Pretty Little Liars Season 3: Halloween Special Pits Toby and the A Team Against the Liars

I have a deep and inexplicable adoration of high school television dramas. I can rattle off Dawson's Creek stats, I own way too many box sets of The O.C., and have watched a lo-ot of Greek. With that information in mind, it shouldn't be a fair stretch of the imagination to determine that tonight I will be watching Pretty Little Liars. 

The intensely addictive ABC Family mystery follows the lives of four preternaturally attractive high school girls as they work to solve the mystery of their best friend's death. It is spooky (in the shadows lurking in the corner kind of way), there are love triangles (in the someone always walks in at the exact wrong moment kind of way), and everyone looks generally fabulous. It's a fantasy world that doesn't teeter too far into the realm of vampires and werewolves. Pretty Little Liars (or PLL for fans) is all about impossible situations ... that could happen ... maybe ... one day? 

In anticipation of tonight's Halloween episode, which takes place on a moving train, the show's executive producer Marlene King sat down for an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. She let a few spoilers drop about tonight's episode that are sure to get the PLL fan base geared up: namely, that someone from Rosewood dies on the train tonight, and that A "definitely has a master plan."

You see, the girls are haunted, stalked, followed (insert any other creepy word here) by a mysterious and all-knowing person/team/force called A. A knows secrets about the girls' lives that no one should ever know. And, as fans learned on the last episode, Team A includes Toby (Keegan Allen) who we all assumed was a devoted boyfriend of one of the girls in the infamous quartet. No this isn't quite life as we know it, but what the program manages to balance is incredibly real depictions of emotions; love, fear, friendship. And this treatment of emotion is what let's the show run with the best of the soap operas out there. 

Murder mystery aside, there is something deeply realistic about the show. It is escapism, but escapsim that keeps a finger on the pulse of reality. Oh, and the addictive story line doesn't hurt.

Pretty Little Liars airs tonight on ABC Family at 8:00 p.m.