As Pretty Little Liars reaches its series finale, will we finally learn who has been tormenting the lead characters? The show, originally about a stalker sending threatening texts to five teenagers, has spent seven seasons transcending peers like Gossip Girl and becoming a suspenseful thriller, crammed with anonymous hackers and nasty gadgets.
In the penultimate episode, the five women at the show’s heart — the Liars, in fan parlance — finally defeated their stalker’s latest ploy, an elaborate device that was part map and part board game. It’s actually a military-grade super-gadget, indestructible by the show’s hackers, Caleb (Tyler Blackburn) and Mona (Janel Parrish). This device is central to the season-seven plot, and it’s full of tricks, spitting poisonous gas when Caleb gets too close, and brandishing a box-cutter at Mona when she tries to lovingly pet it. It even uses AR to show the Liars where a missing corpse has been buried. The game may not appear in the finale, but given that the stalker (once known as “A,” now as “A.D.”) ominously confiscated the board pieces, it’s always possible the game will resurface in some form in the finale. The show’s prop master, Chris Vail, who also worked on the Austin Powers film series, recently talked to me via email about the process of making the device.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
What inspired the super–gadget?
We looked at all kinds of things to inform how the game wanted to look and feel. Old-school board games like Life and Risk, that cool model of the town in Beetlejuice, the game in Jumanji, cool YouTube videos about augmented reality games… There was a good deal of discussion where the writers and myself tried to take our favorite elements from all those things and incorporate them into a game that had the charm of a traditional board game, but also incorporated the digital technology that “A” commonly used.