25 bizarre things you probably forgot happened on 'Pretty Little Liars'

Paige first appears in the show toward the end of season one on the episode "If at First You Don't Succeed, Lie, Lie Again." She was introduced as Emily's competitive swimming teammate.

Both girls were vying for the team captain position, so Paige made homophobic remarks toward Emily to try and knock her down. This incident led to a disciplinary meeting with the coach that Paige wasn't happy about. Paige was also angry when Emily got a better position than her in the swimming lineup.

Shortly after, Paige shoved Emily's head underwater in the pool. Emily struggled for a bit before Paige finally allowed her to resurface.

As if this drowning attempt never happened, Paige and Emily later become one of the longest-lasting couples on the show, and they don't seem to discuss this moment with each other despite how traumatizing it must have been for Emily.

On season two, episode two, "The Goodbye Look," Toby is fired from his construction job after rumors spread around Rosewood that Toby was involved in Alison's disappearance.

Toby's unearned bad reputation gets him fired, but other characters who actually committed serious crimes have no trouble getting accepted into colleges and hired for jobs throughout the rest of the show.

For example, Mona attended university and got hired to work on a political campaign. But when she was part of the "A" team, she tortured and blackmailed the liars, hacked into police files multiple times, broke out of an asylum multiple times, and even hit Hanna with her car.

If Toby's reputation causes him to get fired, surely Mona having actually committed multiple felonies should have caused some issues when applying to schools and jobs.

The most ironic part is that Toby ends up joining the Rosewood police department in season five.

When Toby works on Spencer and Alison's backyard in season two, both Spencer's dad and Ali's brother, Jason, occasionally show up to tell Toby that he's not allowed to ask about items he finds or go into certain parts of the yard.

On season two, episode nine, "Picture This," Spencer and Emily break into a shed that Toby wasn't allowed near, and the girls realize it's actually a darkroom that's filled with photos of Aria sleeping. They also find surveillance equipment, which leads them to believe that Jason is spying on all of the liars.

When Aria eventually confronts Jason about this, he says that he found the roll of film in Ali's bedroom and assumed she had taken them.

That's the only explanation the characters, and the audience, ever received.

As the liars learn throughout the series, Ali had far more friends, enemies, and dates than they ever knew. After the girls realize Ali used to pretend to be a brunette named Vivian Darkbloom, one of Vivian's former dates, Duncan Albert, mistakes Aria for Vivian.

When the two talk during season two, episode 23, "Eye of the Beholder," it is revealed that Duncan knew Ali as Vivian and used to take her for rides in his plane the summer before she went missing.

During the episode, Duncan takes Aria on a plane and asks her to steer it, and Aria actually takes the controls with no previous instruction or experience.

After season two, Ali's interactions with Duncan are never mentioned again and Aria never brings up the fact that she flew a plane.

On season two, episode 24, "If These Dolls Could Talk," the liars go to a doll shop and meet Seth — a child who was at the store when Alison (as Vivian) came to find out who really sent her the creepy doll she received from "A."

His grandmother, Martha, tells Seth to stop talking, and she warns the girls to ignore what he says. After Seth tells the girls vague information about who originally bought the doll, he is sent upstairs by Martha.

As he walks away, he tells the girls, "Sorry about what happened to her. Must have been awful, breathing dirt into your lungs."

It was revealed earlier in the show that Ali's dead body was found buried in the DiLaurentis backyard, but everyone thought she died of blunt head trauma. At this point, only the liars, Garrett, and "A" seemed to know that she actually died from asphyxiation when she was buried alive.

This random child has no way of knowing this unless he has some supernatural powers or surprising police connections. The way Seth knew this information is never revealed, though, and he never appears on the show again.

Melissa and Ian's relationship was full of surprises, from their sudden wedding to Melissa's unexpected pregnancy soon after.

On season three, episode three, "Kingdom of the Blind," we learn that Melissa experienced a miscarriage. However, in the next episode, Melissa reveals that she actually miscarried months earlier, when Ian was found dead by suicide.

She faked her pregnancy for several months, and her mother knew the entire time.

Why would Melissa's mother go along with this? Why would Melissa put work into faking a steadily growing baby bump every single day?

In the realm of the TV series, what purpose did this serve for Melissa or anyone else, other than to add mystery and confusion to an already confusing season?

No one really knows, but perhaps that's OK because it doesn't seem to get mentioned again after season three anyway.

Season three, episode 11, "Single Fright Female," reveals that Paige and Ali had a bad history.

They both played field hockey together, and Ali nicknamed Paige "Pigskin" after she was rough with Ali during a game. As the liars learn from CeCe Drake, Ali even tricked Paige into writing Emily a love letter so that she could use it as blackmail.

Paige's father was homophobic, so the threat of being outed as gay terrified her.

Although Ali's cruelty is believable during this plotline, it is odd that Paige had feelings for Emily for years before they dated and never mentioned it until the liars found out about her nickname.

There is a ton to talk about from season three, episode 13, "This Is a Dark Ride," including Adam Lambert's cameo, Aria being locked in a box on a trail with Garrett's dead body, and another dead body crashing the Halloween party.

But the most bizarre part of the episode has never been explained: Was Hanna's mom talking to a ghost?

No one else sees the eerie girl, who tells Ms. Marin stories about her twin sister that make her sound like the twin murder victim Ali told a story about in the previous Halloween episode, "The First Secret."

Since the ghost girl is played by the same actress who plays the twin on that episode, presumably audiences are to believe that this is indeed the same dead child.

But why on earth can Ms. Marin see her? Why does she never talk about this afterward? And perhaps most significantly, if this was a ghost and supernatural beings do exist on the show, why don't we ever see ghosts of dead characters the liars actually know?

On season three, episode 16, "Misery Loves Company," Aria starts feeling sick after finding out that her father was being blackmailed by Ali and saw her the night she died.

Meredith, Mr. Montgomery's girlfriend, is oddly kind to Aria and takes care of her when she's sick. But Meredith's "care" keeps making Aria sleepier and foggier, which she eventually realizes is the result of the drugged tea Meredith has been giving her.

Of course, Aria only begins to be suspicious of the tea after Ali appears in a vision and warns her about Meredith.

It is later revealed that Meredith drugged Aria so that she could find and destroy the diary pages that prove that Aria's father met with Ali on the night of her disappearance. And when Emily and Hanna show up to save Aria, Meredith locks them in the basement — where Aria is already trapped.

Meredith disappears while Aria's father releases the girls from the basement and is never seen again.

In a season full of hugely significant plotlines (Ali's body being dug up, Emily and Aria getting drugged in separate incidences, Garrett's death, and Toby joining the "A" team, to name a small few), showrunners still made sure Ezra's younger brother, Wesley, had a moment to shine.

During season three, episode 18, "Dead to Me," Wesley is threatened by a man while he's out with Aria, and in an effort to defend himself and create a diversion, he hits him over the head with a pizza box.

Wesley later reveals the man was his physics teacher's husband who was angry because Wesley hit on his wife while he was her student.

By the end of season three, Spencer is so heavily tortured and traumatized by "A" that she ends up in Radley Sanitarium.

One of the major events that contributed to her breakdown was learning that Toby was on the "A" team, but her true breaking point doesn't happen until season three, episode 21, "Out of Sight, Out of Mind."

During this episode, Spencer receives a flower arrangement from "A" with a note that implies someone she loves will die soon. Mona comes to reinforce this message to Spencer, with the added implication that the death will occur that very day.

Spencer ends up following Mona into the woods that night and she's led to a dead person with Toby's tattoo. The person's face is covered by a motorcycle helmet that Spencer never removes.

After hearing Mona saying that Toby is dead, Spencer runs away from the body before ever checking that it's really Toby.

Granted, finding a body with an identifying tattoo is usually enough of a confirmation, but in Spencer's world, people have faked deaths before and "A" has been messing with her for years.

Spencer is regularly considered the brains of the group, so it's weird that she doesn't try to see Toby's face and confirm that it's even him. Especially since we later find out it isn't.

Season four introduces a plotline about Toby's mother, who was a patient at Radley before her mysterious death by suicide.

Of course, this is a plotline that adds even more mystery to what actually goes on at Radley, and one that makes it clear that "A" knows more than any other character on the show.

So when "A" offers Toby information about his mother's death in exchange for handing over the mobile "A" lair and all the incriminating information it contained, he takes the offer.

Toby explains this to Spencer on season four, episode two, "Turn of the Shoe," and asks her not to tell the other liars yet. Spencer agrees because she can tell how important it is to Toby for him to get answers about his mother's death, but it's strange that something so significant to him has never come up before.

He wants answers so badly that he gives up the biggest bits of evidence the group has on "A," and does so for a reason that was literally only introduced in the previous episode.

If Toby has always been deeply invested in finding out what happened to his mother, then why has he never mentioned his mother's death or her time in Radley before this season? This seems especially weird considering that Spencer was in Radley the previous season, and it never came up then.

"A" does a lot of things that seem extremely difficult, if not flat-out impossible, to actually arrange, but this moment during season four, episode five, "Gamma Zeta Die!" definitely stands out.

When Aria is talking to her mom in her car, there's a bee flying around, which her mother promptly kills. After Aria gets out of the car, though, "A" sends a threatening text calling the attack "the first taste of her venom," and a huge swarm of bees appears in Mrs. Montgomery's car. The bees sting her so badly that she has to be hospitalized.

This is one of those brutal "A" attacks that never gets explained.

Who on the "A" team had access to that many bees? How did they transport them into Aria's mom's car? How did they ensure that the bees wouldn't come out of wherever they were hiding until Aria stepped out of the car?

This is just one of the many moments that raise questions that are never answered throughout the show.

One thing that becomes clear throughout the show is that "A" always has access to an absurd number of transportation options.

Mona as "A" hit Hanna with an SUV back in season one, "A" fakes Toby's death with a crashed motorcycle in season three, "A" tries to run over Emily, Aria, and Hanna with Mona's car in season four, and we also learn in season four that "A" has been using a private plane.

But the most unbelievable "A" act involving a vehicle is perhaps the car crash in Emily's living room on season four, episode seven, "Crash and Burn, Girl!"

At the very end of this episode, a car drives directly into Emily's living room, where her mom is talking on the phone. Emily's mom manages to dive out of the way and avoid getting hurt, but the front of her house and the car are completely damaged.

However, we learn in the next episode that whoever was driving somehow escaped the car so quickly after the accident that Emily and her mother didn't see who they were.

We later find out that the driver is "A," but it is never explained how "A" managed to crash a car into a house, survive that crash without injury, and flee the car so quickly.

During season three, viewers were introduced to Ezra's high-school girlfriend Maggie and her 7-year-old son Malcolm, who was believed to be Ezra's child.

Maggie got pregnant while dating Ezra, and his mother paid Maggie to disappear to avoid Ezra having to care for a child as a teenager. Ezra is furious when he finds out about this because he never knew he had a child or that his mother paid Maggie off.

"A" is actually the one who reveals Ezra's secret child to him, and Malcolm is even kidnapped by "A" for an entire afternoon.

Maggie and Malcolm are a huge part of season three and the first half of season four. But after Maggie gets a job offer that would require moving Malcolm away, Ezra takes a paternity test in the hopes of taking Maggie to court to get custody of Malcolm.

However, during season four, episode 10, "The Mirror Has Three Faces," the results of the paternity test prove that Ezra isn't actually Malcolm's father, making the multiple-season plotline a very long waste of time.

Season four, episode 11, "Bring Down the Hoe," combined the show's usual revelations and suspense with a hoedown-style dance.

The fact that Rosewood High was even having a hoedown was a bit of a stretch seeing as the high-class town typically throws formal events. But for some reason, the school threw a country dance that the liars — and the rest of the school — willingly attend.

Once everyone is at the dance, all of the liars get pulled away into dramatic missions centered on their relationships or "A."

Hanna meets Travis at the dance, and he reveals that he saw who killed Detective Darren Wilden and can testify to clear Hanna's mother's name. Meanwhile, Emily and Spencer see Red Coat (this season's iteration of "A") and borrow a hayride truck to try and chase her down.

All of this is pretty much standard for a "Pretty Little Liars" school-dance episode until Aria and her date, Jake, actually start dancing.

Aria and Jake apparently know how to do an entire country line-dance routine — and so do all of the other students from the Northeastern town — and viewers got to spend almost two full minutes watching them.

That is two full minutes set aside for a country dance routine rather than for, say, any kind of explanation about the whole bee thing.

Season four, episode 12, "Now You See Me, Now You Don't," shows the liars going to a magic show in Ravenswood to get answers about Mona's disappearance.

This is already a bit of an odd plotline — especially since Spencer opening an "A" magic box note becomes a clunky way to show that she apparently knows how to do magic tricks, which she never does or brings up again.

Why was "A" sending them to a magic show in Ravenswood, a town that suddenly became important this season? Maybe to promote the spin-off TV series "Ravenswood" that aired around the same time as this season.

While Hanna, Spencer, and Emily watch Aria "disappear" onstage as part of the magic act, Emily is the one who actually goes missing.

"A" somehow kidnaps her in broad daylight during the magic show, even though Emily is completely conscious. And not only does "A" manage to kidnap Emily, but also they get Emily into a coffin that was waiting at a nearby sawmill, and send her down a conveyor belt moving toward a giant, rotating saw.

Emily is rescued, and the liars never ask how she ended up in the coffin. It's never explained how "A" actually managed to do all of this without Emily noticing or crying out, or running away.

When Hanna starts focusing more on the latest mystery in the liars' lives — finding out who was actually buried at Ali's funeral — she realizes that someone switched Ali's dental records to match the teeth of the dead girl.

On season four, episode 17, "Bite Your Tongue," Hanna makes a dentist appointment so she can go through the city's dental files, but "A" has other plans. They put Hanna under anesthesia and perform dental surgery on her to leave a message inside her tooth.

Perhaps the most unbelievable part is that the girls are actually able to find and read the tooth message.

Viewers have to suspend a lot of disbelief here, starting with the fact that "A" knows enough about dental surgery to be able to leave a note in someone's tooth.

"A" also had to assume that when Hanna woke up with her mouth hurting, she would somehow find and read the note. A note that is so minuscule (tooth-sized!) that it has to be read with a magnifying glass.

The scene just makes me miss the times when "A" would simply send a foreboding text.

"Shadow Play," season four, episode 19, entirely takes place in Spencer's mind.

It feels jarringly out of place, has odd out-of-character moments, and earned its place on Screenrant's list of the worst episodes of "Pretty Little Liars."

After spending several nights not sleeping — thanks to the pills she's been taking — Spencer apparently imagines her world as a noir-style film from the 1940s that doesn't quite line up with reality.

Although this episode helps the audience see how seriously Spencer's drug use is affecting her, it feels unnecessary. It's also odd that an episode where nothing happens in the real world would take place at the end of such a suspenseful season.

When Ali's mom puts together a bridal fashion show during season four, episode 23, "Unbridled," the liars volunteer to be models and seize the opportunity to search the DiLaurentis' house for clues.

But despite being considered the smartest liar, Spencer was apparently incapable of realizing the dress she wore for the fashion show had a corset with bones sewn into it.

Corsets are usually a bit uncomfortable to put on, so presumably one with finger bones sewn in would be outright painful. However, Spencer doesn't notice at all until she takes it off in front of the other liars.

How she managed to put the corset on without ever looking at it and seeing the bones is never explained or even questioned by any of the other girls.

At this point, they've already randomly found a necklace made of teeth, so I suppose they've just accepted that sometimes they'll be finding random body parts courtesy of "A."

There are two things that stand out about the night Ali went missing: that she met with an absurd number of people and that she wore a bright-yellow shirt that even the actress who played Ali hated.

For several seasons, viewers wondered why no one except Spencer woke up earlier to realize Ali was missing. On the season four finale, "'A' Is for Answers," the girls find out they slept through that night because Ali actually drugged them all with medication she stole from her mother.

Since Spencer had been taking upper pills at the time, the sedative didn't work properly on her, which explains why she was the only one who woke up during the night.

Ali's reasoning behind drugging her friends was that if she received an "A" threat while the girls were sleeping, she would know for sure that none of the girls were "A."

However, she could also have been just as certain if she got an "A" text while the girls were busy with specific extracurriculars, in class, or doing any other tasks. So drugging all of her friends with a sedative seems uncalled for.

The first episode of season five, "EscApe From New York," is filled with unlikely moments — like how CeCe escapes police custody and Ali publicly meets CeCe in a New York diner without cops recognizing either of them.

Yet an "A" flash mob feels like one of the weirdest moments in the entire series.

After the liars think they've tricked "A" into meeting them at a park, several dozen people dressed in all black with their faces covered appear and disorient the liars.

The real "A" of the moment, Shana, hired all the people, but we never found out exactly how she did that. They are out of town in New York at the time, a place where Shana doesn't seem to have any connections, and they've only been here for a few hours when the mob starts.

How did Shana put together a New York flash mob so quickly and know exactly where and when to organize the group to scare the liars?

Since Shana dies at the end of this episode and the liars never bring the "A" mob up again, it looks like we'll never know.

During season five, episode five, "Miss Me x 100," while the liars and their partners are watching the news brief that reveals the name of the girl buried in Ali's grave, a huge explosion happens across the street at Toby's house.

Immediately, a text reveals that "A" is responsible for this. However, "A" chose to blow up Toby's house while no one was inside instead of the house a few doors down where everyone was sitting, which seems a little off-brand.

As Caleb notes in the episode, "A" doesn't miss, so she targeted Toby's house for a reason. But why Toby's house rather than anywhere else? And how did "A" get explosives and know how to use them so that only Toby's house and yard would be destroyed?

Since this is "Pretty Little Liars," there aren't any solid answers to any of these questions. The generally accepted theory behind this seems to be that "A" just wanted to do something huge to let the girls know they were back.

This also happened on the 100th episode of the series, so the writers may have just wanted to mark the occasion with a huge explosion.

"How the 'A' Stole Christmas" is season five's Christmas episode, and it's as full of holiday cheer as it is odd moments.

At one point, Ali sees a ghost version of the believed-to-be-dead Mona, and at another, Spencer takes the time to dress up as a "sexy" Santa Claus for Toby despite being worried about possibly being convicted for murder.

But the most out-of-character moment happens when Hanna and Caleb hand out gifts to children. Hanna notices that some girls are making fun of another girl who is deaf, and Hanna pulls the girls aside to tell them to stop.

When the apparent leader of the group, who Caleb calls "Ali's little mini-me," is unimpressed by Hanna's warning, she tells the girl that she may want to make fewer enemies since "in Rosewood, b----s get buried."

The girl walks away obviously annoyed, but she doesn't actually seem to be bothered by an adult cursing in front of her and implying that she'll be murdered if she doesn't act nicer.

On season six, episode 10, "Game Over, Charles," CeCe explains many of the show's mysteries to the liars and Mona.

In particular, she talks about visiting Rosewood High for a day in an attempt to see her family. That visit fell picture day and, naturally, CeCe posed for a photo while she was there.

Hawk-eyed viewers will remember that back in season three when CeCe first introduced herself to the liars, Spencer found her photo in an old yearbook.

Despite having never attended Rosewood High, Cece's photo ends up in the yearbook with her name underneath it. The caption stated she won prom queen and was part of two clubs.

Although it's believable that CeCe was able to get her photo taken when she snuck in, who on the yearbook committee actually knew her real name? Also, how was she listed as a member of two clubs and as the prom queen?

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