‘Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin’ Episode 1 Recap: “Spirit Week”

When Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin was announced, I heard a common refrain: why? After all, its predecessor has only been off the air for five short years, and there’s certainly no shortage of new teen dramas for fans to sink their teeth into. But the IP gods must be satiated, and creators Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (Riverdale) and Lindsay Calhoon Bring (The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) have the good sense to fully lean into the horror that the original series flirted with but never quite fully embraced. This is slasher Pretty Little Liars, and rather than hinging on a friend’s disappearance, it centers on five girls whose mothers were somehow involved in the very public suicide of Angela Waters (Stranger Things’ Gabriella Pizzolo) 22 years earlier, during Gen Z’s favorite era: Y2K.

Original Sin moves the action away from the familiar town of Rosewood, to the new but not-so-distant blue-collar town of Millwood, Pennsylvania. After opening with the evening of Angela’s fateful demise, we jump forward to catch up with an adult Davie (Carly Pope), who cruelly brushed her so-called friend away minutes before her demise. Now, she lives in a spooky, graveyard-adjacent house with her daughter, soon-to-be teen mom Imogen (Bailee Madison). At the moment, they’re most concerned with the impending arrival of Karen (Mallory Bechtel), Imogen’s ex-best friend and the town’s resident mean girl. Convinced that Imogen made out with her boyfriend Greg some months before, Karen has just now decided to drop by and pick up her stuff.

But for the show’s purposes, how fitting that our new villain gets to bring Davie the all-important flier taped to their door: an exact replica of the invitation for that fateful New Year’s Eve party, with a brand-new massage scrawled on the back: “Gone but not forgotten. You can’t ignore the past forever. The countdown is on.”

Soon enough, Karen and Imogen’s spat is cut short when they hear water rushing down the hallway, straight from the bathroom. Opening the door in horror, they find Davie lying dead in a bloody bathtub, a scarlet A drawn onto the tile above her. Did she commit suicide out of fear or guilt over what happened to Angela? Or is the creepy masked figure that haunts the entire series involved in some way? We’ll have to wait and see, but just 10 minutes in, Original Sin has racked up a considerable body count.

But there’s no rest for the wicked, and just like that, the show jumps ahead another month to the start of a new school year. Imogen has since moved in with her friend Tabitha (Chandler Kinney) — aka Tabby — a budding filmmaker who happens to be the daughter of (gasp!) Sidney (Sharon Leal), the only girl who gave a moment’s compassion to poor Angela. Imogen has decided to re-enter high school society, prompting Sidney to shock the girls by reminiscing about her close bond with Davie — a fact that evidently never came up over the course of Imogen and Tabby’s own friendship. 

But before they get the chance to unpack that admission, it’s time for the girls to head to school. Along the way, they drop off the key to Imogen’s old house, which Sidney now has the unfortunate task of reselling. Here, we get the first of two explicit Halloween homages, as the masked figure —let’s call them A for now — watches them from inside the house, breathing so heavily I’m surprised they didn’t turn around.

But for now, Imogen and Tabby are forced to deal with another fresh horror: High school spirit week. As Karen terrorizes the student body with her bid for Spirit Queen, we get our first glimpses of the series’ other three Liars. There’s Noa (Maia Reficco), a track star who spent the summer in juvie on drug charges; Mouse (Malia Pyles), a shy computer whiz who seems more than a little intrigued by the school’s upcoming “Coming Out Day”; and Faran (Zaria), a star ballerina who’s been tapped to play the coveted role of the Black Swan, much to Karen’s dismay. At this point, how exactly these three’s moms factor into the Y2K mystery is truly anyone’s guess.

What does unite them is a Pretty Little Liars trademark: a series of threatening, anonymous texts. Imogen’s is most immediately alarming, prompting her to look out the classroom window and discover A staring at her from across the schoolyard before he vanishes once again, Michael Myers-style — although as Tabby would definitely point out, the crudely misshapen mask is much more Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Unfortunately for the other Liars, stalking teenage girls happens to be A’s extracurricular activity. Noa spots a shadow in the windows of an abandoned apartment while she does community service under the watchful eye of Karen’s sheriff dad. While putting in some evening rehearsal time, Faran spots A creeping through the halls, where they’re more than happy to slit a nosy janitor’s throat. And when Tabby’s creepy movie theater manager gives her a ride home from work, his attempts to come onto her are cut short by a roadside from our good friend A. If only they’d been around to deal with Aria and Ezra’s relationship during PLL’s run!

Another PLL parallel worth noting: Karen has an identical twin sister named Kelly, who briefly popped up as the school guidance counselor’s assistant but is introduced fully in a thoroughly uncomfortable family dinner scene. Fans of the original series will recall that the big bad wound up being a main character’s secret British twin, which was… a choice. Kudos to Original Sin for acknowledging the twin schtick right away, even if it only makes Karen seem more duplicitous.

The Liars certainly think so when each of them finds their day ruined by the aspiring Spirit Queen. After making a show of announcing her own bid for Spirit Queen the day before, Imogen and her campaign manager Tabby are blamed when Karen’s Spirit Queen posters are conveniently vandalized. Meanwhile, Noa is stunned when her guidance counselor finds traces of cannabis in her daily urine test, an error she instantly attributes to Kelly (never trust an identical twin!). Poor Mouse and Faran are deemed guilty by association — Karen finds a dead rat in her backpack mirroring her nickname for Mouse (“rodent”), and a razor in her ballet slipper that she attributes to Millwood High’s newest Black Swan.

So all five girls finally find themselves united in the most lenient detention known to man, where they ignore their masked stalker to bond over a much more accessible shared enemy: Karen, of course. And sure, these girls aren’t their mothers, but it’s easy to see the resemblance when the episode ends with a shot of Imogen devilishly grinning into the camera, Kubrick stare-style, as she announces her plan: “I think we should kill Karen Beastley.”

Abby Monteil is a New York-based writer. Her work has also appeared in The Daily Beast, Insider, Them, Thrillist, Elite Daily, and others.