Premiering in 2010, I. Marlene King's teen mystery drama Pretty Little Liars has carved out a space in the minds of millions of teens.

Centering on a group of high school girls that had recently lost their queen bee, the show followed them as they were targeted and harassed by a series of anonymous individuals threatening to reveal all their darkest secrets. Told both in the present time and through flashbacks to life under the thumb of their former leader, the Liars unravel puzzle after puzzle, always under assault from a new antagonist-- all while dealing with high school social drama.

Starring Troian Bellisario, Lucy Hale, Ashley Benson, Shay Mitchell, Sasha Pieterse, and Janel Parrish, PLL ran for seven seasons. Those years were eventful and beyond complicated with all the twists and turns, so it should be no surprise that there is no shortage of oddities, mistakes, and errors that occur in the 160 total episodes.

This list ranks the biggest things that made fans scratch their heads in confusion, the stuff that made no sense about Rosewood, the Liars, and "A," the shadowy person sending them texts. Ranging from continuity errors to worldbuilding mistakes to plot threads that were never tied off, we're looking at the longest-running glitches, the stuff that affected more than just one episode. Obviously, spoilers will follow, so if you haven't seen the show but still want to be surprised, beware!

Welcome to the adrenalized hyper-reality. This is 20 Things That Make No Sense About Pretty Little Liars.

The timeline

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While it's certainly not guaranteed, in general viewers can expect any TV show to map out one year to each season it's been in production, meaning that if a show ran for five seasons, approximately five years took place in the show's world. Pretty Little Liars went along with that for the first two seasons, and then completely left it behind for rest.

Seasons 3-5 take place in an impossibly short amount of time (after Halloween in season three, Christmas of the same year doesn't happen until season five).

Don't even get us started on the time skip that occurs later. Add in smaller chronology mistakes like A's succession not always making sense and it's nearly impossible for anyone who isn't reading up on the show online.

A’s money

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Everyone in Rosewood seems to be comfortably well-off, even those characters who supposedly work lower income jobs. Finances aren't the most realistic thing about the show, but that extends doubly to "A."

Simply put, to fund their operation, any given A would have to be a millionaire.

A owns multiple properties over the course of the series, and the money and time it would take to own and maintain them would be prohibitive to anyone who didn't have a ton of disposable income.

Even ignoring the necessary legal paperwork for the operation, furnishing something as intricate as the Dollhouse would take hundreds of thousands of dollars, at the very least.

The spinoff

What, did you think the inconsistencies in the reality of Pretty Little Liars was limited to just that show? No, they extended even to the spinoff, Ravenswood. 

This show, which began during PLL's fourth season, was a supernatural teen drama that found the main cast (which included PLL's Caleb Rivers) investigating a town that contained tombstones with their names on them.

The problem with all this? The town of Ravenswood may have a wealth of paranormal activity, but Rosewood (the Liars' hometown) had no supernatural drama at all.

That's right, a town chock full of ghosts exists just a bus ride away from the setting of PLL, which ostensibly was set in the real world.

The recasting of family members

Ian Thomas (Ryan Merriman) standing in the Hastings' kitchen in "Pretty Little Liars."

Most shows have to recast a role or two due to necessity or a change in creative direction, but Pretty Little Liars is an especially odd case.

Aside from normal recastings (Natalie Hall replacing Natalie Floyd as Kate and Drew Van Acker replacing Parker Bagley as Jason, both in season two), the show switched out a ton of actors after the pilot.

The recasting hit the roles of the parents especially hard-- Alison's parents, Spencer's parents, and Aria's whole family were all played by different actors in the pilot (or in the separate unaired pilot). They were far from the only ones, as roles like Ian Thomas received the same treatment.

There must have been some cognitive dissonance for viewers who watched the pilot and moved on to the next episodes, only to see a dozen new faces.

How do they ever do schoolwork?

This one isn't complicated. Pretty Little Liars is a show about a group of high schoolers, who have to deal with this "A" stuff while balancing their own lives. You might think the show would display the girls working hard when not investigating their mystery stalker so their academic lives don't suffer. You would be wrong.

The Liars are rarely shown doing homework, schoolwork, or even showing up to class.

It simply is not something important to the story. Yet, after a bit of rejection drama, the Liars all graduate from high school on time, and get in to good colleges.

It feels like the writers just thought school was boring, so they took it out of the story entirely. Don't expect us to just believe that the Liars are good students when they're never shown doing any schoolwork.

Caleb's hacking

At this point, anyone who watches TV knows that it rarely, if ever, depicts computers, technology, or hacking with any kind of realism. Pretty Little Liars falls firmly into the camp of "being a hacker means you can basically control the world, right?"

 Just watch as Caleb, a teenager with no formal training, is basically able to hack into anything on the planet.

Throughout the show, Caleb hacks the police, the government, "A," the school system, and local businesses. We're not saying these things are impossible to hack (they definitely aren't) but that Caleb can do it so easily, so quickly, so often, and with so few repercussions shatters credulity.

Go to prison, teens

It turns out the Liars get treated like adults in more ways than one. Not only are they the love interests for multiple grown men, the Liars are also apparently tried as adults, not minors. Hanna, Spencer, Aria, Emily, and Alison are all tried as adults after getting convicted for Mona's (faked) passing and then sent to real prison instead of a juvenile facility.

While this is legally possible, it's unlikely. Alison is declared guilty of a more serious charge, but the rest are just accessories to the crime and would likely not have been sent anywhere but a juvenile detention facility.

Alison makes it to real prison, and the Liars are kidnapped by A and brought to the Dollhouse, but the legal process here is murky at best, nonsensical at worst.

The many As

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Pretty Little Liars began with an intriguing premise: A group of teenagers, messaged by an anonymous person threatening to reveal all their darkest secrets. One might have expected to see the series' central conflict revolve around the girls finding out who this "A" is, but instead, the first A was revealed at the end of the second season.

After that, one might have expected the next As to be bigger and badder, until the last season found some kind of "true" A that had been organizing it all. Instead, each A was completely different, uninterested in each other's plans. Thus, there wasn't really any underlying plot or arc for the villains. It was just a bunch of people who chose to use the same pseudonym.

A’s motivations

Uber A, Pretty Little Liars

Over the course of the show, many people take on the moniker of Rosewood's most infamous villain, "A." Without one central antagonist to organize them, the different As have very different goals.

Some want to push the Liars into making choices that will actually benefit them, others want to control the Liars' lives, and others want to harm them. However, at no point do the motivations really match up with the activities.

Think about it: this large group of people spends quite a bit of money, time, and effort to impact the Liars' lives - for what?

They're not getting any power, prestige, or money out of this, and it would be incredibly tiring to keep up A's act. It basically seems like a really implausible hobby, at this point.

All the creepy men the Liars date

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Television is by no means the place to go if you're looking for realistic depictions of romantic relationships, but Pretty Little Liars took it too far when it normalized grown men dating teenagers.

Ezra and Aria are easily the most famous of these, but the show actually had several relationships with this exact dynamic, a disturbing pattern.

Along with Ezra and Aria, Garrett, an adult police officer, dates Jenna, the Liars; classmate,. These are open relationships that don't get nearly the heat they should in the show.

We won't get into the dozen or so times grown men make advances on the Liars. All in all, this was extremely uncomfortable for fans to see, given that the show's main demographic was teenage girls.

Ezra never faces any consequences

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One of the most baffling character arcs in the show is that of Ezra Fitz, played by Ian Harding. A teacher from an affluent background, Ezra was in a relationship with Lucy Hale's Aria Montgomery, despite the fact that he was her high school teacher.

While he resigned from his position at the school (and was later fired when he tried to take up a teaching job at another school), Ezra never had to deal with any legal consequences for his tryst with Aria.

It is more than just odd, In fact, it's creepy, that nobody in the town of Rosewood ostracizes or prosecutes Ezra for this. Instead, everyone in town still seems to think of him as a good guy, he opens up a nice café, and even marries Aria.

Alison's transformation

Sasha Pieterse as Allison in Pretty Little Liars

This was just a letdown. After seasons building up Alison as an ice cold queen bee, Pretty Little Liars pulled and made the character nearly unrecognizable in the second part of the sixth season.

The change occurs after a significant time skip, and gone is the Alison of old, the one described by other characters as "a master manipulator."

Alison DiLaurentis goes from being a manipulative genius to a soccer mom.

It wasn't just disappointing to see Alison turn into suburban normie mom; it was straight-up nonsense for the character. The show seemed to be painting her as someone who had found her conscience, but to fans it seemed more like she was someone else altogether-- someone way less interesting.

The Liars’ daily schedule

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We've most likely made this clear by now, but just in case the message hasn't come through: Pretty Little Liars was not a show devoted to realism. Most details in the story looked odd when held up to the light, and that certainly holds true for the daily schedule of the main cast of girls.

To start in the morning, the Liars would frequently meet up before school at a café to scheme, and this would occasionally result in multiple scenes occurring before the school day began, meaning they were meeting up sometime around 5-6 A.M.

Add in the fact that they were also using their afternoons and evenings to investigate, plus the parties and socializing, and you've got a day that could only exist in television, not real life.

Spencer’s twin

Spencer and Alex Drake on Pretty Little Liars

As the show went on, the villains of Pretty Little Liars grew more and more outlandish, with each one having more fevered, unpleasant designs on the lives of the Liars. That certainly didn't stop with A.D., aka Alex Drake. Alex was Spencer's identical twin, and sought to replace her and steal her life because she was jealous she had never had the chance.

This was all well and good, but even ignoring the basic bewilderment of a character suddenly having a long-lost identical twin she'd never heard about, the actual logistics of the twins' movements didn't always make sense.

Since fans were frequently unsure which twin they were looking at (both were played by Troian Bellisario), so many plotlines in season 6B and 7 seemed designed to make the viewer say, "Wait, what?"

Confusing locations

At this point, we shouldn't expect Pretty Little Liars to be at all consistent with the details, but here we go again: There is no real logic to the geography of Rosewood.

Places exist where the writers need them to exist, and sometimes that means they get shuffled around.

Take Alison's old house for example. At one point in the series, it is shown to be next to Emily's house. At another, it is next to Spencer's. These two houses are not on the same street, but we guess Alison can make her house be in two places at once.

This isn't the only location problem in the series (or even the only one involving Alison's house), but exemplifies that the show wasn't exactly committed to consistency here.

The police are never helpful

Keegan Allen as Toby Cavanaugh looking mysteriously on Pretty Little Liars

This entry is pretty self-explanatory. The Rosewood Police Department is just not useful. Pretty Little Liars is a show about a group of girls who get harassed by a series of anonymous stalkers, and all the police seem to do is harass the Liars even further.

At first, the Liars avoid them because A makes it clear they aren't an option, and it only gets worse.

In the later seasons, the Liars are repeatedly framed for crimes they did not commit, and the police always seem to think the most logical explanation is to believe the framers and accept the idea that the Liars are the real criminals here. Thus, the show has the Liars constantly bypassing the cops, sneaking into their headquarters, or going to jail because of them.

You'd think at some point this would change, but no.

Ali’s house

It turns out Alison's house breaks reality in more than one way. Shuffling around from place to place to conveniently be next door to other Liars' houses is just the start of the inconsistencies here.

Alison's house changes from place to place, owner to owner, and even in its own appearance.

Changing in design and color scheme from the first season to later seasons, Alison's house was also bought and sold several different times within the space of a year, like it's some kind of incredibly expensive rental home.

The writers of Pretty Little Liars treated it like it was a lucky charm, handing it off from one location to the next, one owner to the next, never letting it be a house that actually conformed to the laws of reality.

The parties

Glitz and glamour is one of the reasons fans tuned in to watch Pretty Little Liars each week, and the writers and designers knew that. Fancy dances and parties were a mainstay of the series, even if there frequently didn't appear to be any reason for them to exist.

These dances were extravagant, excessively themed, and appeared to happen once every few episodes.

The really weird part is they didn't seem to be sponsored by the school or town, yet were still public to any and all teenagers who wanted to come.

Alison hosted one of these-- a teenager hosted a huge winter-themed ball for the whole town. It was like a parallel reality where American towns had public funding for teen parties.

The Liars’ investigation methods

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We're not professional secret stalker investigators like the Liars, but we have a pro tip for you: if someone implies they know who your threatening, abusive stalker is, you should probably ask them about it.

Multiple characters do just this in Pretty Little Liars, and the main clique never just asks them. This, however, is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Liars' investigative mistakes.

Instead of telling the police or their parents, the Liars try to go it alone, or ask for help from their friends and boyfriends. Hanna tries to tell the police and it doesn't go well, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't have sought outside help.

Really, if you're looking for the answer to a problem, and someone tells you they know the answer, just ask them.

What Maya Knew

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One of the larger plot holes in the entire series, fans are still puzzled over the passing and mystery of Emily's first girlfriend, Maya St. Germain.

Played by Bianca Lawson, Maya met her end in the second season of the show, but Pretty Little Liars tried to make it seem like a big deal by tying her into a mystery that went absolutely nowhere.

Mona at one point in the season says "Miss Aria, you're a killer, not Ezra's wife." This seemed odd, but the first letter of each word spells out "MAYA KNEW," obviously meant as a message to the liars.

However, it was never revealed in the show what Maya knew, and creator I. Marlene King's Twitter explanation had nothing to do with the plot of A, meaning that it was a wild goose chase from the start.

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What else doesn't make sense about Pretty Little Liars? Let us know in the comments!