“Pretty Little Liars” was a formative series for its time.
Viewers stuck around for seven seasons, enamored with The Liars and their lives in the fictitious town of Rosewood, Pennsylvania.
I love the setting, the characters, the romance, the mystery and everything else about the show, but even an avid viewer like myself can admit that some plotlines were simply outrageous.
I’ve compiled a list of what I think are the craziest things to happen in “Pretty Little Liars.”
Beware of major spoilers.
- Aria and Ezra’s relationship
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We all rooted for them to be together back in middle school. Looking back at it now, I simply cannot condone Ezra’s behavior.
He knowingly hooked up with a teenager in order to gather personal information about her and her friends for a book he was writing about a different teenager he had been involved with.
When Aria and Ezra decided to come clean about their relationship to Aria’s family, her younger brother Mike punched Ezra in the face. It was dramatic, but it’s hard to blame him for trying to protect his teenage sister from her high school English teacher.
Aria might have forgiven him for his lies and betrayal, but I never will.
- The Halloween train episode
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Season three, episode 13 is a cinematic masterpiece, but it’s also incredibly unhinged.
This Halloween special places all of The Liars on a speeding train for a spooky costume party. I’ve never heard of a train party before, but considering all of the murders that occur in Rosewood, it doesn’t feel like a particularly safe idea.
In typical PLL fashion, it doesn’t take long for things to spiral out of control.
Adam Lambert performs on the train for some reason?
Aria’s drink is roofied, and she ends up kidnapped and stuffed into a wooden coffin next to Garrett’s corpse, Spencer gets choked by an unknown costumed figure and Emily is running around trying to find Paige, who was helping Spencer fight off her attacker.
Also, Hanna is creeped out by a stranger in a weird costume, but it ends up being Caleb playing a prank on her.
At the end of the episode, Aria’s coffin teeters precariously over the edge of the train, and the other Liars must use their strength to haul it up and save her from certain death.
- Emily’s Dating History
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Emily Fields was an iconic lesbian character.
She has the most accepting heart and performs some heroic acts throughout the series, despite being constantly described as the weakest link in the group.
She has an inherent ability to love and accept everyone exactly as they are, but this often means she overlooks some scarlet red flags in relationships.
For example, Paige tried to drown Emily by holding her head underwater in the school pool in season one, but Emily forgave her and proceeded to date her on and off until the final season.
Maya and Emily had some sweet moments, but when Maya gets caught smoking weed for the second time she tries to run away from home to avoid getting sent back to rehab.
Maya, however, is killed by her stalker before she can get very far, and that same stalker then befriends Emily under an alias.
Emily then kills the stalker in a lighthouse after discovering his true identity, which left her emotionally scarred.
Sara Harvey betrayed all of The Liars by lying about her involvement with A, but she hurt Emily most of all.
Emily tried to help Sara after the dollhouse and ended up catching real feelings for her, but it was entirely one sided.
This poor girl couldn’t catch a break.
- Alison impregnated with Emily’s eggs
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Speaking of Emily’s dating history, I have to mention this crazy twist from season seven.
The time jump from season six brings us to several years after The Liars’ graduation and Emily is short on cash.
She wants to sell her eggs to make money, but A has other plans. A steals the eggs from the donation center and uses them to impregnate Alison when she is trapped in Welby State Psychiatric Hospital.
Alison and Emily end up getting married and raising the twin girls together, so everything turns out okay, but it was a wild ride.
- Bethany YOung
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Since I mentioned Welby, I might as well dive into the twisted history of the patients at the infamous Radley Sanitarium.
Bethany Young befriended a young Charles DiLaurentis when they were teenagers at Radley.
One night, Bethany pushes Toby’s mom off the roof. Charles witnesses this, but Bethany threatens to blame it all on Charles if he says anything.
Years later, Charles transitions to Charlotte, or Cece, and wants revenge.
Both girls sneak out of Radley on the same night, and Cece thinks that Bethany is going to harm Alison.
Cece uses a rock to hit Bethany on the head, but it ends up being Alison instead.
Meanwhile, Mona sees Bethany and, thinking that it’s Alison, hits her over the head with a shovel.
Afterwards, Melissa Hastings buries Bethany’s body, who she also mistakes for Alison, because she assumed Spencer killed her.
A year later, Bethany’s body is discovered and mistaken for Alison’s body yet again.
Confused? Me too, but it only gets crazier from here.
- Spencer’s stint at Radley
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Spencer is constantly relied on to be the brains of the group. She’s under a lot of pressure, not only because she’s being tortured by a sadistic stranger, but also because she tries to maintain a perfect GPA and a dozen different extracurricular activities on top of the stress of regular high school.
I can’t blame her for having a mental breakdown once in a while, but the reason for this one was wild.
Toby wants to stop A once and for all. He devises a plan to befriend A and take them down from the inside. To make it realistic, though, he has to be secretive about his intentions and can’t even tell Spencer what he’s doing.
When Spencer discovers that Toby is working for A, however, she goes off the rails. She then thinks she sees Toby’s body lifeless in the woods, which causes her to lose her mind completely.
She’s later found wandering the woods without her phone or ID and can’t seem to remember her own name.
After, she is taken to Radley Sanitarium, where she stays for about a week as Jane Doe. She wanted to stay longer, but the other Liars convince her to come home.
- Cece Drake/Charlotte Dilaurentis
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Charles was born to Mary Drake, Jessica DiLaurentis’ twin sister, in Radley Sanitarium. Since Mary couldn’t raise a baby as a patient, Jessica and her husband Kenneth adopted Charles.
Charles then lived with the DiLaurentis family for seven years, but Kenneth insisted the child be placed in Radley after an incident where baby Alison almost drowned.
In Radley, Charles befriended Bethany Young, transitioned and changed her name to Charlotte. Her life in Radley was traumatic, but eventually she escaped.
She ends up dating Jason, her cousin and adopted brother, and befriending Alison. After getting sent back to Radley for hitting Alison over the head with a rock, however, Cece met Mona.
Since Mona is on an intense medication plan and thinks that Cece is Alison, she keys Cece in on all of the drama with The Liars and the A game.
Cece loves the idea so much that she escapes Radley again and restarts the A game with Mona as a sidekick, even though she doesn’t fully trust her.
She kidnaps all of The Liars, including Mona, and keeps them in an underground life-sized dollhouse.
Did you get all of that?
- The Dollhouse
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The Dollhouse is the work of an evil genius master game maker. Charlotte might have been crazy, but there’s no question of her intelligence and creativity.
She frames The Liars for Mona’s alleged murder and then hijacks their prison van as they’re being driven away. She then kidnaps the girls and keeps them in a life-sized dollhouse with replicas of their real rooms.
At this point, the girls have no idea that Alison and Jason even had another sibling, so it came as an incredible shock to everyone when Spencer figured out the truth and helped all the girls escape.
In total, the girls spent about three weeks being tortured in the Dollhouse and being forced to play crazy mind games with each other.
- Hastings/Dilaurentis/Drake Family Tree
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It takes the entire seven seasons to figure out exactly how all these characters are connected, and secret siblings are revealed all of the time. Bear with me for this crash course, because things get confusing (as if they weren’t already).
Refer to the diagram to piece everything together.
The Hastings family features mother Veronica, father Peter and sisters Melissa and Spencer.
The DiLaurentis family features mother Jessica, father Kenneth and siblings Jason and Alison.
The first surprise comes when we find out that Jason is actually Peter Hastings’ son with Jessica, not Kenneth’s, which makes Melissa and Spencer half-siblings with Jason. This was super weird because Melissa and Jason had dated for a bit in high school, and the parents couldn’t tell their kids why they disapproved of the relationship.
Then it was revealed that Charlotte was Jason and Alison’s sister (How does Jason get unlucky enough to date two of his secret sisters?).
Mary Drake’s arrival is a surprise because Jessica never told anyone about her twin sister. She reveals herself as Charlotte’s real mom soon after, and the father is Pastor Ted, who dated, and almost married, Hanna’s mom.
In an extremely dramatic scene where Spencer gets shot, Mary Drake reveals herself to be Spencer’s mom as well. This causes Spencer’s world to be turned upside down, since she realizes that Veronica isn’t her real mom.
- Alex Drake
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Last, and craziest, we have Alex Drake.
Alex Drake isn’t revealed until the very final episode of season seven, but she’s the main antagonist for the entire time jump, which starts in the middle of season six.
She is Spencer’s secret twin sister, and no one knew about her except for Mary Drake, Spencer and Alex’s birth mother.
While Spencer was adopted by the Hastings family, Alex is sent away to England where she has a troubling childhood. She doesn’t know about Spencer until she meets Wren, Melissa’s on-again-off-again boyfriend, who mistakes her for Spencer.
Wren and Alex fall in love, and Wren tells her all about Spencer and the world of The Liars in Rosewood.
Alex then becomes obsessed with Spencer, resenting that she lived a privileged life with friends who would do anything for her, while Alex had no one.
She soon devises a plan to steal Spencer’s life, and she nearly succeeds.
A lot of viewers think the writers should have worked harder on this ending, but I have mixed feelings. I wish we would have had more time to get to know Alex like we did Charlotte, but her story ended up being rushed.
Honorable Mentions
I feel it’s only appropriate to mention Jenna Marshall and Noel Kahn.
Jenna Marshall hated The Liars ever since “The Jenna Thing,” and for good reason.
Alison, for some reason, thought it was appropriate to throw a small explosive into Toby’s garage, but she told The Liars it was just a stinkbomb.
Jenna, Toby’s step-sister, was in the garage when the bomb went off. She was blinded by the explosion and made it her mission to get payback on Alison and the others.
Just like the others, her storyline is long and windy.
To be fully transparent, I still don’t understand Noel Kahn’s entire storyline, and I’ve watched the show from start to finish three times.
His final scene is mind-blowing, though.
Jenna and Noel lead The Liars to a house where they shut off all the lights and make them run around blind, which is supposed to replicate what Jenna had to experience every day because of their prank.
Jenna, who is actually blind, runs around the house with a gun trying to shoot the girls whenever she hears a noise. Noel also hunted the girls in the dark house, but he used an ax. In an altercation at the top of the stairs, however, Noel trips and falls on his own ax, decapitating himself.
I have so much more to say about the world and characters of PLL, but these are some of the craziest plotlines in the whole series.
Confusing? Absolutely. Messy? You bet.
Would I recommend this show to everyone? Also yes.
Do you have any questions? Yeah, me too. Just go watch for yourself and see if you can make sense of The Liars’ extensive web of secrets.