennings, transgender awareness has taken over the media in the past year or so. I honestly believe that the minds behind Pretty Little Liars wanted to jump on this bandwagon, both to make themselves appear edgy and to create a good story for the media. This would have been more excusable if the writers had been more careful with portraying its transgender character.
Charlotte is the villain. The lack of love felt from her father and suppressed desires to transition to a female are, in the long run, what caused her to torture her sister’s friends for so long. The show depicts her as twisted, and she truly believes that she is justified in her actions because none of the girls died in the end. “The woman is crazy and transgender” is only a short leap away from “the woman is crazy because she is transgender.”
But Alison and the other girls end up forgiving Charlotte in the end! Only because they’ve heard her heart-wrenching story, they’ve seemed to completely forget that this woman psychologically tortured them for two years. Give me a break. Being transgender does not automatically make someone crazy, but being transgender also does not automatically excuse someone for doing crazy things.
And why is it such a huge reveal to find out that a character is transgender in the first place? This show has been building up to this exposure of A’s identity for five years, as if every coming out deserves this much of a shock value. It may even discourage transgender people from coming out at all, afraid of the scandal that may follow.
I do have to say this to the show’s defense: Vanessa Ray, the actress who plays Charlotte/Cece, did magnificently in this episode (for what she was given, anyway). Her emotions were raw and her acting completely believable.
Will I continue to watch the show once the second half of season six premieres? Probably. I’ve put too much commitment into Pretty Little Liars not to. Besides, I’ve fallen in love with Vanessa Ray, and I want to see if the producers improve on Charlotte’s character development, making her less like a crazy transgender trope.
Image Credit: popsugar.com, mirror.co.uk, youtube.com, and feeyuh.wordpress.com