Entertainment

Is Andrew A Good Guy After All?

by Kaitlin Reilly

I'm not sure I can name a character on Pretty Little Liars that I didn't think was A for at least an entire episode, which is why I'm not entirely convinced that Andrew Campbell is really Charles DiLaurentis. In fact, I'm not entirely convinced that Andrew is a bad guy involved in the A game at all, and my main reason is that the show is trying entirely too hard to make him seem guilty. It sounds silly, but I'm even more convinced of Andrew's innocence now that the new Pretty Little Liars promo for the Season 6 premiere featured a reporter stating that he was the main suspect in the kidnappings of the Liars and Mona. I'm starting to think that not only is Andrew a red herring, but that the guy is in serious danger — and it's all part of Big A's master plan.

Logically, there are plenty of reasons to suspect Andrew of being A. He's super smart, potentially connected to the Campbell farm where A's home video was shot, and has taken a random interest in Aria as of late. Then there's also some concrete evidence that he knows what's up in Rosewood, like the fact that he was shown hacking into Melissa's voicemail to her parents. But while the writers probably intended to make that last bit of information "prove" Andrew's guilt to the audience, I'm wondering if maybe it's the thing that actually caused A to come after Andrew.

We may think that Andrew is wire-tapping Melissa for sinister reasons, but what if he's actually doing everything he can to make sure that Aria is safe? Andrew followed Aria to meet Cyrus and was around for the whole "I think Mike is up to something" thing, so he knows that Aria doesn't always put safety first. Andrew could have just been trying to secretly untangle the whole A mystery to keep the girls safe... and that might have given the real Charles some big ideas.

If Andrew really was trying to protect the girls on the down low, there's no way that Charles didn't get a wind of it — A sees everything, after all. Perhaps Charles knew that Andrew would be an easy fall guy for the kidnapping, and decided to use him as a scapegoat so that the cops would look for him instead. Charles could have planted information about Aria's whereabouts, knowing Andrew would try to find her, and then kidnapped Andrew himself to make it look like he was guilty of taking the girls. It would be a seriously messed up plan, but hey, that dollhouse is plenty messed up. At the end of the day, Andrew could be another victim of A's master plan — and a red herring.

Images: ABC Family; randombenzo, romirockstar/Tumblr