The A-Team

How That Bonkers Pretty Little Liars Ending Came Together

Creator I. Marlene King and actress Troian Bellisario have been planning this bombshell for years.
This image may contain Clothing Apparel Evening Dress Robe Fashion Gown Human Person Shay Mitchell Suit and Coat
Courtesy of Freeform.
This post contains spoilers for the Pretty Little Liars series finale.

Of course Spencer had an evil twin. And of course that twin was English. And, yes, of course that evil twin turned out to be the seemingly omniscient A.D.

In the world of Rosewood, fans have come to expect the insane and revel in the absurd. And apparently, Pretty Little Liars creator I. Marlene King and actress Troian Bellisario—who plays both Spencer and her mirror image, Alex Drake—have been planning the shocker that concluded the soapy drama on Tuesday night for years. The idea, they say, was first hatched during Season 5. What better way for Freeform’s most popular show to sign off than with one final twist?

For those who missed Tuesday’s finale, which takes place a year after last week’s installment, here’s the gist, give or take a few thousand plot points. A fan theory was confirmed as Spencer found herself kidnapped—by her own evil twin. It turns out that Mary Drake, mother of both Spencer and Charlotte DiLaurentis—who was born Charles Drake—gave birth to two daughters the night Spencer was born. Alex, sadly, was shipped off to London to live with a family who ultimately abandoned her. The rest is the usual story: she ran away from the orphanage, had no family or friends, yada yada. Eventually, she met Wren, who told her all about her two biological sisters—thinking she was Spencer—and eventually, Alex met Charlotte. The two bonded instantly. So naturally, when Charlotte died, Alex took it pretty hard—and wanted to know who was responsible. Eventually, after impersonating her sister, Alex decided that she wanted Spencer’s life—and specifically, her loyal friends. Alex then kidnapped Spencer and Ezra, who was all set to marry Aria, before eventually getting caught and hauled away.

“We started playing with the twin theory early on,” King told The New York Times. “We didn’t know who the twins were going to be until about Season 3. It runs in the family. They say it skips a generation, but they just got lucky.”

Meanwhile, Troian Bellisario herself told Elle that she’s known about Alex Drake since Season 5, when King first approached her with the idea, swearing her to secrecy. “So I sat on it for over a year,” Bellisario said. “Then at the end of Season 6, she said, ‘We’re going to do it.’ It was like the starting gun at the races.”

Bellisario worked with a dialect coach to nail Alex’s accent, and started developing Alex’s persona and specific quirks. Alex is a little more aggressive than Spencer; she also fidgets with her hair. As Bellisario noted, she’s also a lot more sexual than Spencer: “Spencer comes out from under things, that’s where her confidence comes from,” Bellisario told Elle. “Alex has a very different kind of confidence. She’s brash, she’s, uh, a very sexually confident person. I think of it like this: Spencer approaches things with her head and her heart, and Alex approaches things with her head and her groin. That’s not to say she doesn’t have a heart or feelings, but she’s gotten really good at putting a thick coat of armor over her heart.”

Initially, Charlotte was going to be the only “A,” as King had originally planned on the series lasting five seasons. When she was asked to come up with two more years of storylines, King started putting pieces together to figure out who might be the show’s next villain.

“If I had known in Season 4 or 5 what Season 7 ultimately was going to be, it would have been great to see Alex Drake in our world a few more times,” King told the Times. “If you lined up the timelines, Alex was aware that the Pretty Little Liars existed, but Charlotte wouldn’t let her come to Rosewood in Season 5. It was too dangerous. I think for us just to stay sane, we did one ‘A’ at a time. As we knew one ‘A’ was coming to an end, yes, we would start to think about the next. For me, it was a very clean mythology just to say this ‘A’ stole the game. Our big ‘A,’ Charlotte, stole the game from Mona, and then ‘A.D.’ came and started the game all over again, to punish the Pretty Little Liars for Charlotte’s death. It felt very clean to me to say they are separate games, for very different reasons.”

As for what it’s like to say goodbye to a show after so long? King laid that experience out in an op-ed for The Hollywood Reporter, in which she noted that writing the episode was largely like crafting any other—except for one difficult scene. She put off writing the goodbye scene as long as she could, and things only got more emotional once she handed in the script:

After a tearful table read, I called “action” and we were shooting our last episode. One by one, we said goodbye to our cast as they were “series wrapped.” But then something amazing happened. They came back. On the last day of filming, actors, department heads, executives, directors and our entire office staff came to the set. Video village grew from a handful of people to a hundred. Late into the night, I called “cut” for the last time on Pretty Little Liars. I’ll never forget the cadence of our first A.D. announcing, “Ladies and gentlemen, that’s a series wrap on Lucy Hale, Ashley Benson, Shay Mitchell, Sasha Pieterse, Troian Bellisario … and Pretty Little Liars.”

As King puts it, “The sound of a group sob is also unforgettable.” But cheer up, Pretty Little Liars fans. There’s always King’s new show, Famous in Love—and who knows? Given the way this finale ended—with a whole new group of girls discovering their friend has gone missing—there’s always a chance for a reboot.