Pretty Little Liars started off with one missing blonde teenager, and now, at the beginning of its sixth season, the show has three missing blonde teenagers: Alison DiLaurentis, who is back in action; Bethany Young, who was in the grave where Ali was buried alive; and Sara Harvey, who went missing the same Labor Day weekend as Alison. The Season 6 premiere of Pretty Little Liars revealed that Sara Harvey was in the dollhouse too, totally unbeknownst to the Liars. But how long was Sara in Charles’ bunker before the Liars made their escape and a police officer found her?
To paraphrase Cher Horowitz, here’s the 411 on Sara Harvey. Pretty Little Liars fans first met her (or the idea of her) in Season 4, just after the girls learned that Alison was actually still alive and kicking. Hanna (who yes, surprisingly, can use a computer) did a bit of Internet research and found that Sara was from a few towns over and went missing on pretty much the same day as Alison. The Liars met Sara’s friends, who made her seem very much like Alison: A popular mean girl. Sara’s friends, who all have popular girl names I won’t even bother to reveal here, mentioned that Sara is presumed dead, but her body has never been found. Ding, ding, ding. She’s not the body in Ali’s old grave (that was Bethany), but something else is totes going on here.
Fast forward through a few red herrings and to today’s current events. The Sara Harvey in the dollhouse seems very different than the one her friends described. In the dollhouse she is skittish, panicky, and quiet as a mouse. But I guess I would be, too, if I were taken away from my friends and family and held captive for over three years, seemingly for no reason. Yes, three years. If Sara went missing the same weekend as Alison, then she's been gone for about three years, and based on the huge amount of marks on the wall of her cell, it's very likely that she's been in the dollhouse that whole time. And let's not forget that Sara didn’t even know Ali, so she was held against her will with no idea why. Dark stuff, Charles.
So why did Charles take Sara? Honestly, I think it was a practice run for kidnapping/framing/getting revenge on Alison. Sara and Ali are very similar, both in personality and physicality — Charles even dresses Sara in the ruffled yellow shirt that Ali was wearing the night she went missing. Sara is personified as a mean girl, and Charles, who seems to hate his likely sister Alison, may have wanted to punish another mean girl. But it also could've been the exact opposite. Maybe Charles put Ali on so high a pedestal that he wanted to create a whole army of Alisons: pretty blondes with yellow shirts and bad attitudes.
In Tuesday's new episode, Sara and the Liars are now out of the dollhouse and recuperating in the hospital, and I hope that Sara remembers enough about her time spent in Charles’ lair to explain it all to the police (and the audience). Being held captive for that long, she could have blocked out the atrocities she saw, or she could have Stockholm syndrome and feel badly for Charles. Either way, I just hope we find out how Sara ended up in the dollhouse in the first place and what happened once she was inside.
For more PLL, check out Bustle's podcast, "Taking This One To The Grave," below.
Images: Eric McCandless/ABC Family; Giphy
