That doesn't mean we successfully escaped it.......Beloved Daughter, among the show's primary demographic target (girls and women, ages 13 to 35, more or less) watched every episode faithfully, sometimes drafting us into an excruciating, unwilling co-viewing of an occasional episode......(or as much of an episode as we could stand before we fled, from both the show and its avalanche of commercials for tampons and acne wash, desperately seeking a good book...)
What little we saw of the series remained incomprehensible to us......the story seemed to hinge on a group of girls forever stalked, harassed and terrified (primarily via cellphone) by some mysterious cyber-psycho nursing a deep grudge against them. Random murder victims would pile up as the girls regularly made lethal bad moves in dealing with this....uh....whoever.
To be fair.....that's not a bad premise for a 95 minute thriller......but for a series lasting seven seasons? Throughout the years, we constantly asked Beloved Daughter, "Why didn't these girls go the cops in the first episode? Who would live their entire youth tormented like this....from high school through college, through young adulthood?" (No real human being, of course, but by keeping its audience riveted by the characters' never ending foolhardy behavior, the show thrived......and kept its network flush in advertising bucks from tampons and acne wash...)
Once again, the BQ, eyes heavily rolling upward, was drafted to sit down and watch the series' 2 hour positively final episode......in which, the network trumpeted, 'all will be revealed'.....
Having watched this show only in mercifully brief snippets, we understood what was going on about as well as Donald Trump understands the Health Care bill (or anything, for that matter)....not at all.
After enduring about an hour or so, including lengthy montages of the principle actors taking time off from all the suspense to enjoy a roll in the sheets with their various partners.....at long last the show unmasked its Big Bad Villain......
(I suppose this is where we should warn you to stop reading if you have the slightest interest in finding out this heart-stopping surprise for yourself.....)
Our mouth did open a bit at the villain reveal......at the sheer nerve of the show's writers in exhuming that most ancient and most lazy of all gimmick villains.......the Evil Twin. Yes, following in the footsteps of a thousand hack soap opera writers before them, the writers went there........with one of our lead girls afflicted with her doppelganger, a cheeky sociopath sporting the same mock-cockney accent we last heard from some kid working the Ye Olde Hot Dog stand at the Renaissance Faire.
We wonder how many of the show's young fans found this revelation fresh and original....and how many them recognized it as a hoary device that's been employed by centuries of imagination-starved writers as a swift escape out of impossible plot twists they painted themselves into.....(we're guessing the latter group raced to their twitter accounts, furiously punching "WTF" into their phones and IPads....)
The true kicker in the "Pretty Little Liars" finale was not its pop up English evil-doer, sounding like she's working at the magic wand shop in Universal Orlando's Harry Potter World.....but a teaser scene in which the network threatened to start the series all over again.....only with younger actresses. No better example of naked corporate greed could you find......with the original leads heading into old age (some of them pushing 30).....a perfect time to reboot with fresh babes.....and keep selling those tampons and acne wash.....
For this post, we only feel qualified to rate the two hours we watched......we can't base a rating on the seven years of the show itself, having glimpsed it only in fleeting chunks. But that lame surprise villain only warrants 1 star (*).......and we've sworn up and down that we'll never, never lay eyes on any potential re-tread of this show.......unless, God forbid, Beloved Daughter asks us to.....
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