Pretty Little Liars: Original SinSeason 1 is closing in on its finale, and it seems like all the clues are leading the liars one step closer to “A” and the serial rapist. With the help of a blood drive at school and a chaotic Thanksgiving week, they begin to gather all the evidence they need to find the person who assaulted Imogen (Bailee Madison) and impregnated her. In the meantime, “A” is now bothering Sydney (Sharon Leal), the last mother of the bunch to be addressed by the anonymous identity. Could she be the key to the liars finding out about what happened to Angela (Gabriella Pizzolo), or does Crazy Joe (Michael Maze) know more than what he has revealed to them thus far? Here is what this chapter has to contribute to this suspenseful storyline.
Episode 8, titled “Bad Blood”, sees the girls at the school bathroom spiraling over the picture they received from “A” of Tyler’s (Brian Altemus) dead body in a bathtub. Unsure of what to do, they decide to once again keep their mouths shut about it until they find out A’s identity and motivation. Tabby (Chandler Kinney) and Imogen also confide about their rape incidents and share with the girls their game plan to use the blood drive to obtain the DNA of their assaulter. Noa (Maia Reficco), Mouse (Malia Pyles), and Faran (Zaria Simone) agree to help their friends implement the idea through their personal connections. Meanwhile, later that day, Sydney receives a copy ofThe Scarlet Letterat her front door. As she picks up the book, she finds a library card in it with various signatures from Angela Waters (maybe this could be an Easter egg to the list of signatures in the visitor’s book that Tabby and Imogen sawduring their trip to Rosewood) and a note saying “silence kills.” Mortified by this, Sydney has a momentary flashback to 1999 when Angela told her a secret that she and her friends chose to ignore.
In an attempt to find out who Imogen’s rapist is, Noa asks Marjorie (Elena Goode) if she can help run DNA tests with the blood collected from the drive. Noa’s mother agrees to contact a close friend who could perform these tests with discretion. Yet, when Noa asks Shawn (Alex Aiono) to convince his football teammates to donate, he says that it wouldn’t be possible due to the fact that many of them take substances to keep them energized before games. This even leads the girls to collect items from the boys' locker room as a way to obtain the evidence that they need.
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As we know from previous episodes, Tabby plans to use her school film project as a means of coming to terms with her own traumatic encounter. However, Mr. Smithee (Jeffrey Bean) isn’t very receptive to that idea and asks her to have her mother sign a form stating that she would be ok if her daughter brings up this topic in an assignment. Sydney ends up agreeing to support Tabby’s project after the liar told her mother that she was inspired by Angela’s rape story, not her own. Diving back to the blood drive plan, Imogen opens up with Kelly (Mallory Betchel) about the origin of her pregnancy and convinces her to collect blood drops from the boys in school for the DNA tests. That is enough to give the girls the opportunity to make sure that everything goes according to plan.
After Faran previously found out that she needed physiotherapy to heal her back before returning to the ballet production ofGiselle, she is committed to working hard to get better. Yet, things don’t go exactly the way she anticipates when her ballet instructor says that she will push back the performance to the following year. Since she won’t be able to go back to dance practice anytime soon, Faran agrees to go on a date with Henry (Ben Cook) on Thanksgiving instead. Another character that encountered a shocking revelation in one oflast week’s episodeswas Mouse. After she began to investigate her kidnapping incident as a kid, the liar finds out that the man who almost took her away from her moms was in fact her biological father. In an urge to meet him, she looks over the file cabinets and finds his name on her birth certificate. Later in this episode, she even dresses up as a Girl Scout and pays him a visit. However, Mouse’s father tells her in no uncertain terms to leave him alone.
In the midst of all this drama, the mothers are afraid that their daughters might be too interested in Angela’s death. Given that Imogen seems to be the leader, the mothers agree that Sidney should keep an eye out on her. When Imogen and Tabby discuss the possibility of Rose Waters, Angela’s mother, having returned to Millwood once the asylum shut down, Sidney listens to their conversation but keeps quiet. Later on, the mother continues to look for more details in her daughter’s room, only to discover that Tabby was keeping video recordings of the boys' locker room on her computer. That sparks an argument between them, in which the two get to the conclusion that they never have an honest conversation about anything, proving A’s point that “silence kills”. When Tyler’s father confronts Tabby about his son’s disappearance, Sidney approaches the liar about whether Tyler did something to her. Although Tabby knows it wasn’t Tyler, she finally opens up to her mom about the bonfire party during their Thanksgiving dinner.
Imogen decides to visit Angela’s house and look for the deceased girl’s mother — yet, what she finds instead are totally destroyed rooms and A’s mask. Before she manages to leave the place, she is chased by Crazy Joe with a pocket knife in his hand (a signature tool that viewers saw “A” using in some of the killings). Despite this terrifying situation, the liars decide to revisit Crazy Joe in the hopes of threatening him to tell them all that he knows, but they arrive too late. He has already killed himself and left Davie’s yearbook next to his body as the last clue that he could contribute to their investigation — or so it appears.
Now that one of the suspects is no longer alive, there are other people that could be underneath A’s grotesque mask. After all, as Tabby learned from all the horror films that she’s ever watched, the killer is never that obvious. What we also know from all the episodes so far is that each character has their own secrets, so anyone could’ve lied up until now. In Episode 8, specifically, we not only discover that Shawn lied to Noa about not using drugs for sports, but we also heard a weird request from Kelly to be called Karen. These and other suspicious behaviors that we’ve seen thus far are all subject to consideration when it comes to unearthing the real identity of “A”. We’ll find out more in the final two episodes of Season 1!
