Everything I have written since then has been informed by the scorn those men hurled at me. Storytellers obtuse enough to feed us poison and cruel enough to berate us when we protest. Straight men telling silly gay women who is in charge of our stories and that we should be quiet and respect what they decide we deserve. It is in my mind, always, the things those men said to me. And it took me a long, long, long time before I was willing to open myself up to another story. I didn’t want to do it, actually. I fought against it with my whole self, even though stories are the thing that make us human. If you re-read my first Pretty Little Liars recaps, you’ll see it. The smugness, the sarcasm, the cheap and lazy snark I wove around everything I wrote, like armor. Protecting me, but protecting you too, because I led us to the place where we were ambushed.
And in wandered Paige McCullers. You remember her in the beginning, right, with that blue sweater and those murder-bangs, scowling and growling and her whole life’s purpose was to be the anchor on the Sharks swim team. I mean, on the surface, that was her whole life’s purpose, but what she realized later on, what we all realized later on, is that she wanted to torture Emily because the fact of Emily was torturing her. Paige was a lesbian: closeted (deeply), self-hating (fully), in love with Emily Fields (wholly). Paige’s identity was Swimming and she pushed that propaganda about herself as hard as an axe because it meant no one (including herself) would have a reason to start questioning other things about who she was. But if Emily was better at swimming, and thriving as an out gay person, and showing up day after day with that hair and that face and those shoulders, making Paige want to kiss, kiss, kiss her — well, what was not to hate? The simple existence of Emily was destroying Paige’s fragile, terrifying world!
Pretty Little Liars has always been about Alison, first, even when she was dead. And then about the myriad ways the Liars orbit Alison. And after that, way after that, Pretty Little Liars is about the way way the Liars’ lovers orbit them. Alison as the sun, the Liars as the planets, and the Paiges and Tobys and Calebs as the planets’ little moons. And that’s all Paige was to me at first, a little moon, futzing with Emily’s tide in an inconsequential way, in terms of the universe.
I can’t pinpoint when it started to matter to me. I want to say when she came out (“If I say it out loud — if I say ‘I’m gay’ — the whole world is gonna change”), but I think it was before that, actually, back when she rode her bike through a hurricane at like 2:00 am to unleash a frantic, crazy apology all over Emily on her front porch for shoving her head underwater. The moment it became obvious that the person Paige actually hated was herself. I think that was the game-changer. I remember watching that and thinking, “Whoa. What if they tell the story of that girl? What if they really tell that story?”
I didn’t believe they would. I didn’t believe they would start down the road of that story or keep going down the road when they encountered all the weeds and underbrush, and no matter how much I wanted to trust these writers, I didn’t see how they could finish that story in a way that wouldn’t break my heart.
But they did and they did — and my heart was safe!
Over the course of five seasons, Paige learned to dance in the grey between the Liars and these male heartthrobs that make ABC Family’s world turn, between femininity and masculinity, between what is Right and what is Wrong, between fear and courage, between shame and pride, between despair and the burning blue glory of hope. The moons exist for their planets. The love interests on this show exist to love the Liars. Only that. But Paige is different because we got to see the part where she had a whole world of struggle beyond Emily. She fucked up. She fell down. She smashed herself against the rocks of the things she hated and against the rocks of the things she loved.
Paige was an object of scorn when she arrived on this show. Scorn from Emily, scorn from the Liars, even scorn from Ali, who, it turns out, is the one who hated her first and most of all. The instiller of her deepest fears. Pretty Little Liars plays with some dark themes, and I’m not talking about murder. I’m not talking about the things that go bump in the night. I’m talking about the gross, hard, awful things this world does to women, the things most of us can’t even figure out how to fight because what kind of damage does a sword do to the shadows? And it has been Paige who has embodied so many of those struggles. She has felt shame so deep that she almost killed herself, fear of being terrorized so intense that it emotionally paralyzed her. She has been objectified, manipulated, surveilled, and forced to repeatedly make decisions that any male character would get a pass on but for which she has always been villainized.
When she got on that plane, I paused the TV and sobbed into my hands for I don’t even know how long. Because it was heartbreaking, yeah. Because I’m going to miss the way Paige made me feel known in my bones. But mostly I sobbed because they did it. They told the story. They hit the high notes and they hit the low notes and they refused to back away from the grey. Paige crawled through the mire on her knees, repenting, until she realized the only thing she had to do was stand up and love who she loved. Within the show’s narrative world and outside in the show’s fandoms, Paige could have easily been Pretty Little Liars‘ biggest victim, but she became Pretty Little Liars‘ most triumphant hero. She let herself love and be loved by Emily — but so much better even than that: the girl who whirled onto our screens like a tornado of self-hate five years ago left because she learned to love herself.
She said, “I can’t swim anymore.” She said, “Emily, I can’t be around you.” She said, “I absolutely cannot come out.”
But she did come out. And she let herself be around (and under and on top of and all over) Emily. And she left, on her own terms, to swim again, on a scholarship at one of the most prestigious universities in the country. The message the world projects at us from every platform at all times always is that nothing we do as women matters, because we will always be victims, because someone else will always being making our decisions for us. That is the theme Pretty Little Liars explores more than anything, and that is the game Paige McCullers won. She fought the monster that made her a monster, and she, alone, decided to stop punching at the echos and screaming at the wind.
In some ways, that episode I keep talking about, the one with the bike and the rain, is a microcosm of Pretty Little Liars‘ storytelling philosophy. Paige took a tumble on her bike when she was riding home in those gale force winds that night and she couldn’t swim the next day, remember? But she came to the swim meet anyway to cheer on Emily. The focus was Emily. Paige — like Toby and like Caleb — was always meant for the bleachers. Standing on her tip-toes in the stands, for Emily. I know it’s hard not to want more, more, more. I mean, and I do. I do want more. But I also understand that she’s a little moon. My favorite moon. The anchor of my heart.
Paige leaving, at least for a time, has always been inevitable, and I don’t mind telling you the how of it has always terrified me. My main worry, of course, was that she was going to get murdered. And then I thought she might just get her heart broken by Emily and limp off into the sunset, never to be seen again. I had so many conversations in the off-season — long, rambling, sometimes drunken conversations with my favorite story processors — about how I knew the show had other stories it needed to tell, but I couldn’t bear the thought of Paige just being shoved aside. This ending is more than I dared to hope for. Her choice, in her time, toward her own new horizon, with Emily begging her not to go.
In a minute, the Liars are going to agree that Paige McCullers is the person they aspire to be. Paige McCullers. Go back and watch “Je Suis Une Amie” and let that sink in.
I want to keep writing about Paige because I don’t want her to be gone — but I love how Joseph Dougherty and Lijah Barasz let her go (and it was Shay Mitchell and Lindsey Shaw‘s best scene on record; it is known), and so I’ll finish with The Night Circus and a heart full to bursting with gratitude and awe:
When the battles are fought and won and lost, when the pirates find their treasures and the dragons eat their foes for breakfast with a nice cup of Lapsang souchong, someone needs to tell [their stories]. You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone’s soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows what they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift. Your sister may be able to see the future, but you yourself can shape it, boy. Do not forget it. There are many kinds of magic, after all.
The Liars sit on Spencer’s porch and wonder what it would be like to be Paige for a minute. To see the world beyond Rosewood, to run full-tilt toward life. Maybe they’ll do it one day, they say. Now that A is really gone. They’re getting ready to group hug when some fireworks go off in the distance. But not just regular-shaped fireworks. A-shaped fireworks. Spencer literally goes, “No. No. I refuse to accept that this is happening.”
Oh, but it is.
And Alison is in jail.
Everyone (except for Paige) is in bigger trouble than they ever have been in their whole entire lives.
By biggest, hugest thanks to Nicole (@PLLBigA) for all of her support and encouragement and also for these amazing screencaps. She’s like A, for real: She knows everything that’s going to happen to the Liars way before they do. Follow her on Twitter and see for yourself.
I didn’t have time to grab any #BooRadleyVanCullen tweets this week because this recap took me 100 hours to write, but I’ll be back to honoring you next week!
