Based on everything we saw during Tuesday night's premiere, it's safe to say that Pretty Little Liars Season 7 is going to be the darkest this show has ever been thus far. It's also going to be chock-full of even more mysteries than usual, especially in regards to Jessica DiLaurentis' twin sister, Mary Drake. While a majority of the episode focused on the Liars' race against the clock in order to save Hanna, they also ended up unearthing some very interesting details about Mary Drake's past, involving the death of a child who died under her care while babysitting. In fact, it's the entire reason she ended up at Radley Sanitarium in the first place. But who was the child Mary Drake killed? I have a feeling that question is going to go unanswered for quite some time and may even eventually lead us to Charlotte's killer once and for all.
Here's what I'm thinking... let's say the story is true and Mary Drake did accidentally kill someone's child. I have a hard time buying that the parents (or perhaps even the child's siblings) would be able to get over that kind of loss. True, it stated that the parents never took action against her... but maybe that's because they wanted to deliver a form of revenge themselves. What if one of the child's family members decided to give Mary Drake a taste of her own medicine and killed Charlotte in retaliation? The hosts of Bustle's Pretty Little Liars podcast, Taking This One To The Grave, also have some thoughts on Mary Drake's past, which you can listen to below.
Could this be a member of the Hastings family? What about the Campbells? The Drakes and DiLaurentis' seem to have strong ties to both of these families, so it would make sense for them to somehow be involved. The Campbell Farm was even a very familiar place to Jason, Charlotte, and Alison, who we know were frequent visitors, so it's not as though they all weren't in close contact.
Then again, it's also possible that this story was completely fabricated and Mary Drake didn't actually kill anyone at all. I mean, for all we know someone really had it in for Mary and wanted her to get locked up in Radley, so they pinned this child's death on her. There's still so much about this character that we don't know, but it'd be naive to just take everything we hear about her at face value. There's definitely more to this story than meets the eye. Maybe the child was even hers and that's why she ended up in Radley — because of her grief.
The point is, though, that right now we have no clue as to what really happened. Who was this child? How did he or she come to meet such a fatal and tragic end? These are all questions the show will have to answer eventually, but in the meantime, we'll just have to unpack all the complicated layers of Mary Drake as best as we can.
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