That’s for the pretty little updates, The Perfectionists!
There may be a whole lot going on at BHU in the wake of the murder of Nolan Hotchkiss, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t some time for Mona (Janel Parrish) to make a quick phone call to her old bestie, Hanna (Ashley Benson) in last night’s episode. We didn’t hear or see Hanna, but we heard Mona’s helpfully expositional side of the convo.
“How are you? How’s Caleb? How’s the baby? Wait, Hanna, back up. What do you mean Spencer and Toby eloped? Even you didn’t know? Well are they registered somewhere? Of course, I wanna get them a gift!”
So Hanna and Caleb (Tyler Blackburn) have their baby, which we knew they were pregnant with at the end of the finale, and Spencer (Troian Bellisario) and Toby (Keegan Allen) are now married. We haven’t yet heard about Aria (Lucy Hale) and Ezra (Ian Harding), but we’ve got updates aplenty on Emison who officially are not broken up, you guys!
“There’s no break up,” Sasha Pieterse assured E!’s Erin Lim at the Freeform Summit on Wednesday, and showrunner I Marlene King echoed that. “They’re currently not broken up. They’re in the process of figuring some stuff out.”
At the end of Pretty Little Liars, Emily (Shay Mitchell) and Alison (Pieterse) were married and had those adorable twins (created by Emily’s eggs, fertilized with Wren’s sperm, implanted in Alison’s womb by Alex Drake, Spencer’s secret evil twin and oh boy have we missed explaining stuff like that), and nothing has changed, including the insane history that has happened between these two women over the years.
“What Marlene has kind of really made sure that she keeps around is the love for Emison, because it is real,” Pieterse says. “It’s one of the things that she really takes care of. It’s one of her favorite relationships, and I think she’s very real about it. Life is complicated, they have two beautiful babies, they’re married and they love it, but there’s a lot of complicated things that have happened in their life, and they are struggling, but that doesn’t mean that things don’t end up working out in the future. It’s just really hard. Alison has not abandoned her family. She loves her kids, she loves her wife very much, and her ultimate goal is to become a professor so she can move back to Hollis and teach there, so she’s not deserting anybody. It’s just growing pains.”
King said very much the same thing, but also explained the real-life realities: Shay Mitchell wasn’t ready to do the spinoff.
“I love that couple. I wrote most of their early scenes together, so it’s hard,” she says. “It’s difficult because one person wanted to move on to this show, and the other person—kudos kudos—was ready to do other things. I think we’ve handled it in a way that feels truthful and honest to who they are. It’s not been easy, but I think it’s authentic and truthful.”
Now, the show is looking forward with a new big bad that’s “very complicated,” as Pieterse says (but what’s new, honestly), and a finale that’s “a lot of experiments.”
Based on what we’ve seen so far, count us in for the long haul, even if we’re left waiting for an Emily cameo forever.
Watch the videos above for more on what’s to come!
The Perfectionists airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. on Freeform.