Season 1, Episode 8 (Series Finale)
Date of release: November 12, 2021 (Amazon Prime)
Written by: Sara Goodman
Directed by: Logan Kibens
”And now here we are. The love story of the century.”
I have no idea how much sense all of this made. I was just sitting here, watching the events unfold, and sighing the biggest sigh in the history of sighs when Alison made the decision about who to blame for stabbing her just now. That scene turned this PRETTY LITTLE LIARS-coded slasher drama into the ending of GONE GIRL, where Alison will forever live with the pain of losing her sister, and with the fear of Margot turning into her killer. But hey, Alison already said that she is very much cracked in the head, so she may even enjoy the chaos and terror that comes with being with Margot. Maybe the two deserve each other after all...
I was glad that the conclusion didn't turn out to be predictable, and that my two main suspects decided to be weirdos with equally cracked heads. I almost feel a little sorry for Dylan, who is now going to suffer for Margot's actions, but maybe the prison lifestyle will finally bring some order into his very destructive mind. Judging by the way he was talking (and his connection to Clara), it felt like he was part of the cult as well, and I'm sure that would have ended horribly for him. Alison framing him might have saved his life – maybe not just in that regard, but also to protect him from Margot.
Meanwhile, all the side plots didn't lead anywhere. Alison's mother was thrown into the plot to get deeper into the cult storyline, and then she was dead. The whole “next life” thing sounded like otherworldly fantasy babble, but was completely misplaced in a slasher drama, making the final image of Riley feel like it should have been part of a show like SUPERNATURAL instead. Margot mentioned how her mother and her stepfather were involved in her crimes, but that was just used for the closing gag, apparently to give the audience all the necessary information that they needed to understand how and why Margot did what she did. If you can't even get that information dump into the regular scheduled programming and instead waste it during the end credits for a silly little joke, then maybe something didn't quite work out in the writers' room, and your narrative structure was faulty.
Lois Duncan wouldn't have been happy with this adaptation either. As a fan of the franchise, I'm not happy either. They just took the title of her novel and did something completely different with it, reminding us all once more how Hollywood doesn't really care for the story; they just want the IP to make money.
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| Signing off. XOXO, the villain. |
