When Did Plot Twists Become a Requirement?

Pretty Little Liars spent seven seasons trying to stay one step ahead of its audience. Somewhere along the way, it demonstrated why being unpredictable and telling a satisfying story are not the same thing.

I love a good plot twist.

I love that tiny moment when a story gives you a piece of information and suddenly everything that came before it rearranges itself in your head. The conversation that seemed insignificant isn’t insignificant anymore. The strange look somebody gave another character three chapters ago suddenly makes sense. You realise the answer was sitting in front of you the entire time and somehow you still missed it.

That’s the good stuff.

What I don’t particularly enjoy is reaching the end of a story, discovering the big secret and thinking:

Well, yes. I suppose I didn’t predict that.

Mostly because there was absolutely no way I could have predicted it.

Somewhere along the way, unpredictability seems to have become synonymous with clever writing. If the audience works something out before the reveal, the writer has failed. If Reddit has correctly identified the murderer by episode six, apparently somebody needs to be rewritten into the murderer by episode eight.

And if you want to see where that philosophy can lead, I would like to introduce Exhibit A:

Pretty Little Liars.

The Liars at Rosewood High, before the mystery became more complicated than the town could contain.

Or, as I occasionally think of it, what happens when a television series develops an adversarial relationship with its own audience.

When unpredictability becomes the goal

To be fair to Pretty Little Liars, mystery was built into its DNA. The entire pleasure of watching it involved theorising. Who is A? Who killed Alison? Who knows what? Who is lying? Why is that person standing ominously in the background? Why does everybody in Rosewood apparently have the disposable income required to maintain seventeen secret identities?

It was ridiculous.

It was wonderful.

And, particularly in its earlier seasons, it understood something important about mystery: the audience wants to participate.

We weren’t simply waiting for an answer. We were collecting clues.

That’s what makes a mystery satisfying. The writer knows something the audience doesn’t, but we’re playing with the same deck of cards. You can hide a card. Distract us with another one. Let us confidently assemble them in completely the wrong order.

But the card eventually revealed has to have been in the deck.

That’s where the obsession with the plot twist can become a problem.

As Pretty Little Liars continued, its audience became extremely good at watching Pretty Little Liars. Fans analysed costumes, dialogue, timelines, background objects and character behaviour. Entire communities formed around theories about A’s identity.

Which should have been a sign that the mystery was working.

Instead, the possibility of viewers correctly predicting an answer increasingly seemed to be treated as something the story needed to defeat.

And this is where I think writers sometimes misunderstand what a prediction actually means.

Predictable doesn’t mean badly written

If your audience figures out your twist, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve written a bad twist.

It might mean you’ve written a very good one.

You planted evidence.

They noticed it.

Congratulations. Your foreshadowing works.

Obviously, you don’t want every reader correctly identifying your killer on page twelve. But there’s a difference between an answer being obvious and an answer being possible to deduce.

A satisfying reveal often creates two reactions at exactly the same time:

I didn’t see that coming.

And:

Of course.

The second one matters more than we give it credit for.

Because without it, all you’ve really achieved is surprise.

And surprise is easy.

I could end this article by revealing that I am A.

You didn’t predict that.

What an extraordinary plot twist.

Unfortunately, it makes absolutely no sense.

That distinction became painfully clear with some of Pretty Little Liars’ later reveals.

The series became famous for red herrings, secret relatives, hidden identities, characters who weren’t who we thought they were and explanations that sometimes seemed less interested in resolving what we’d watched than in producing one final gasp.

The most infamous example is probably Alex Drake.

After seven seasons, we discover that Spencer Hastings has an identical British twin who has existed off-screen for essentially the entire story and is responsible for the final A-game.

Could you have predicted Alex Drake?

Probably not.

And that’s precisely the problem.

There are late clues once the story begins preparing for the reveal, but the central piece of information required to solve the mystery — Spencer has an identical twin — is information the audience simply doesn’t possess for most of the series.

So when Alex turns around and reveals herself, the reaction isn’t necessarily Oh my God, how did I miss that?

It’s more:

Oh.

She has a twin now.

The final A.D. reveal gave us Spencer’s previously unseen twin, Alex Drake—a twist no amount of careful theorising could reasonably have solved.

And those are very different pleasures.

The frustrating thing is that Pretty Little Liars already had everything it needed to create compelling reveals without constantly escalating them. Rosewood was populated by characters with secrets, complicated relationships, resentment, obsession and genuine reasons to hurt one another. The writers had built an enormous web.

But once the primary objective becomes the audience must not guess, every plausible answer becomes dangerous.

The more evidence points towards somebody, the less attractive that person becomes as the reveal because viewers might have noticed.

So you add another red herring.

Then another secret.

Then another relative.

Then somebody comes back from the dead.

Then somebody has a twin.

Eventually you’re no longer asking, What answer best completes this story?

You’re asking, What answer haven’t they thought of yet?

Those questions produce very different writing.

And this isn’t exclusively a Pretty Little Liars problem. It’s a temptation built into contemporary storytelling, particularly now that writers can watch audiences solve their mysteries in real time.

Readers and viewers talk to each other. We have Reddit threads, TikTok theories, YouTube breakdowns and people willing to freeze-frame a three-second shot and increase the brightness until they’ve identified the manufacturer of a suspicious lampshade.

Give millions of people enough clues and somebody is going to work it out.

That isn’t failure.

In fact, changing a well-constructed ending solely because somebody guessed it risks punishing the rest of the audience for the crime of one person paying attention.

What makes a good plot twist?

A plot twist isn’t valuable because nobody predicted it.

It’s valuable because after we know it, the story becomes better.

That’s the test I find much more interesting.

Go back to the beginning.

Does knowing the truth change how you understand earlier scenes?

Do apparently insignificant details acquire meaning?

Does a character’s behaviour make more sense?

Can you see where the writer told you the truth while persuading you to look somewhere else?

That’s why the best twists make you want to experience the story again.

The surprise is temporary.

The recontextualisation lasts.

Sometimes inevitability is better than surprise

And sometimes a story doesn’t need to surprise us at all.

There is enormous pleasure in inevitability.

Sometimes we know exactly where a character is heading and the tension comes from watching them continue towards it anyway. Sometimes the audience understands the truth before the protagonist does. Sometimes we’ve correctly identified the villain and the interesting question becomes whether the characters will realise before it’s too late.

Predictability isn’t automatically the enemy of good storytelling any more than surprise is automatically evidence of it.

The real enemy is an ending that hasn’t been earned.

Perhaps that’s the lesson I’d steal from Pretty Little Liars.

Not don’t write plot twists. Please write them. Lie to me. Distract me. Put the answer directly in front of my face and make me feel slightly stupid when I finally see it.

Just don’t become so frightened of me guessing your answer that you stop giving me the information required to guess at all.

Because if I work it out?

Fine.

Maybe I’ll feel clever.

Maybe I’ll spend the rest of the story desperately hoping I’m wrong.

Maybe the pleasure will come from discovering exactly how the pieces fit together.

But when the reveal finally arrives, I want to look backwards and see the story differently.

I don’t just want to be shocked.

I want to realise you were telling me all along.