How Wren is still Charles, why he’s A.D. Who ‘Charlotte’ really is and how almost every plothole is fixed:
Before I start this theory, please read my “Jason Killed Charlotte” theory and feel free to check out my other thoughts, theories and feelings I’ve had about Pretty Little Liars by clicking here.
I also updated my icon and header (mobile) for the end of the show we all love/hate.
*Disclaimer, 99% of this is my own theory, with a couple small details thrown in from other peoples posts that make sense to me.
THEORY; STARTING FROM THE BEGINNING OF CHARLES’ DOWNFALL:
Charles Drake is sent to Radley for giving his cousin Alison a bath in too hot water, almost burning her and drowning her. This was an accident but Kenneth DiLaurentis did not want his mentally insane sister in-law’s child living with his wife, himself and his two children. Charles is sent to Radley Sanitarium, where his Mother resides, or used to. (I can’t remember.) He slowly begins to grow up, missing who he believed was his Mother, Father and two siblings, Alison and Jason. He makes friends with some of the other children in the children’s ward.
Here he meets a young girl named Cecilia who was in Radley for brutally attacking and killing her twin sister with a knife over stealing her doll.
Cecilia became infatuated with Charles and fell ‘in love’ with him very quickly. He would tell her stories about his baby sister and younger brother. She would let him play with her dolls, even calling one of the blonde ones “Alison.”
Their (twin’s) parents were very hurt by their situation, their mother, maiden name Young, committed suicide and their father, Scott Montgomery quickly became suicidal himself, and started to lose his sanity.
There was Charles and Cecilia, and then Bethany showed up. Bethany and Charles became friends very quickly and Cecilia begins to get jealous. In the night, when it’s dark she grabs a knife, needle, scalple, something, when the nurses and doctors aren’t looking and hides it under her mattress. Then, when Bethany is sleeping her ‘friend’ and roommate Cecilia goes over to her bed and begins to cut and slice her face. This way, Charles can’t find her pretty, right? She makes sure to not get any blood on herself, wipes her prints from the blade and places the makeshift blade into Bethany’s hand as she is screaming and crying, Cecilia also begins to scream and cry, running back to her own bed. She tells the doctors she was sound asleep and she hears Bethany screaming and she rolls over to see Bethany harming herself. Nobody knows who to believe and Bethany and Cecilia have now switched rooms. (Bethany is now with Rhonda or Lelsi at this point.) Bethany is growing up and is traumatized with her face severely scarred. She has no idea what she is supposed to look like as a growing tween/teen.
But Charles still thinks she is beautiful and begins to spend more time with Bethany while she recovers, not taking sides against his two best friends. He still spends time with Cecilia but never the two at the same time, as they hate each other. Bethany hating Cecilia for what she did to her face, and Cecilia hating Bethany for ‘lying about her accident’ (stealing Charles from her) Charles and Bethany are in love and Cecilia has no idea. Until… (Wait for it.)
At the age of 16, Jessica comes back for Charles and helps him fake a suicide so he can get out. He gets a fake I.D., travels and leaves the Country. Going to the U.K., where his favorite Doctor and Father-Figure with rapidly approaching dementia was from.
Charles keeps in touch with Cecilia and Bethany in his journey across sea. He is unrecognizable to everyone except Cecilia, who gets out and goes to UPen under the name Cece Drake. Cece is a nickname from Cecilia and Drake is from Charles’ mother’s maiden name. She needed something to go by to try and live a new life.
Bethany on the other hand, is not doing too well. Her ex-boyfriend’s (ended on good terms, she knows he needed to get out) Mother is dating her Father and this upsets her. Cece had told Jessica that she was Charles’ girlfriend, and Bethany seemed crazy. Jessica liked Cece and wanted to protect her from her true identity getting out. Jessica believed that Cece’s mental illness had been ‘cured’ and she began taking care of her, even setting her up with her son.
Now, Charles had been coming around Rosewood for awhile watching his sister and her friends interact. He wasn’t sure how he would get back into their lives just yet, but he was having a good time observing.
(Wren, just to the left of Ali’s head. I took this screenshot from a youtube video, but someone had another picture where it’s clearly Wren.)
But before he can get his family back together, it’s Labor Day. Cece finds out that Charles has kept in touch with Bethany and is seeing her again. She lures Bethany out from Radley to meet her as “Alison.” Tells her she’s her boyfriends sister and she wants to meet her, that she will be wearing a yellow top (and a purple bracelet?) and she’s sending her one just like it. She talks to a college friend and is seen by Jason.
Bethany finds Cece in the top and excitedly tries to introduce herself as Charles’ girlfriend. But Cece turns around and reveals herself and Bethany screams (Spencer hears this) when she recognizes her former roommate and attacker. Cece hits Bethany and leaves her to suffer. This is when Melissa sees Bethany whose scarred face is covered by her blonde hair and she rolls her into an open makeshift grave from the construction of the Gazebo and fills it in. Cece confesses to Charles what she’s done and Charles is pissed. Cece runs off and as he finds ‘her’ again, he makes eye contact with his ‘Mother’, signalling for her to look away as he bashes the rock into ‘Cece’s’ skull. But when she falls, Charles sees this is his little sister Alison. He is distraught and leaves as Jessica buries Alison in another open plot due to construction.
Within the next year, Charles forgives himself for ‘killing’ Ali and decides to get revenge on Cece. But he can’t find her. So he begins dating the last person he knew she was with. Melissa Hastings. Who even lives right next to his parents. Bethany’s body as Alison is found and Charles attends his ‘sister’s’ funeral.
He immediately cheats on Melissa with her sister, Alison’s friend Spencer. This is to get closer to having a brother sister relationship with his dead sister, since he never had the chance. In the UK he had weaseled his way into a Doctor’s degree for whatever he needed to become a Doctor, but cheated his way through college.
Years go by and he begins to give up on finding Cece, almost settles down with Melissa again in the UK. But Cece turns up. He has forgiven her for killing Bethany and has been working on his mental health. She tells him she’d done the same. But she wants his help playing a game. He agrees, but she’s obviously not healthy yet. He still works with her for a bit to finish up what she had been working on, convincing him that his sister Alison was still alive and that coincidentally she had been her friend, without knowing that was his sister.
They don’t find her right away, or at least this is what Charles/Wren thinks. (He just misses her as Cece pulls her away after her dance with Spencer) He moves on and decides to try and fix his familial problems in a healthy way, but it’s too late. Cece has become obsessed with him all over again. She builds a life-sized ‘dollhouse’ and kidnaps the girl who had been torturing his sister and her friends. (Mona sent Ali A messages before she went missing)
She gives him Mona and Alison’s friends as a bunch of dolls (entirely because of her obsession with dolls) and even set up a room dedicated to him as Charles and not Wren, so that he can tell his story and get his life back. He begins to play along, even going as far as to try and meet up with Jason.
But to Charles’ knowledge, Jason ‘calls the cops’ on him at the arcade. Charles runs, and gives up once again on the family that “never wanted him”.
He tells Cece to let everything go, and set the girls free. He doesn’t want anyone to know that he is Charles DiLaurentis anymore. He goes back to the UK. Again. But Cece still loves him, and demands that his story is told. So, she takes on the identity as Charles and had already killed the only person that could 100% identify that she is not Charles. (Jessica.) She killed her because she found out that she wasn’t Charles’ biological Mother and that Mary was.
It is only AFTER Jason’s failed meeting with Charles that it is revealed that maybe A is a female?
This is also even better for Cece, who wants to punish Jason for ‘not giving Charles a chance to explain himself’ and pretends that since she and Jason dated, he dated his transgender brother. This makes Jason sick- BUT (Insert the whole plot of my “Jason killed Charlotte” theory here)
So ‘Charlotte’ calls Charles from Welby, and promises him that this time, she is really getting better and she asks for his forgiveness. Even proving that she has a boyfriend (still british, but this time its Rollins) and won’t become obsessed with Charles again. And she mentions that, Oh, she only hit Bethany with the rock, but his girlfriend, Melissa buried her alive and she is the one who truly killed her. Charles breaks up with Melissa for good this time, but they remain roommates because he is now A.D. and is blackmailing Melissa. Then Charlotte ends up dead (Hi, Jason.) and Charles feels responsible, since she was probably killed for ‘being Charles’. He becomes to learn things as A.D. Awful things. He only wanted to find out who killed Charlotte, but he finds out that he isn’t Charles DiLaurentis, but Charles Drake (Father unknown to him at this point.) And to make things worse, he finds out that he has a sister that was adopted by the Hastings. It was Spencer, but that didn’t matter at first because he understands that no matter who it was, he had been in an incestual (is that a word?) relationship with his sister. He begins to take things easy on Spencer, only making her go visit Toby for the letter from their Mother, Mary.
(Puzzle piece next to picture of Charles in the soul room)
And he’s still A.D. and hates Hanna for rejecting him that one time, invites his ex-girlfriend’s cousin Aria to join the A-team and is torturing his cousin Alison and Emily because Cece had told him that Alison had ‘known’ about Charles and didn’t give a shit about him, and that she only wanted to be close to Cece.
But wait! If Charles and Lucas so obviously came up with the A game….how did it get to Mona, who really started things?
Alison bullied both of them. Lucas showed it to Mona before she got popular and ditched him for Hanna.
Charles is finishing the game and ending things once and for all.
Melissa was Black Widow, Cece Redcoat, and Wren/Charles as the man in the black hoodie.
PLEASE LET ME KNOW WHAT YOU THINK.
I’LL CONTINUE TO UPDATE THIS WITH MORE ANSWERED PLOT HOLES AND STUFF IF YOU POINT THINGS OUT TO ME.
EDIT #1: prettylittlequeenie pointed out to me that Mona has already confessed to being the one who hit Bethany. I believe (Since my theory involves Red Coat being Cece;) Charlotte enjoyed Mona’s work and when she went to visit her in Radley, as red coat and not a patient, she either convinced Mona to work with her to continue to bring down the liars or blackmailed her into it. This is proved multiple times (and doesn’t contradict what I was saying earlier about why Cece kidnapped Mona. She was playing Mona and still took her (it was all staged) and gave her to Charles as a ‘peace offering’)
Mona knew it was Cece in the Red Coat and even though she says “I didn’t know it was Cece, I was so drugged up blah blah blah.” It only makes sense that she was still working with her when…
She was drawing and storing all of her blood to splash around the house when Cece “kidnapped her”. It also explains why Mona did not go with the liars to Radley when she wanted “To hear how the story ends.” The truth is is that she knew Sara and Cece were going to blow up the whole building or wing with themselves and the girls inside of it. Mona didn’t go to avoid her own death.
Mona said she hit Bethany to help Charlotte finish the game (Even the liars notice the shows plotholes, lol), and knew that the only ones able to confirm she said that would be dead.
I hope that’s cleared up now, and thanks for pointing that out. I was going to put that in there but I completely forgot.
(End of EDIT #1)
I'm bringing this back because I'm literally a genius...
