I love Pretty Little Liars a lot and when the series finale airs later this month, I’ll be sad to see it go. The show isn’t perfect — the poorly handled “Charlotte is trans” plot line still stands out as a low point — but in its best moments, PLL is suspenseful, funny, and sweet, often all at the same time. As I’ve been watching the second half of the final season, though, I keep thinking that Uber A’s antics finally have been eclipsed by something even more ridiculous and unrealistic: the fact that these girls are still friends.

At the beginning of the series, the girls had drifted apart following Alison’s disappearance but came back together to solve her murder (when they still thought she’d been murdered). That’s shaky ground to build a friendship on but I let it slide because they were teenagers. My own high-school friendships were more intense and dramatic than any I’ve had in my adult years, and the biggest trauma we ever had to weather was a battle over who got the better solo in orchestra.

But the Liars aren’t teenagers anymore and their repeated assertions that they’re doing this “for their friendship” are starting to ring hollow. We only know bits and pieces of what they got up to in the five years that happened off-screen between season 6A and 6B, but they definitely saw each other a lot less often. When they come back to Rosewood in 6B to give statements on Charlotte’s behalf, they’re all in their 20s, living separate lives, and pursuing their own careers. It makes sense they’d have catch-up drinks once or twice, and maybe even that they’d work together to stop Uber A once and for all, but the idea that they want to stay friends after all of this drama is ludicrous. They keep saying they don’t want Liar’s Lament to affect their relationships with each other but why? What do these five women really have to say to each other anymore?

As I started to write this, Teen Vogue published a piece about how PLL depicts some of the most nuanced, well-rounded female friendships on TV. That piece does make some great points, especially about how the girls' individual flaws are balanced out by the group's stability, but the joy they found with each other in earlier seasons is now missing. Since the time jump, the girls’ friendship has become more like a business arrangement than anything else. They’re working together because A.D. has forced them together, not because they want to be together. Even if they had the time to enjoy each other’s company, there’s not much indication that they’d care to, and after all the hell they’ve been through together, who could blame them for choosing to cut ties with the human reminders of all the trauma they’ve dealt with for the past 6 1/2 seasons?

What’s most upsetting about PLL is the idea that the girls turning their backs on each other is the worst thing they can do. I don’t condone Aria’s recent trashing of the nursery in "The Glove That Rocks the Cradle," but I do think it’s totally reasonable for her to say “I’ve had enough” and take matters into her own hands. There’s a rule among the Liars that they must remain loyal at all costs, and whenever someone goes rogue, she’s shunned and shamed until she admits her wrongdoing and promises not to do it again. But that’s not how real women operate, nor should it be. At the risk of sounding like some asshole who just got done with an app meditation, self-care is important, and if a friend is interfering with your ability to take care of yourself, you are allowed to cut that person out of your life. It’s weird that the Liars never seem to realize this about each other, especially now that they’re at an age where real women really do start drifting away from toxic friends.

In earlier seasons, I wondered why the girls so willingly welcomed Ali back into the fold after all the things she’d done to them. The only explanation I could come up with is that they were too young to know it would be fine to cut her out, but what’s the story now? Even before the drama with Elliott/Archer and the pregnancy, they barely hesitated to come to her aid at Charlotte’s hearing. Charlotte, you’ll remember, is the person who held them hostage in the dollhouse and tortured them. Is that really true friendship, or is that dangerously intense codependency?

You could argue that Emily, Spencer, Aria, and Hanna have kept rallying around Ali in 7B because they’re her only support system — her sister died, her ex-fiancé died (and was a lying schemer to boot), and she’s pregnant with her best friend’s baby because A.D. forcibly implanted her with the embryo. But in the real world, someone should have taken her aside, like, six episodes ago and said, “I’m happy to be here for you in any way that I can, but I also think you should seek professional help because this is more than I can process as a fellow human with my own history of trauma and abuse.” Where’s Dr. Sullivan when you need her?! (In hiding, probably, after A broke into her office.)

After all these years of PLL, I’ve learned not to make any predictions about what might happen and not to hope that all the mysteries will resolve themselves neatly. You can hope that A.D. is Aria’s unstable uncle all you want, but then Spencer will turn out to be a Drake and that theory will get shot to hell right next to Noel Kahn’s head. I will, however, allow myself to hope that once the Liars unmask A.D., they’ll go their separate ways and never speak again. It would truly be best for all of them.

Follow Eliza on Twitter.



Eliza Thompson senior entertainment editor I’m the senior entertainment editor at Cosmopolitan.com, which means my DVR is always 98 percent full.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io