by Taylor Fernandez ’14

The much anticipated season 3 of “Pretty Little Liars” airs this January on ABC Family, but this past Halloween, a special one-hour event gave the audience a story before the story; a look at the pretty little liars before they got their title, before the drama, before ‘A.’

Let me explain. The four ‘pretty little liars,’ Hanna, Emily, Spencer and Aria, were once just a regular group of best friends, along with a girl named Alison. Mysteriously, Alison was murdered, but no one knows any details. The four girls were left without their ‘queen bee,’ but soon after her death, they began to receive texts, emails, letters, notes, anything you could possibly think of, all signed with a single letter, A. These notes scared the girls, because they revealed secrets that only Alison would know, and that could put their lives in danger.

In the one-hour special, the episode starts with Alison telling a Halloween story. Here, the audience clearly sees that the episode isn’t an ordinary episode; it’s a prequel to the series that explains exactly how ‘A’ started and how the girls came to be best friends. The majority of the episode portrays who Alison was and, towards the end, the mystery of A. From the previous seasons, viewers know that ‘A’ appears in the girls’ lives without them knowing, sometimes leaving notes on their house windows, and other times in their cars. At the end of the prequel when Alison and the girls are at a Halloween party, Alison receives a text that reads, “Dying to know who I am? You’ll find out. –A.” And from here, the mystery begins.

As a long-time fan of “Pretty Little Liars,” I personally found the special episode extremely important to the series, because it gave the story on how all of these strange occurrences and drama-filled events began to happen. The episode not only showed us Alison, who is important to the plot line, but we see that she too got messages from ‘A.’

The upcoming season premiers this January and previews of the first episode have been scattered around on the show’s website. Although the Halloween special didn’t give much information about the new season, it did pose an intriguing question: Did ‘A’ kill Alison? I guess we’ll find out.