Before I get into all this, beware: If you have not watched Pretty Little Liars' summer finale yet, you might want to run while you still can, because I'm definitely going to spoil it for you in just a split second.
Amongst the huge amount of TV shows I've watched, Pretty Little Liars might be my favorite TV show of all time. For some reason, it got me hooked on all its mysteries and drama for almost two years now, so naturally, I was over-excited to finally find out who has been behind the alias 'A' on Tuesday.
My friends and I had planned a viewing party, because gurl can't take all this suspension on her own, and we waited eagerly until two in the morning (!) because us Germans are just so damn unlucky when it comes to th air-time of US TV shows.
After what was promoted as "The Summer Of Answers" by the network, we had still only found out little to no real clues regarding A's identity, but when the episode started, we were still pretty positive and eager to finally put a face to that name.
A few minutes into the episode, the bomb was officially dropped - CeCe Drake has been the liars' tormentor all this time!
That alone actually didn't upset me, I had read a ton, and I mean hours worth of theories about who could be A/Charles during the weeks before the finale, and I came across some very, very well tought out ones featuring CeCe.
What did leave me feeling like I kind of wasted two years of my life waiting for that reveal was next to everything that followed.
CeCe explained that she is actually Charles, who was sent to the mental institution Radley as a young child for putting his baby sister Alison in the bathtub in order to stop her from crying and "make her feel better". In Radley, Charles became good friends with Bethany, the girl that Mrs. DiLaurentis payed visits to years later. We were shown that it was indeed Bethany who pushed Marion Cavanaugh, Toby's mother, off Radley's roof - which she blamed on Charles.
At quite a young age, Charles started dressing in his mothers clothes and continued doing so after he was sent away. Somewhere between the Marion incident and Mrs. DiLaurentis faking Charles' death, Charles decided to go through a gender change, eventually becoming Charlotte, who we have known as CeCe Drake all this time.
Charlotte became a very studious young woman and due to that was allowed to attend classes at UPenn. Around that time, she started dating Jason - who is her brother, might I add. Is this Game of Thrones now? - to be closer to her family.
The night Alison dissapeared, Bethany stole Charlotte's clothes and fled Radley thinking that Mrs. DiLaurentis had an affair with her father, possibly plotting revenge. Charlotte took after her and hit Ali, who she tought was Bethany, on the head with a rock. After burying Ali, Mrs.DiLaurentis payed Wilden to take CeCe back to Radley and keep quiet about it. And well, the rest is, as they say, history.
My problem with this reveal is that it felt insanely rushed, which eventually led to a ton of unneeded plotholes. For some reason, Marion apparently died when Charles was still young - yet Marion was very well alive when Alison tried to seduce Toby when they were teenagers. Huh? Same goes for Red Coat, who was said to have an individual scene with each of the liars, and Black Widow, who we apparently saw unmasked in season four - all lies, as Sara Harvey, who is starting to get well on my nerves, was revealed to be both of the above. I was very let down by that, not gonna lie, because Sara has been around for a total of five episodes and was introduced this season, so she feels pretty irrelevant to the entire plot. And we don't even know how she got to know CeCe. Damnit.
On top of that, the episodes leading up to this summer finale included red herrings, false evidence - donated organs? - random characters, but no answers. All the answers we got were crammed into a 45 minute long episode - how could that ever work out - so obviously, quite a few questions were left unanswered, leading Marlene King, the series developer, to answer said questions in an interview.
Obviously, some might still be answered in the upcoming time jump, which did look pretty exciting. The liars seem to be up against a new Big Bad, who appears to be a male, five years later.
That turned into one hell of a rant, didn't it? Woah.
Sorry for that verbal diarrhea that just happened all over your screen, but I just really felt the need to voice my opinon, because quite frankly, I feel let down and angry.
Obviously, there are people who liked the episode because everyone has a different mindset on the show, and we were told that "the producers are not aiming to please everybody", but from the reactions after the finale, the majority of the fanbase was sad, angered or at the very least insanely dissapointed.
I hope that the team working on this show somehow manages to make up for all this mess during season 6B, which will air in January 2016, because really, I love this show to death and I'm curious to see how it continues, but this episode, even though it was so important for the development of the show's plot, was a total letdown.
