Beyond Selidor

Apparently the Caleb-centric spin-off was to do with that town he went to for a while that had ghosts; they just went for a fully supernatural premise there. I like things like that in general, but in the context of PLL I always found those episodes a bit odd and so the series didn't draw me.

To me it really made sense for it to be one of their fathers - they seemed so hypocritical, and you're absolutely right about why it would've made such sense thematically. I thought the whole reveal with Ezra was great, but it was disappointing that ultimately the show didn't take the questions it raised about the relationship to their logical conclusion: instead, it felt like we were meant to think it was okay because Aria's so mature or something, but she's a kid who's been forced to grow up fast because she's being stalked and manipulated.

There was a lot going on there about the transition from childhood to adulthood generally. The picture aspirational teen shows from the US paint of the adolescence is often of freedom that feels quasi-adult: they drive young over there, the casting (Alison excepted; the production team didn't realise how young Sasha Pieterse was at first) tends to be of people who are not in their teens, I think partly because of child labour laws, and despite plot points around financial trouble, the PLL girls seemed to have the clothing budgets of adults with freedom to spend money how they wanted. So it kind of plays into the idea that they're little adults who are only being thwarted by A and by their parents' rules.

I think in a lot of ways the fact it riffed so much on traditions (film noir, the femme fatale) with very gendered dynamics imposed limits (or rather, they didn't let it transcend those limits often enough), but they could've so easily NOT made it transphobic. There were so many plausible options for who could've been A, and why.

On a less serious note, I also think it was a bit of a mistake to do the five-years-later thing: the girls going off to uni (finally getting out of bloody Rosewood!) felt like a really fitting end. Naturally people want to know what happened to them, but it felt like something best left to fanfic.