I have watched PLL The Perfectionists

All 10 episodes, which it turns out are all the show is going to get.

I enjoyed it, there is a lot of fan-service for fans of Pretty Little Liars but I also liked the new characters.

Spoilers will abound.

It's popular now to be cynical about this kind of fan service.  They all organically serve the plot at hand in my opinion.  And in my view no different then any completely new show that implies a lot of back story.  Hell I still think the reign of the Mad King would make a better TV show then Game of Thrones.

But I ultimately don't and can't have the perspective of someone watching the show as a complete stand alone.  As much as I loved PLL I currently have no interest in watching new shows of the same genre, not on American TV anyway.  I was tuning in first and foremost to get more Ali and Mona and what they gave me was a treat that brought back all my positive memories of the show but none of the negative.

I will be talking about my criticisms below, but be aware my overall opinion of the show is still currently a positive one.

The decision to make the new Ali a male character was perhaps a short sighted one.

The reason a character like Alison DiLaurentis can become a Hero to Feminists in-spite of the almsot villainous first impression we're given of her is because of the role her archetypes plays in how Sexism works.  How girls in real life and other fiction are condemned as far worse over doing far less.  Because before PLL shows about Dead Girl murder mysteries were usually from a male perspective, and the inevitable shift of her perceived moral character goes in the opposite direction.  The brilliance of PLL was that as much as it started seeming like a generic Teen Girl Drama it became a feminist subversion/deconstruction of the tropes popularized by Twin Peaks.

But a character like Nolan, a Ciz White Male (and Het as far as the public knows) blackmailing and manipulating his sexual partners who come from marginalized groups, and hurts the woman he loves to protect her, comes with a completely different baggage.  The kind of people who would like seeing that character turn out to be an Anti-Hero rather then villain are completely different and not as likely to be in PLL's target audience.  Fortunately this show wasn't built around flashbacks as much as PLL was.

I felt this 10 episode season was decently paced in terms of the actual plot structure, but the escalation was weird.

It kind of has the same premise as the prior show in that the Secrets our protagonists are dealing with are at first pretty typical of moderately well off teenagers.  But they still do to keep them a secret instead of just coming clean causing the stakes to escalate until the original simple answer of "just tell the truth" is no longer viable.  And then the anti-authoritarian themes of the show undermine the idea that simply going to the cops to begin with was ever a good idea.

But on PLL Classic Version that escalation took years, while this show takes us from the stakes of PPL Season 1A to PLL Season 5 in only 10 episodes.  Which when watching it as an Allison and Mona show works fine, but for the newbies it feels like making someone start playing Ocarina of Time at The Water Temple.

What's amusing is how they handle the phase of the story where they think the person blackmailing them isn't the same person as the killer.  This is a fundamentally weird route for a mystery show to take this early, but it does so because on PLL that was always how things actually played out.  It's in the context of being a sequel to PLL that the finale's reveal that they actually are the same is a twist.

The show ends with the mystery unresolved, and in any other context I'd wish they'd tried to avoid that.  But for PLL it was maybe for the best.  I can head-canon that the Professor is simply Alex Drake and Jeremy another of her Wren contacts.

The character named Luke in the last episode I was expecting and hoping was indeed going to apologize for his past bullying.  However what I also specifically didn't want was the "I did it because I was a repressed Gay" reveal, VraiKaiser has written about why that seemingly Woke trope actually needs to die.

Again, all those issues aside it was an enjoyable show.  Because I was first and foremost watching it as an Ali and Mona show.  It's a fun satisfying epilogue to the saga of Pretty Little Liars.  And so in that context I'm hoping it will be for awhile the last time I talk about the show on this blog.  I want to end my relationship with PLL on a positive note.