PLL: Original Sin, Riverdale Exist in the Same Universe

No text from “A” could ever leave us this shocked.

The latest episode of Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin reveals a connection to another teen drama—in addition to its predecessor. It turns out the HBO Max series and Riverdale exist within the same universe.

The new Liars learn in episode six that several of the patients from Radley Sanitarium, which featured heavily in the original series, were moved to the “Sisters of Quiet Mercy over in Riverdale” when the psychiatric hospital was turned into a hotel. If the Sisters of Quiet Mercy sounds familiar, that’s because it’s pretty infamous in The CW series as a home for troubled girls run by a group of nuns who don’t exactly extoll the virtues of Christ.

Merging the words of Riverdale and PLL: Original sin is a bizarre twist, especially since the two series that have little connection beyond the fact that they were both created by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. 

And he recently explained exactly how the Easter egg happened. “We kind of just wrote that line in,” Roberto told TVLine Aug. 11. “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.”