With Pretty Little Liars coming to an end later this year, it’s time to start thinking about what could come next.
When the final Pretty Little Liars episode airs, it’s going to be bittersweet for fans. On one hand, we’ll (hopefully) finally know who’s been involved in the girls’ torture, but on the other hand, we’ll have to say goodbye to the series and the characters that we’ve come to love over 7 years.
The good news is, Pretty Little Liars creator, Marlene King, has already spoken about a potential future for the series. She’s not sure if the future will come in the form of a spinoff, a movie or something else, and it won’t happen right away, but she’s certain the show will come back, in some form.
This is great to hear, since the extremely dedicated Pretty Little Liars fan base, who still breaks records for social media engagement, might have a difficult time quitting cold turkey, with no hope for more. The question is, if/when those incredibly devoted fans do get to return to the Pretty Little Liars world, what would they want to see?
Well, we may not all ship the same couples, we don’t all subscribe to the same crazy theories, and we don’t all care about the same ridiculous side plots, but there are a couple things that Pretty Little Liars fans can agree on. One, is that Wren Kingston is unequivocally guilty and involved in some way (unrelated to this article, but true, nonetheless), and another, is that we need answers. As many as we can get.
Over the course of the Pretty Little Liars series, we’ve seen more than 100 hours’ worth of A’s reign of terror over the girls. Over 100 hours of escalating mystery and truly WTF worthy moments. Given the amount of questions we’ve had, over the years, you’d think they’d have given us at least a few hours’ worth of answers, right?
In reality, we’ve gotten maybe 30 minutes of answers, spread out over a couple episodes. That’s not enough! Also, there’s a big problem with the answers that we do get from Pretty Little Liars. They always seem to come with more questions!
We got a far-too-brief confession from Mona about how things went down in the beginning. Charlotte filled in more blanks, but basically just blamed everything that couldn’t be explained on Sara Harvey. We’ll definitely get some oversimplified exposition from the guilty culprit(s) at the end of Pretty Little Liars, but will it cover everything that we want/need to know? Definitely not.
We’ve invested so much time in this mystery, and we deserve every little morsel of truth they can give us. We want to know the who, what, when, where, why, and most of all, how all of this went down. That’s why, the one Pretty Little Liars spinoff that all fans can agree on, is one that shows us exactly how A pulled all of this off! Or rather, how The A Team pulled it off, which is what the spinoff could be called.
Imagine going right back to the beginning of Pretty Little Liars and seeing it play out from A’s perspective. Imagine watching Mona deciding to go after the girls, figuring out their weaknesses, and exploiting them. Pulling their strings like the puppet master she was. What if we could see how she assembled the A Team, and actually get to the bottom of who’s been involved, and for what purposes.
First of all, anything that keeps Mona Vanderwaal on our screens is a good thing. She’s brilliant, sassy, hilarious, complicated, and just an overall joy to watch. A series with her at the centre, at least at the beginning, would be insanely fun to come back to, week after week. She’s so intriguing and nearly impossible to figure out. The A Team would give us a chance to figure out her motives, and appreciate her character, even more.
This series could also give us an opportunity to dive deeper into Radley. When Mona started the A game, she was extremely ill, and in desperate need of help. Is she better now? Honestly, we’re still not really sure, but we know that she did spend time at Radley to receive treatment.
Based on what we’ve seen of Radley, they weren’t always interested in actually helping their patients. Between Mona, Spencer, Charlotte, Bethany, and Toby’s mom, so many characters have gone through there, with varying degrees of success. It’s often repeated that all roads lead to Radley, so spending more time there with Mona, and seeing Charlotte steal the game from her, could fill in so many blanks and give us a deeper understanding of why these characters treated the girls so badly.
On top of being informative, this spinoff would have the potential to be entertaining in a multitude of other ways. You know Mona/Charlotte/the rest of the A team had to put themselves in some hilariously compromising positions to gain all of their intel. You can’t spy on four different girls for years and always remain comfortable. It could also be a cool way to return to the original series and characters, since they would have to show clips of what’s happening with the girls, as A pulls the strings.
We’re not saying the spinoff would have to match the Pretty Little Liars events, episode per episode. We’re not looking for another seven year commitment. It could be a much shorter series, since all of the red herrings and the girls’ horrible theories could be cut out. But, after over 100 hours of mystery, set up and questions, they could surely deliver at least a couple seasons’ worth of answers.
If the creators of Pretty Little Liars do return to the world, someday, this is the story they should tell. More than anything, Pretty Little Liars fans need answers, and this would be the ideal way to deliver them!