The whole point of a mystery is to see if the audience can solve it. Unless you ask Marlene King, then it’d be to trick and shock the fans with a reveal they’d never have been able to guess in the first place.
Pretty Little Liars pilot episode aired on June 8, 2010 and to say that I was obsessed with discovering the identity of A would be an understatement. Every week, I would tune in to watch the liars face more torment and fail to solve the mystery that plagued their lives.
It’s no surprise that I was among the thousands – or millions of fans who were disappointed at the nonsensical Cece reveal. But imagine if the writers cared more about making an amazing story than a shocking reveal? What if the clues all panned out to some larger plan? What if the entire story actually cared about and respected the audience?
To start us off, I’ll make it clear that I have no beef with the Mona reveal. At that point in the show, the writers were still sticking pretty closely to the source material of Sara Shepard’s book series. The groundwork was laid, and the writing still made sense.
It wasn’t until after the Mona reveal that the writing quality started to decline. What’s even worse is that as fans, we had so much faith in Marlene King and her team. Season 5 was truly amazing. Alison in jail, the dollhouse, the scandal, the drama, the tension. Yet they dropped the ball with an incoherent and tacky villain reveal for the sake of the story not being predictable.
It’s incredible when you realize that the writers completely missed the reason fans loved the show to begin with. Sure, the intrigue of solving Alisons murder was huge in the earlier seasons. But as the show went on, it was more about putting an end to the torment the girls were constantly facing at the hands of the A team. We needed the adrenaline rush of the epic killer reveal monologue. It was what we were all waiting for.
What if the writers got it right?
As mentioned earlier, Mona’s reveal was actually handled pretty well. She was a show regular who had an established relationship with each of the liars. Ex-best friends reunited with Hannah after Alison’s disappearance. Rivals with Spencer in whatever Mona felt like snatching from her at the moment. She had fewer interactions with Aria and Emily, but they both had very blatant opinions about her. This was shown to us during the Camp Mona episode when the girls practically threw their invitations in the garbage.
I breakdown Mona’s entire character arc and motives more in this blog post, so check it out when you’re done here.
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