Pretty Little Liars season 4 episode 12 review: Now You See Me, Now You Don’t

This review contains spoilers.

4.12 Now You See Me

You’ve got to give the Pretty Little Liars writers some credit – that took guts. Aside from making one of the Liars ‘Big A’ (or ‘Uber A’ as I refuse to call them), having Ezra Fitz revealed as a wrongun in this summer finale’s final moments was the most ballsy move they could have pulled at this point. Aside from the shippers and endless heartache this means for them, this changes absolutely everything we thought we knew about ‘A’, and Rosewood and Alison’s dealing with ‘Board Shorts’ in the summer before her supposed death.

But before I get overexcited about this awesome episode, we have to remind ourselves that this show LIES. The writers lie in interviews, the characters lie on screen and everything we see and hear has to be taken with a large pinch of salt. That said, Ezra as the leader of the ‘A’-team makes a lot of sense, and has definitely been foreshadowed multiple times over the last four seasons (he was on the Halloween train; he was at Alison’s funeral; he drinks the same whisky as ‘A’; Aria has been the least targeted etc.). He’s certainly higher up the chain than Mona, but his affiliation with the show’s villains alters the game regardless.

The extra-creepy element of the reveal is the assumption that Ezra, not Wilden, is Board Shorts, and could possibly have gotten Alison pregnant before trying to murder her. Remember, Ali was around fourteen years old when this all happened so, given Ezra’s already immoral and possibly illegal relationship with seventeen year old Aria, this vindicates all of the anti-Ezra fans who called him out as a paedophile since the pilot. He’s a predator going after young girls, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Ali, not Maggie, was the girl his mother paid off to have an abortion. This is darker than I ever honestly thought they’d go.

It brings up to the money issue, and the corporation ‘A’ has set up to fund his/her dastardly schemes. The Fitzgerald family are loaded and the massive surveillance system in Ezra’s lair goes some way towards explaining how ‘A’ can be everywhere and everyone at once. Cece is on the payroll, as I’m sure the rest of our cast are too, with Ezra functioning as some kind of elaborate puppet master from his apartment in neighbouring Ravenswood. It’s a fabulous twist, and one that makes some of the other more ridiculous elements of the show slightly more plausible.

But with that bombshell dropped in the show’s final minute, it’s easy to forget the other big revelation of the night. There are two Red Coats – one of them is Cece and the other is probably Alison. As Mrs. Grunwald recounts, Alison was buried alive and pulled out by her former confidant. She had known someone was after her and faked her death for her own safety. For me, this means that Red Coat is on a completely different team to ‘A’, rather than being the leader as we had previously thought. She is trying to protect the liars, with Alison leading Spencer to Ezra’s lair.

But why has she been hiding from them – her closest friends? Because she can’t trust them, and this is where the ‘Aria is A’ theorists probably stood up and readied themselves. Now that Ezra has been unmasked, does this mean that Aria has no idea or does it mean that they’ve been working together all of this time? There must be a reason that Alison is afraid to come out in the open, and that reason is probably a suspicion that the group contains a mole. We know it’s not Spencer and it’s unlikely to be Hannah or Emily – so that leaves Aria. The theory isn’t dead yet, that’s for sure.

In other news, Ashley’s name is cleared after Travis talks to the police, and the new prime suspect for Wilden’s murder is Cece. Like Mona, we may never know what side Cece is really on but she seems like a scapegoat for hire at the moment. She was hired by Ezra, she is posing as a decoy Red Coat and now Travis has named her as the suspect in a police officer’s murder. My money’s still on Pastor Ted but, now we know that ‘A’ and Wilden both had dealing with Ali and Cece in the same summer, it’s plausible that this all leads back to the main mystery.

Is Ezra really as creepy as he seems right now? Are he and Aria working together? Is Alison really alive? I have to admit that I’ve not been as excited about Pretty Little Liars since before the big Mona-reveal, and I can hardly wait for the two-hour Halloween special (three-hours if you count the Ravenswood premiere). See you October!

Read Caroline’s review of the previous episode, Bring Down The Hoe, here.

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