A Guy Who Has Never Watched "Pretty Little Liars" Tries To Make Sense of the "Pretty Little Liars" Finale

Image via Complex Original

How are they going to disrespect teens everywhere by making this a bottle episode clip show? According to Wikipedia, this series is set in "the fictional town of Rosewood, Pennsylvania," but here we are in some half-assed art deco Philadelphia hotel room. If it isn't a hotel room, it sure looks a hell of a lot like a cut-rate knock-off of The W, which, incidentally, would be perfect for downtown Philly, so kudos to the art department.

This episode reminded me of those joke Simpsons clip shows they used to do back in the day mixed with one long "the detective tells us who the real murderer is" sequence a la Murder on the Orient Express. This was kind of a greatest hits episode, of course, but in a far more literal sense than your standard clip show. If they were really after greatest hits, then we should have seen Spencer connect Ali's head with the shovel. It would have also been nice if we found out who A is, but more on that later.

How did Ali squeeze so many meetings into that one night she roofied her friends at the farm house? Did she have her secretary set her schedule to make sure she could fit in as many scorned, psychotic lovers as possible? There were like five smoldering 30-year-old dudes with nothing better to do than come to farm house and threaten a 16-year-old.

Kudos to Ali in terms of efficiency, but damn, these guys are losers. Then again, in a real small town, by that time of night these guys would have been watching Duck Dynasty or passed out from drinking their body weight in Busch, so maybe they had nothing better to do than harass a minor.

Looks like the symbolism police stopped by this room before the Liars got there. There were more cutaways to the Newtown's Cradle (the suspended metal ball thing) in this episode than there are to courtesan breasts in an episode of Game of Thrones. And of course, the black walls and black clock were a nice touch too, because you know, the characters are in a dark place. Your tenth grade English teacher is rolling her eyes as we speak.

To be fair, I found myself begging for a return to the interior set when we had to endure the clumsy staging and subpar green-screen of the final scene.

As a man who enjoys House of Cards, I have learned how to suspend disbelief when it comes to texts, emails, and the like. But, with all the money floating around this rich ass town, how haven't they tracked this phone? Okay, so the number's blocked, but why haven't they done some location tracking on this shit?

A isn't running an Avon Barksdale level network here, right? This ridiculously large police department should have been able to put something together over the last four years.

Even though the town can't seem to put some kind of tracking solution in place with these phones, the police sure have a lot of resources. Apparently, this suburban police station has more interrogation rooms than any precinct in America. I'm pretty sure there were at least five different interrogations happening at once in this one episode, all related to the same crime that was almost half a decade old.

I'm sure this is a sleepy town and homicide/missing persons/resurrections don't happen every day. But if this shit happened in my hometown, the cops would've gone back to hanging out at the diner between speed trap shifts three years, eleven months, and two and a half weeks ago.

I was seeing celebrity doppelgangers all over the damn place in this show. Every male cast member looks like a castoff from The O.C., and I'm pretty sure I've seen half the actresses on one vampire show or another.

The most distracting celeb look alike on this show is Leslie Fera (Spencer's Mom), who looks so much like Law & Order: SVU's Mariska Hargitay—down to the furrowing of the brow—that it's distracting. If only they could've shoehorned Christopher Meloni (or his doppelganger) into this show somehow, then we would've really been in business.

If I ever find myself acting as a policeman on a teen drama, the ugly girl is my prime suspect for any crime. Of course by ugly, I don't mean ugly in real life, because only models are allowed to play prominent roles on these shows. By "ugly," I mean that they wear glasses and are given frumpy wardrobe. As Alison tells Mona point blank, old girl just needs a makeover.

If a girl is wearing glasses in a teen drama, there are two options. The first is that she will be made over by a Freddie Prinze Jr. clone only to realize that she's been made a fool of. The second possibility is that she's cray. Never trust nerds man. Just wait until the 10-year high school reunion, apologize for bullying them, and see if you can get a job at their startup. Until then, keep them at arm's length.

I'm from the country, so it's always amazing to me when TV teenagers get their hands on designer drugs. Where I come from, you were pretty much limited to weed and whiskey unless you had plans on losing your teeth.

These rich kid shows always involve elaborate drug cocktails. I want to know where the funding for all of this suburban teen substance abuse comes from. The parents surely aren't funding it, so they must be accidentally leaving Benjamins around the house or forgetting to lock their generous semi-legal medicine cabinets.

I counted three possible instances of statutory rape in this episode alone. Teachers, college students, murder suspects—every perv in town wants a piece of these Little Liars. Let's pause for a moment to offer a public service announcement to any high schoolers that might be reading. A college student who begins a relationship with a high school student is a loser, no matter how much Fitzgerald he's been reading. 

Shame on these dudes in PLL land chasing jailbait with all these fine MILFs, including a Mariska Hargitay lookalike, running around.

I'm frustrated and I've only seen 40 minutes of this show. If we don't find out next season, we may have a tween rebellion on our hands. Even if you flipped your laptop in rage last night after missing out yet again on A's identity, you have to give props to PLL for stringing out one plot for four seasons without losing too many fans.

Not since The Fugitive's one-armed man has a show kept their villain front and center yet elusive for so long. Sure, the rooftop gun shot and "dangerous jump" at the end were a little far fetched, but it was riveting to see how A lived to text another day. I'd just like to avoid hordes of rampaging pubescents, so if we could reveal this A thing sooner than later, that'd be great.