Pretty Little Liars' Big A reveal may not have actually unmasked A, but it still had huge ramifications on the series. While future episodes of PLL will undoubtedly be influenced by A being identified as Charles, even past seasons have been affected. Now when you re-watch an episode, you're more likely than ever to pick up on clues you previously overlooked, and that's exactly what happened to me. While watching an old Season 2 episode, I noticed a kind of huge Pretty Little Liars clue about Charles. How huge? Well, it just might prove that Charles was at the DiLaurentis house the night Alison went missing.
As is usually the case when there's nothing new on TV, last weekend I sat down to watch an old PLL episode, settling on "The Devil You Know." In addition to featuring the Haleb reunion (my reason for choosing this particular ep, obvs), the fifth episode of Season 2 shows Ian's funeral. In case you've forgotten his storyline in the wake of everything that followed it, after surviving being pushed from a church bell tower and disappearing, Ian supposedly killed himself, and was found with a note confessing to Alison's murder. By the end of the episode, the Liars would realize that Ian didn't really kill Alison (duh), but it's not their opinion that matters at this point — it's Jason's.
At the end of the funeral, Aria approaches Jason, who is sitting on a nearby bench. During their conversation, Jason explains how he relieved he felt after learning of Ian's "confession," because he had always wondered if he killed Alison himself. Jason reveals to Aria that he has no memory of the night Ali was killed (or, as we now know, the night she was attacked and then ran away), and woke up with a note in his pocket that made him suspect himself. This note, shown below, is what holds the key to Charles, placing him at the scene on that fateful night.
As Aria read the note, I immediately rewinded the episode, stopping to examine it. Something about it looked so familiar, but what? Suddenly, it hit me. Recently, Tumblr user hopelessly-lost-in-Rosewood posted a collection of handwritten A notes, including the one above, pointing out that often, the Ts appear to be capitalized, even if they are in the middle of a word. Notice anything suspicious about the note Jason found now?
In addition to the large T, the rest of the handwriting matches the A notes collected by hopelessly-lost-in-Rosewood. Check out the samples below.
Now, the Liars have received handwritten notes from A that have different handwriting, but this specific style seems to belong to Charles himself, so the others were likely written by various A minions. How do I know it's not the other way around? The note that made hopelessly-lost-in-Rosewood notice the T trend in the first place was the one that accompanied Mona's gas mask in the dollhouse during the Season 5 finale, aka the #BigAReveal. If Charles wrote the note in the dollhouse, which read "because you're my favorite" and was signed "-A," he also wrote the other notes with this handwriting. That includes the one left in Jason's pocket, while he was in his house, on the night Alison was attacked and Bethany Young was murdered in the backyard.
While hopelessly-lost-in-Rosewood used all of this to question whether the Ts could stand for Toby, I think Jason's note is the most important part of this handwriting. Those five words place Charles at the scene of a night that will go down in history in the world of Pretty Little Liars. It could mean so many things. Charles could have attacked Ali or killed Bethany, or both, and left the note just to hurt Jason and make him think he killed his own sister. Jason could have actually attacked Ali or killed Bethany, or both, and Charles wanted to make sure he knew.
Because, as this seemingly simple clue reveals, Mona may have been the first A, but Charles has been on the edges of Pretty Little Liars, and the girls' lives, from the very beginning.
Images: ABC Family (4)
