This was honestly the most baffling series finale I have ever seen, and that includes (yes, really) the finale to How I Met Your Mother. Let me break it down for you, and explain exactly why it is so mind-bogglingly terrible.

~From opening credits to the 40-minute mark: random filler dream sequences, pointless cameos, and fan-fiction lip service smut, the latter of which might have made sense if they hadn’t inserted about fifty sex scenes into the previous two episodes as well.

Then came what was arguably the best scene of the episode, Twincer mimicking Spencer as she wakes up in her high-tech underground bunker, complete with fake atmosphere and nature, built in a year under the entire town of Rosewood via a single entrance below a private house by contractors who didn’t care about bylaws, zoning restrictions, or the need to provide silent heavy machinery that can be condensed into the size of a doorframe to be reconstructed inside Toby’s house in order to complete their job. Awesome! I thought that was a neat way to introduce the twincer concept, with the mirror imaging. My optimism for the episode rises slightly.

The Spencer-twin theory was the one I was predicting would be brought to the table, so I was gratified to be correct. I’d seen interviews with I. Marlene King where she said she’d read correct theories online, and I’ve read (and constructed!) some very complex ones that would have tied together most of the series, so at this point, my impatience brought on by the complete waste of my time creating a 2-hour finale was dissolving.

Oh man, was I in for it! BLIMEY!

I’m entirely baffled by the rest of the finale, save for Mona’s ending, which was hilarious if not completely logical (let’s be honest, we all suspend our logic somewhat when watching this show. We have to.) But the A.D. reveal? The only explanation for the way they built Alex Drake’s backstory is that somehow they deliberately conceived of a character whose existence could create an explanation for 90% of the plotholes of the entire 7 seasons, give the show a deeper meaning, and give reason to the fact that multiple random people seem to want to torture a specific handful of (admittedly thoughtless and sometimes downright idiotic) suburban highschoolers-turned-grownups in a game of Pass The Torture Baton ….and then said, hey, fuck it! That’d be too easy; let’s actually go to MORE effort to give her a backstory that not only has raging plotholes of its own, but retroactively ruins the CeCe reveal (which was culturally insensitive in and of itself, but let’s not even go there).

How does this retroactively ruin the CeCe reveal, you ask? Not sure why you would, but let’s indulge. If CeCe was having this sisterly relationship with Alex since she left for France, which was canonically taking place after the girls killed Shana in New York, then why was CeCe’s obsession with Alison? Alison, homecoming queen, must reconcile with my sister Alison! Pictures of Alison all over my lairs, and the dollhouse is so I can bring a homecoming for my sister Alison, and I’m going to leave lots of clues about my origins with the DiLaurentis family. Except I already found a true sister in Europe, and my other actual biological sister is Spencer, but fuck her, because for some reason, the Hastings are TERRIBLE PEOPLE, Alex, just trust me (*cough cough* pot, kettle, black *cough cough*).

Aside from the fact that I don’t understand why Charlotte would have a particular vendetta against Spencer, at least enough to tell Alex that she needs to stay away from her, the timeline also makes no sense. If, as Alex says, Wren and Melissa were already broken up by the time she met him, which was obviously before she met Charlotte, since he introduced them, then the scene with Hanna and Melissa in London makes no sense. How could Hanna run into Melissa in London DURING the five-year time jump, with them conversing about how Melissa and Wren recently broke up, if they were already broken up for good before the dollhouse episodes occurred?

Of course, this is only one of many, many gaping holes (phrasing) in this incredibly condensed half-finale reveal. Many people have said, “it’s Pretty Little Liars! Stop thinking it through so much.” And I’m like, “yes, hello 2017, I realize that suspending disbelief and lowering your standards below ground level are basically a necessity for this brave new world, but somehow I still manage to press on with it.”

The reason that these lackluster explanations are so infuriating is two-fold. First, the show has historically managed to weave complex concepts and suspenseful plotlines, while dropping hints that are obscure and yet indicate the potential that the overall conclusion of the show could redeem the many failings it has. Second, and most importantly, it actually quite literally would have been EASIER to use the twin theory to retroactively explain the overall arc of the show in a satisfying way. At the moment that Alex says goodbye to Charlotte as she returns to the US and says she never saw her alive again, my friend and I paused the show (thank god I downloaded this illegally, I can’t imagine how I would have felt if I’d paid to watch that episode), and looked at each other in disbelief. Don’t worry, past self! It’ll only get more horrifyingly, entertainingly bad.

With the exception of episode 7x19, the entire seventh season was filler, and not even good filler. I convinced myself that it was because they were building up to a dramatic, shocking and satisfying finale. I also told myself I wasn’t going to be too optimistic, but clearly I was in serious, life-threatening denial. After suffering through an entire year consisting of 9 filler episodes and a lot of waiting, the entire deductive process of the main characters discovering A.D.’s identity can be summed up in two lines of dialogue (paraphrased):

Toby: “you guys! A horse and Jenna told me Spencer isn’t herself! Also she gave me a book! She’s a twin, she’s evil! We have to get her!”

Everyone else: “uhhh hang on we were engaging in illegal and grossly inappropriate investigation of our friends’ credit card statements and GPS tracking because he was mean and left our other friend at the altar! P.S. I still don’t understand why people always want to torture us! A twin, you say? TWINS RUN IN THEIR FAMILY! Say no more! Let’s hurry and get there before we run out of time in this finale, I swear there was a reason it was two hours long.”

I actually calculated the time that this scene took, and it was exactly one minute. From Toby arriving and spewing nonsense about Spencer’s book when they were asking about Ezra’s whereabouts, to them just accepting what wasn’t even presented as a theory, but a statement of fact based on the testimony of one of their sworn enemies, and a horse (this is so ridiculous, it bears repeating). Literally 60 effing seconds. I’m so glad they stayed true to the fans by indulging in their enjoyment of the process, of the deduction and clues that led to their discovery of villains or potential villains over the years.

Still not convinced? This isn’t enough lead-up? Don’t change the channel! Just wait! There’s more! We’ve got the most exhausted TV trope in history, the “which twin is the evil twin? Let’s ask a question only the REAL Spencer Hastings would know! Better hope the twin never read the book that she knew her doppelganger loved so much, despite the fact that she clearly spent months or years studying her as to effectively mimic her and be able to regurgitate specific bits of knowledge from her life or memories by rote, and also knew to give you the book in the first place. But oh wait, she didn’t even bother to make sure her copy looked like the original, so somehow she is omniscient and yet also lacks a keen eye for detail simultaneously.”

Mona’s ending was clever and satisfying, aside from the fact that they painted Mary Drake as an insane-yet-still-protective mother to Spencer, but then we were supposed to be happy about her eternal torture and misery at the hands of another mentally ill person. Aside from all the incredibly offensive lessons we’ve been taught by PLL about mental health issues, the Mona ending was somewhat fulfilling, and had they ended the finale there, I might have upgraded my evaluation of this episode from 0.0003/10 to 0.0005/10. But no, they had a group of the most awkward and untalented pre-teens regurgitate the exact script from the beginning of the pilot, a move so bewilderingly stupid, I don’t even understand how the executives gave this thing the green light. Who are these people, and why are they getting paid exponentially higher salaries than I am? What is most confusing about this is that I watched an interview with I. Marlene King where she was bursting with pride about this “full-circle moment” and couldn’t wait to reveal it to the fans. Did she actually watch the final edit of this thing? The only part of this that feels full-circle is the way it resembles a dog chasing its tail. Pointless, self-serving, and humorous in the most ridiculous way.

The most entertaining part of this entire experience is that they spent 7 years teaching their fans how to use social media and technology to harass people who have wronged them, and then completed their run by creating an ending that would instil the same emotions into those people. Good luck with that! (N.B.: I do not endorse this in any way. I mean that truly; you deserve better than to waste any more time or effort on this show, or anyone who had a hand in crafting that ending).

Personally, I’ll end this with my relatively simplistic alternate explanation/ending that would have circumvented all of this bullshit, then sigh a breath of relief at the catharsis that is walking away from all those wasted hours of my life. As an aside, I hope Troian Bellisario goes on to bigger and better things – her accent wasn’t great, but her acting was fantastic. You were the sole saving grace of this episode. In the meantime, I recommend to anyone who hasn’t watched the finale yet: pretend that 7x19 is the last episode, for your own sake. It has a decent ending, and while it doesn’t answer most of your questions, it doesn’t retroactively ruin the entire 7 seasons preceding it, either.

How it Actually Should Have Ended

- “I’m your twin! Alex Drake!” *Spencer gasps in shock*.

- “How is this possible?” The fans ask.

- She tells her story:

- I was adopted from Radley, but given back because by the time I could form memories, I was already too much of a rascal! I was raised in Radley under the name Bethany Young, and Alison lured me from the Sanitarium with the intention to kill me out of jealousy. I can make plans too, though! I convinced another patient with blond hair to come with me, and put her in the clothes Jessica gave me. She was buried by Melissa, who thought she was Alison. The same person who switched Alison’s dental records did the same for me, and also I found out my real name is Alex Drake. From then on, I was obsessed with getting revenge with not only Alison for plotting to kill me, but also the girls who let her get away with being such an abysmal person. As a bonus, one of them is my twin sister who had the luck of being born a minute before me, and therefore got a fabulously privileged life, while most of mine was spent in Radley. So I enlisted Mona and then Charlotte, whom I discovered to be my sister during my investigation of my family tree (and was lucky enough to be cooped up in Radley too! Double score on the background connections!) to help me get revenge on those I perceived to be the source of my own misery in life.

- No? Too easy? I guess we’ll just have to insert a time-travelling paradox of a backstory to explain my existence, because otherwise our executive producer would have to actually re-watch some of the episodes before writing this finale. And that would be way, way too much work (considering the pittance I’m sure she’s paid) to create the ending to a show whose premise is the unraveling of a mystery. It’s okay, the show was insanely popular enough to give her more work in the future, no matter how badly she cratered the one episode that could have made the whole thing brilliant.