Pretty Little Liars Review: Tick-Tock Bitches (Season 7 Episode 1)

Suddenly, the second half of Season 6 seems irrelevant. Pretty Little Liars starts off its seventh year with a kidnapping, a deadline, and a possible confession.

Let’s start with the opening scene. Emily, Aria, and Spencer are digging a grave. Emily is crying and Spencer is doggedly digging.

The whole sequence is shocking, especially when Spencer says:

SPENCER: There is no other way, Emily. It was a well thought out plan, when it ends up like this its called first-degree murder.

As far as opening scenes go, it’s jarring, and I expected this episode to end with another body. It seems like they were talking about Hanna, but they are careful not to mention a name.

We are only one day into a four-day window. If Pretty Little Liars keeps this pace up, there are sure to be more than a few twists and turns along the way.

After spending the second half of last season chasing down Sarah Harvey, the liars are finally making progress on finding Charlotte’s real killer.

All it took was Hanna getting kidnapped through a hole in the floor!

Fortunately, Hanna is fine for the moment, and the series seems to be getting back to its usual tricks. (Given the opening scene, we’re not putting her in the “safe” column just yet.)

Packing in an action filled moral dilemma that goes right up there with Hanna’s Dad’s wedding, the bridal fashion show, and prom, “Tick-Tock Bitches” delivers a fast-paced episode.

Let’s start with the big news from the finale. The big twin reveal in the “Hush, Hush…Sweet Liars” reintroduced Andrea Parker to the cast as Jessica DiLaurentis’ twin and Ali’s aunt.

We expected her to be in hiding for at least a few episodes, but Mary comes right out in the open, reporting a break-in at The Lost Woods Resort.

This is probably a smart move since the Liars would immediately focus all of their attention on finding her. That saves us a few episodes worth of facepalming.

Now the question is, can we trust Mary Drake? It sounds like she and Eliot are back in town to make the DiLaurentis family pay.

The fact that she’s already come out into the open and she’s the one Hanna runs into when she gets out of her cell could mean things aren’t as they seem or that Mary Drake is playing the long game.

Time will tell regarding Mary Drake. Eliot, on the other hand, isn’t winning any popularity contests. We’ve had suspicions since he and Ali had that shotgun wedding last season, but this ups our disdain to a whole other level.

The Liars realize Alison could have killed Charlotte and they have to decide whether or not to offer her up to the wolves.

Oh, and don’t forget that Alison entered a psychiatric hospital because she thought she was seeing her mother and Detective Wilden’s ghosts.

This plotline seems like it’s ripped straight out of Nellie Bly’s most famous article “Behind Asylum Bars.” Not only has Alison been committed to a psychiatric institute, voluntarily, but her husband is drugging her.

From what they show of Ali this episode, she is helpless, drugged and because she’s in a mental hospital no one believes that she’s sane, let alone that one of the doctors might be causing her psychosis.

Add to that Eliot’s monologue at the end, and you have a recipe for a creepy situation.

The premiere only skims the surface of a new can of worms that last season’s finale opened up and we’re looking forward to seeing what Mary Drake and Eliot do, but someone please get Alison out of that hospital.

What did you think of this episode of Pretty Little Liars? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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Pretty Little Liars airs Tuesdays at 8/7c on Freeform.

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