Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa has been a very busy man for many years now; among the pile of hats he’s currently wearing include the executive producer caps of both Riverdale and the Pretty Little Liars spin-off Original Sin. Now he has used his terrible power to smash the two TV universes together to form one.
In the most recent episode of Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin, the new generation of good-looking liars went to Rosewood, home of the OG liars, only to discover the inhabitants of Rosewood’s Radley Sanitarium were “sent to the Sisters of Quiet Mercy over in Riverdale” once it was turned into a hotel. That’s bad news for the patients, as the nuns there were drug dealers who eventually committed mass suicide, but it’s still a rather definitive connection between the two shows. As Aguirre-Sacasa told TV Line:
“We kind of just wrote that line in. I assumed that we wouldn’t be allowed to reference Riverdale, since it’s in a completely different universe, but it stayed in. So, yeah, I guess it does exist in the same universe. … That was obviously just a fun Easter egg in an episode with the biggest Easter egg of them all, which is going to Rosewood.”
Full disclosure: I have seen every minute of the first Pretty Little Liars television series, having been promised sinister, soapy, ridiculous delights. Those ended up being few and very far between, but Riverdale ended up delivering everything I had hoped PLL would provide and more. (So, so, so much more.) Honestly, if you added up all the twists, turns, and madness of an entire season of Pretty Little Liars, it would probably equal an episode and a half of Riverdale. All I’m saying is that Original Sin should be honoured to be a part of the Riverdale-verse, and if the show gets in the way of a very angry Jughead being stuck in the ‘50s I will never forgive it.
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