[SPOILERS ALERT!]

Ever since I watched the season six finale of Pretty Little Liars on Wednesday 12th August, I have wanted to write an article about it. About the whole of season six. The reason it has taken me a while is that I didn’t know – and part of me is still bemused – how I feel about it.

I was a bit late jumping on the PLL bandwagon; I started watching it at Christmas last year and ever since then, have watched it religiously. I had my own theories and my boyfriend (who I watched it with) would discuss them at great lengths. For those of you who also read all of the fan theories, I agreed with the whole ‘Wren is A’ one. It made sense. My theory was Wren Kingston (Julian Morris) was A, CeCe Drake (Vanessa Ray) was Redcoat and Melissa Hastings (Torrey DeVitto) was Black Veil (since I thought Melissa and Wren had to be working together).

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

On the night of the finale in the U.S, I didn’t go on social media at all. Not until 6 o clock the next day when I watched it. Twitter had already ruined it for me slightly when I got an update come through on my phone saying ‘so-and-so and three more people are tweeting about #Aisagirl’. I should’ve deleted all my social media apps. I forgot Twitter sent updates. Silly me. Part of me didn’t want to watch the episode after that; my opinion of the episode had already been tainted without me even watching it. But I had to. If A was a girl, I wanted to find out who, and who the hell Charles was.

The whole of season six had felt quite slow to me; all of the episodes seemed to be filler ones – just building up to the penultimate episode, ‘Last Dance, and the finale ‘Game Over, Charles’. The finale pretty much picked off where ‘Last Dance’ ended, at the school prom where Alison (Sasha Pieterse)  had just been abducted by A and A had revealed themselves to Ali. It’s a man-hunt for the rest of ‘the Liars’ who include an art student – who is now obsessed by dolls – Aria Montgomery (Lucy Hale), a was-supposed-to-be-a-valedictorian, Spencer Hastings (Troian Bellisario), Emily Fields (Shay Mitchell), who seems to have a crush on nearly every girl in the show, Hanna Marin (Ashley Benson) who is super smart and amazing and keeps us all entertained with her hilarious one-liners and Mona Vanderwaal (Janel Parrish), the first A who completely messed with the girls – up until season two – yet I absolutely adore her.

Whilst the Liars are in A’s lair, Mona finds a link to a camera where A is with Alison and the five girls listen on (obviously with A knowing) as A tells their story to Ali.

So it was revealed to us that Charles DiLaurentis a.k.a Charlotte DiLaurentis a.k.a CeCe Drake was A.  The reasoning for her being A was brilliant: she was Charles DiLaurentis, Ali’s and Jason’s (Drew Van Acker) brother who had always felt like he was born to be a girl, to be Charlotte. Jessica DiLaurentis (Andrea Parker) knew this and started to buy dresses for Charles but Kenneth DiLaurentis (Jim Abele) disagreed with the whole notion.

It’s been said that Charlotte isn’t the big bad wolf of the show, it’s Kenneth. It’s been his actions against Charlotte when she was younger that turned her into the person that wanted to torture and manipulate people. However, the reason for CeCe taking out all of this anger on ‘the Liars’ is weak. She explains to Ali that she was really good at playing the Big A game and it was like a drug to her, she loved the adrenaline. She returned to Rosewood to befriend to Liars and find out more about them, but when she found out that the Liars weren’t exactly upset that Ali had disappeared, CeCe was infuriated – at the end of the day, Alison was her sister – and began to torture the Liars.

When the Liars went to New York, they thought that they had killed A, so CeCe left the country thinking that the A game was in the past. But the adrenaline started to kick in again and she started to crave the game once more, so she returned to Rosewood to try and finish what she started. According to CeCe, she only really got angry when “Ali didn’t listen to [her]” and that’s apparently the reason why she did any of the dangerous things like drive a car into Emily’s house, or try and freeze Emily and Spencer, or poisoning Aria. She did it all to get Alison’s attention. Hence the reason she tried to (almost) kill the Liars. She had seen someone wandering round in a red coat and thought it was Alison and suspected that Alison was alive, so by starting the barn fire, she knew that Ali would come to the rescue and save the girls.

Confused yet?

CeCe then hired her own Redcoat as a decoy – who turned out to be Sara Harvey (Dre Davis) and also a very boring character and was also revealed as Black Veil. I don’t understand why Harvey had to be given two of the most mysterious roles in the show. How did she meet CeCe so they could start working together? What about the two and a half years she was ‘in the dollhouse?’ Did CeCe really kidnap her?

This is just one of the plot holes that I have picked up on after watching the finale. CeCe comes home back to the DiLaurentis house and finds her Mother dead in the back garden. She goes into a state, crying and holding her Mom in the most loving way possible. The audience feels her loss. So why, when she’s so worked up about finding her dead Mother, would she send this photo to the Liars? It doesn’t make sense. Like I said, that’s just one of the plot holes.

I am not disappointed about CeCe being ‘A’, I am not disappointed in the transgender plot. I thought it was brilliant. Vanessa Ray’s acting was profound but the finale was rushed and it was messy. CeCe’s reasoning for being A is brilliant and moving. I’m not utterly disappointed about the finale; it had suspense, action and tearful emotion, I’m just disappointed about the number of plot holes and about the amount of unanswered questions like, ‘who killed Jessica DiLaurentis?’, ‘what about those tombstones that Caleb saw in Ravenswood when they had his and Miranda’s faces on?’, ‘ARE THE LIARS MOMS STILL STUCK IN THE DILAURENTIS BASEMENT?!’ and ‘are Jason and Kenneth DiLaurentis ok?’ See? There’ still a lot of unanswered questions that the writers seem to have forgotten about.

Hopefully, these questions will be answered in the upcoming episodes in the winter. Even after a slow season six and a finale full of suspense and most questions finally answered, the ending left the audience sitting on the edge of the sofa and waiting for January to come so we can find out who the Liars are referring to when they “he’s coming”. So all of us who are hardcore PLL fans, we have more wonderfully intense episodes to fill our screens.