A Plot Hole as Big as the Ritz

a rantifesto

There are two types of people who like magic tricks: those who don’t want to know how it’s done and those who desperately do. A good puzzle box story often has the chance to fulfill both desires. It keeps you in suspense for most of the run time on how the tricks are pulled off, then gives you a big reveal at the end. If it’s done right, your viewer leaves the story satisfied and stunned that all the loose threads, all the sleight of hand, have really come to something in the end. But if it’s done wrong, as it often is, it deflates the whole story. So why do so many shows do it wrong?

I stumbled across a video series recently that recaps and storyboards the entire series Pretty Little Liars. PLL (as it is known amongst the die-hard fans) is one of my favorite insane teen soap operas. PLL ran for 160 episodes on ABC Family (now Freeform) from 2010 to 2017. It is (roughly) the story of a group of five high school friends whose leader, Alison, disappears about a year before the events of the first episode. In that episode, her body is found and the remaining girls begin receiving texts from someone calling themselves “A,” who knows all their secrets and generally makes their lives a living hell for no discernible reason. The identity of “A,” along with what happened to Alison, form the two main mysteries of the series. PLL was not always exactly good television, but it was always iconic television. It once gave the girls a clue by having a dead lady’s parrot hum the tones of a phone number. As a puzzle box show, it didn’t just constantly bite off more than it could chew, it stuffed everything it could find into its giant narrative maw and spat out whatever couldn’t fit. It was a really fun show to watch, but I can say with absolute certainty that not a single human involved in the creation of that show knew who “A” was for most of the show’s run. I’m not even sure the writers knew whether Alison was really dead or not until halfway through the show. Like Gossip Girl before it, PLL decided to just jump off that bridge when it came to it.

That Youtube series is obsessively excellent. It traces every major storyline and character and points out each plot hole in the series as it goes along, taking the show’s creator, I. Marlene King, to task (a frequent utterance on the part of the Youtuber, Mike Messineo, is “Marlene, you are not seeing heaven”). Now, it may seem petty of me to pick on a teen soap opera like PLL or Gossip Girl for a lack of forward-planning. But this is a trend I have continued to see pop up in shows on major networks and I would like to use my minuscule amount of power to stop it in its tracks. My dictum is simply this: you don’t have to show us how the magic trick is done, but you have to know how it is done. Before you write a line of dialogue in your murder mystery, you need to know who done it. If you have a secret blackmailer who is hiding their identity, you need to know who that person is even if the audience won’t learn their identity until 160 hours of television have passed.

As I said, I see this happening more and more. The new NBC thriller Endgame indulges in this narrative free-for-all in its pilot episode. The main character, Elena (Morena Baccarin) spends the whole episode in custody being interrogated by various high-ranking U.S. government officials because she’s the head of a vast sophisticated criminal organization. While in custody she orchestrates a heist on 7 banks, puts a note in one of the interrogator’s pockets (despite never getting near him), and has access to detailed personal information about everyone in the room. She does all this while lounging in her chair garbed in a royal blue satin gown and never breaks a mental sweat. Wow! How did she do all that!? We don’t know and I highly doubt the writers have the foggiest idea either. Was I entertained? Sure! Morena Baccarin is an entertaining actress to watch. She gave every line reading like a queen with a naughty glimmer in her eye. She knows she’s the smartest person in the room and that she’s going to pull all this off, leaving several U.S. cabinet members in her dust. Every time the flabbergasted officials get a call letting them know she’s done something else impressive and insane she grins that same grin your uncle had when he pulled the quarter out of your ear at your eighth birthday party. Ta da! It’s magic.

But there is no magic in television. Even in stories that have magic in them, you need to establish rules everyone in the world abides by. These narrative rules are like the laws of physics; without them, we’re just spinning around in a black hole of nonsense in which anything can happen because the writers decide they want it to. Pretty Little Liars begins with its feet on the ground: the first two seasons have a clear outline and are fully aware of who the secret villain is, but it indulges in narrative weightlessness more and more as the series progresses. At one point, the girls are locked into an underground bunker in rooms that have been constructed to look exactly like their rooms at home, being forced to torture each other with electric shocks. Don’t they have like math class to go to? At one point a minor character falls down an elevator shaft and emerges a few episodes later totally fine? At one point one of the girls’ moms finds out the girl had a brief affair with her sister’s boyfriend when she was 14 and he was 23 and she is mad at the girl and not at him at all and it is never addressed!

So do plot holes really matter? I clearly come down on one side in this debate (that maybe I am only having with myself). I think a lot about the willing suspension of disbelief when I’m writing about stories. Asking your audience to enter into the world of your story and believe what you are telling them is a big ask. I think writers and showrunners owe it to their audience to know what’s going to happen, to keep track of their narrative threads, and ultimately to provide us with a sense of an ending. We don’t have to like who “A” or Gossip Girl are, but the answers you provide us should be reasonable ones. If they aren’t, it erodes people’s ability to immerse themselves in other stories. I want everyone to have two feet firmly in a story, not hovering on the edges wondering if they should spend 160 hours trying to figure out who this crazy blackmailer is because maybe the answer is going to ultimately be totally nonsensical! Do better!

Here endeth the rant.