'Pretty Little Liars' Showrunner Explains That Dream Sequence In Allison's Classroom

Look, sometimes you write yourself into a corner, and the only way out is a good ol' fashioned dream sequence.

This is exactly what happened to Pretty Little Liars showrunner  I. Marlene King, and she isn't afraid to admit it.

Last season, at the very end of the Season 6A finale, fans were teased with a flash-forward scene, five years in the future.

Now, in the second to last episode of Season 7 (and of all time), we finally went back to that scene of the girls entering Alison's (Sasha Pieterse) classroom.

Except this time, it was revealed the scene never actually happened, it was just part of a crazy dream Emily (Shay Mitchell) had.

After all that build up waiting to catch up to that original scene, it was something of a letdown for fans.

So why did King do it that way? In an interview with TVLine, she revealed it was because she just couldn't figure out any other way to work it into the Season 7 plot line.

King said,

I'll be super honest with you — that was one of those things we didn't have a well thought-out plan for. We did know that we wanted to leave that 6A finale giving the fans a sense of urgency and a little bit of a jumpstart into the time jump. And we really struggled, because we didn't know what that was at the time. We really struggled as a writers room to fit it into the post-time jump world. Ultimately, in an homage to the horror aspect of Pretty Little Liars, we decided that we could just have fun with it as a dream sequence.

Well, I appreciate the honesty, at least!

King went on to say she still felt the scene worked as a dream because it was a tribute to how much Emily cares for Alison.

Now that the flash-forward scene has been taken care of, there's still a lot more questions that need to be answered. (Like who A.D. is, for example.)

We'll find out whether we'll get those answers or not in just a few days, in the two-hour Pretty Little Liars series finale, this Tuesday at 8 p.m. ET on Freeform.