meganbmoore | Pretty Little Liars eps 1-10 (Reply)

I feel odd posting this when almost everyone is out having a social life or something (I hide from the world when there are likely to be drunk partiers?) but new episodes start in just a few days.

Pretty Little Liars is a show in the Twin Peaks and Veronica Mars in that the metaplot revolves around the disappearance/death of a pretty/popular girl, and features her friends looking into the mystery of what happens to her. All three also eventually reveal a secret sexual life that the girl led, that appears to be tied to her fate. Except PLL ditched all the men, focuses almost entirely on her relationships with other women, and is way less male gazey in general.

It’s also very like a Christopher Pike mystery book in that it’s cracky and twisty and has the hint of the supernatural, and focuses on a group of friends trying to solve the mystery. Except that it’s way, way less racist (Not that that’s hard, really-I’ve been rereading Pike lately, trust me on this-but I actually can’t think of any big failures that front?) has far fewer Nice Guys (and sometimes actually realizes that they are Nice Guys, and the girls involved should trade up) and all the detectives are girls.

So, basically, I’m wondering why more of the “multiple women doing things” fans on my list aren’t squeeing over it?

The basics are this: Spencer, Aria, Hanna and Emily used to be BFFs with Allison, the most popular girl in school, but then Allison disappeared while they were on a camping trip, and they grew apart, and have barely spoken since. But they re-bond when Allison’s body is found, and at her funeral, they all receive taunting texts from A, an unknown person who knows secrets that only Allison knew.

Then there’s the awesomely creepy blind girl who has just cause to hate their guts, the fact that their family lives are framed through their relationships with their mothers, and what is probably the only biracial lesbian pairing on television with no white people involved. (Also, they are adorable. So is some of the het, but especially them.)

There are romantic subplots at first that made me cringe a lot, but they mostly improve. I’m uncomfortable with some of it, but I think most of what makes me cringe is meant to. But basically, it’s a marvelously fun show about a bunch of snarky, bitchy girls having positive (and sometimes antagonistic, but mostly positive) relationships with each other and other women, solving mysteries and running through houses and woods in potential peril. Uhm…there are some boys, too? And I like some? But it’s mostly girls.

A couple random things before I get to some spoilers.

1. So, in a show about snarky, catty “mean” girls, my favorite is Hanna, the nicest and most considerate of the lot? I also just realized that every single other major character (except the token Nice Guy, who I ignore) has dark hair, and Hanna is the only blonde in the whole thing. Though, my next two favorites are Spencer (the ambitious control freak who reads a lot) and Jenna (the creepy snarky blind girl).

2. Speaking of hair, this show frequently suffers from Flat Hair Curse. You know, when all the women start with their own, individual hairstyles, but it slowly gets converted so that they all have the identical flat, straight hair? This first showed up with Jenna, which made me sad, but then Aria and Hanna were attacked by the curse, too. And the forced straightness really stands out next to more normally straight hair like Emily’s. I think the only thing saving Maya from the curse is that they don’t want us to notice that Bianca Lawson is still playing teenagers.

3. Yes, Kendra from Buffy is still playing a teenager. WTF? Also, Piper from Charmed plays Aria’s mother, and while Chad Lowe plays her father, wikipedia informs me that he was originally supposed to be played by Alexis Denisof. Piper and Wesley were going to have teenaged kids! But Kendra was (and is) still going to be a teenager! WHAT? My geekery is reeling.

Now for some spoilers.

So, basically, the few things that make me uncertain about the show are wrapped up in Aria’s plot. At first, I hated her father (naturally) for burdening his teenaged kid with having to keep his affair secret, but he was shown as a loser there, I think, and very wrong for doing that to both of them. But later, when Ella moves out because Byron refuses to give her the space she needs after she learns about his affair, the show still sympathizes with her and expects us to side with her, but it also…seems to want us to care about his Man Pain, and the agony of being the responsible parent and doing the things she did that he took for granted? And then we have Aria being angry with Ella over it, and I get being mad at your parent for leaving, of course, but Aria…seems to have forgotten that the entire situation is her father’s fault?

And then there’s her relationship with Ezra, and how it seems to be set up as the Epic Romance of the show. I was uncomfortable with how she deliberately led him to believe she was legal at the bar when they first met, even though she didn’t outright lie? But I dislike the student/teacher forbidden romance and how he’s…so clearly at a more emotionally mature/stable place than she is. But he seemed to at least put in an effort to sometimes be The Adult, and put in token attempts at doing the right thing, and Aria was the typical aggressor. But then their last scene in episode 10 where she told him to take a hike because she was tired of his passive aggressive bull, and then he becomes the aggressor and just…won’t let her make the choice he couldn’t make, and it becomes a romantic reunion? That bit made me really uncomfortable, and I’m not sure where it’s going. I mean, I’m not thrilled with Spencer’s apparent tendency to fall for her older sister’s boyfriends? But I think both were framed as her being an infatuated teenager, and the men as wrong for encouraging/pursuing her, and I think that we were meant to see the flashback with Ian as almost predatory on his part, even though it was from her perspective. So while I don’t quite like it for Spencer, I don’t have narrative issues with it like I do with Aria.

Wow, I went on about that a lot. But really, Aria’s personal plotline is the only problem I have with the show, and I like the personal plotlines of the other three. And I like Aria as part of the group, I just…don’t enjoy her scenes that don’t involve the others.

More importantly, A/Allison.

1. I don’t think I’m convinced that A and the person stealing pictures, wrecking memorials, almost-terrorizing the girls and running people down with cars are the same person. Many of A’s messages border on warnings, and while they’re snaky and bitchy and often mean, I feel there’s a different kind of malice to the shadowy figure sneaking around.

2. This is directly tied to the fact that I really, really want Allison to not be dead. Specifically, I want her to have faked her death and not looked back, but to have returned purely to save her friends.

3. If Allison is dead, then I want the mystery of her death to be solved, as well as the harasser, but for A to remain a mystery, leaving room to interpret it as Allison protecting her friends from beyond the grave.

4. I want Maya, Jenna and Mona (or at least one) to have Secret Motives, and be helping/working for A.

Soooo...has anyoneread the books?