Recap: Ravenswood series premiere

ABC Family’s Ravenswood had a haunting series premiere

By Aleina McGettrick

The haunting series premiere of Ravenswood, a spinoff show of ABC Family’s Pretty Little Liars, aired after the PLL Halloween episode. The premiere episode of Ravenswood picked up right where Pretty Little Liars left off, a great transition into this mysterious new town of Ravenswood. We see two of the leading characters, Caleb — Tyler Blackburn continuing his role from Pretty Little Liars—and Miranda (Nicole Gale Anderson) wondering about the headstones that they found with their names on them and pictures of people that looked exactly like them. Miranda is in town to find her uncle, and Caleb is there to help her. When he finds the headstone he knows that he has even more to figure out in Ravenswood.

They make it to Uncle Collins’ house and even though they are negatively received by Miranda’s uncle they are escorted into the house by Mrs. Grunwald —another character from Pretty Little Liars, with Meg Foster continuing the role —whom is unusual as ever in Ravenswood. We meet two other leading characters in the show, siblings Olivia and Luke (Merritt Patterson and Brett Dier) when they are outside of the Collins house in the graveyard arguing with their mother. Their father has recently passed away, and in this scene their mom is scrubbing her headstone because the words “Black Widow” are spray painted on it; many people of the town have accused their mother of killing their father. [The scenes shot in the cemetery are at an actual cemetery in New Orleans, an answer to a question Tyler Blackburn received from fans yesterday.] Caleb and Miranda watch the family interact and go outside to talk to them but they are gone by the time they get there. They look for the creepy headstones that they discovered the night before, but to their surprise they are gone and replaced with two random headstones. Caleb needs more answers and goes into town to try and find the obituaries that matched those headstones from so long ago.

ravenswood pilot

At the newspaper he meets Remy (Britne Oldford), the last character in the group of people affected by the unusual curse of Ravenswood. Once Caleb says his name and who he is looking for, Remy’s father intervenes and cuts Caleb’s search for answers short. Miranda is back at her uncle’s house, in the room that had once belonged to her mother, looking at an old photo album. To add even more to this disturbing town a ghoulish figure appears behind her. And further, while Caleb is taking a bath in preparation for dinner he starts to be drowned by a figure that appears and disappears just as easily as it managed to get into the locked bathroom in the first place. These frightening and supernatural scenes aren’t enough the make Miranda and Caleb leave Ravenswood, though. If anything it has the opposite effect on them — now they need answers more than ever.

Remy is in the basement of the obituaries when she is found by Caleb and Miranda. They find out that Caleb Rivers and Miranda Collins had died the same day after a soldier came home from war exclaiming, “I don’t know why I’m still here, I shouldn’t be alive,” the exact statement that Remy’s mother had told her hours before. If this isn’t enough of a warning to them, I don’t know what is.

Remy, Caleb, and Miranda head back to their homes in Remy’s car. They are driving and see Olivia and Luke walking home from the homecoming parade that didn’t turn out so well for Olivia. The two join the car and they continue on their way. Remember that ghoulish figure I mentioned before from Miranda’s room? It later appeared in the town with the message, “Last chance.” And that’s not the final time that we see the figure in this episode. Miranda, in the front seat of the car, sees the figure in the middle of the road and frantically grabs the steering wheel away from Remy, driving the car off the bridge, drowning Caleb, Miranda, Remy, Olivia, and Luke and ending the episode to the show’s ominous theme song, “The One That Got Away” by The Civil Wars.


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Ravenswood premiere image: Skip Bolen/ABC Family