Yes, Noel is the latest in the cast of Pretty Little Liars to buy the farm. In the first season Noel threw a girl downstairs and now in the seventh someone threw him downstairs, or at least “a piece of him”, as Horatio might say.
I started watching PLL after my girlfriend started watching it, and she started because her daughter was watching it. The show didn’t make much sense to me for a long time, since I couldn’t tell the girls apart and was missing about 50 hours of backstory, but somehow that didn’t matter. I finally figured out that Emily (or “Em”, as we like to call her) was the lesbian, that Spencer was the smart one (thanks mainly to the dimple in her chin), that Hannah was the shallow (but not really) bad girl who said lots of incorrect things to push the plot along (“Are you part Negro? Hey, we were all thinking it!”), while Aria was the creative one, as evidenced by the fact that she’s screwing her English teacher,1 but the show still didn’t make much sense. Plot lines were started and dropped more or less at random—like the school production of The Bad Seed, which I was looking forward to, and the creepy kid in the “Doll Hospital” store—but somehow I didn’t care. Whenever there was an “SOS” my heart rate went up.2 After all, a lot of time life doesn’t make much sense either!
It’s hard to know why some schlock TV is amusingly ridiculous, while others are just stupid—why I rarely missed an episode of Desperate Housewives and Revenge, but couldn’t stand Scandal, not to mention Hawaii 5-O. My all-time favorite TV show is Sex and the City and perhaps I’m simply partial to the four-babe format. I guess it’s an art form of a sort—how to cram a large number of disparate “moments”—funny, sad, sweet, “dark”, heartwarming, etc.—week after week in such a rigid frame, in a narrative that has a climax of sorts every week yet carries a continuing arc. If I knew how it’s done I guess I’d be rich.
Afterwords
At first I thought it was Spencer who swung the battle axe that took off Noel’s head, since she was the only PLL gal who hadn’t killed someone, but it turns out that Noel cut off his own head, which is hard to do without a guillotine. Early on, Em killed this black guy who was trying to kill her, while Aria killed this black chick who was hassling the girls (are we seeing a pattern here?),3 not really meaning to kill her, while Hannah just ran over this guy who married Alison, whom I haven’t even mentioned yet, and stole all her money.
Since I like to give actor’s credits, dead Noel was played by Brant Daugherty, Em is played by Shay Mitchell, Spencer is Troian Bellisario, Hannah is Ashley Benson, Aria is Lucy Hale, and Alison is Sasha Pieterse.
If you want to know a lot about the last four seasons of PLL, check out Jessica Goldstein’s detailed recaps for Vulture.
- This extended shout-out to statutory rape, which is still a crime even if the participants are not student and teacher, is treated in a remarkably casual matter in the show. Also hard to believe: that contemporary kids are so into forties noir that they will watch black and white movies and, probably, know who Gene Tierney is. Magnum, PI, co-produced by Troian’s dad, a show I did not like, often flaunted a self-consciously noir vibe. So maybe that’s where the kids get it. ↩︎
- I watched the show closely enough to notice that sometimes the text message read “SOS” and sometimes “S.O.S.” It would be funny if it was Spencer who sent the “S.O.S.” version, but I doubt if that’s the case. ↩︎
- At this writing, at least one, and possibly two, sympathetic black characters have also been killed. The show has a lot of “mixed race with white affect” characters, as a way to manage the diversity thing. Bellisario, though you wouldn’t guess it, nor is it part of the show, is officially part black and part Creole. Em’s parents, and she herself, are vaguely Hispanic, or at least not white, and Mitchell’s mother is a Filipina. ↩︎
