Marlene Explains Emily's Nightmare Regarding Alison 

took viewers back to a familiar scene: a recreation of the original flash forward from the closing moments of the Season 6A finale — although we didn’t get there the way anyone expected to.

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Rather than having the scene — in which the Liars entered Alison’s classroom in a panic — play out in real time as part of the story, it was shown as a dream that Emily had about Ali. Executive producer Marlene King always knew she planned to revisit it, but didn’t anticipate how tricky it would be to weave the scene into the show organically.

“I’ll be super honest with you — that was one of those things we didn’t have a well thought-out plan for,” King tells TVLine. “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

, we decided that we could just have fun with it as a dream sequence.”

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King credits executive producer Joseph Dougherty, who wrote the penultimate episode, with the idea of presenting it as a dream.

“I thought it was a great homage to how much Emily cares about Alison,” she explains. “Attacking it from an emotional standpoint, instead of from a plot or mystery standpoint, was what made it work and what made it rewarding for fans.”

We’ll have more scoop as Tuesday’s two-hour

series finale (Freeform, 8/7c) creeps ever closer, but for now, drop a comment with your thoughts on this iconic scene below.

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At least for once she’s admitting she had no idea what she was doing on this show instead of the usual “This was planned all along” obvious lie she usually spins.

“we didn’t have a well thought-out plan for” is pretty much an encapsulation of the last 3 years.

She took the words literally out of all our mouths who hated how bad the writing has been and how poorly planned the show became.

Agreed! It was a rich, smart, slowly woven, fun series that eventually got bogged down in fan service to shippers and a lack of storylines that connected. When it’s all over I think it is going to feel like two seasons worth of episodes amounted to filler material. It’s a great cast and well drawn characters on what started as a wonderful mystery but when the initial driving of the show fell away they lost the thread completely.

I’ve always wondered what the series would have looked like if when the time jump happened a new team, who wrote mystery as well as the early seasons, had a chance to play with the characters to create the new direction. ‘A 2.0’ just never worked.

I just can’t believe in Emison – sorry people who ship them, but Alison is NOT worthy!

Emison and Ezria are the 2 ships who are all kinds wrong. Alison was a bitch to the girls, period and Ezra seduced a 16 year old full knowing who she was.

Ditto! Good actors but despite the Ezria actor chemistry the set up left me as someone who could never cheer for them. And the Emison one they slapped together at the very end, with little build up and no redemption arc for Alison. It never worked for me. Painting her a victim didn’t help to erase her behavior with any of them and having Paige be the one to help Alison see the light with Emily didn’t automatically make the speed at which they were coupled work either. Had they wanted to end on the Emison pairing they needed to spend the entire season having Alison’s actions earn the pairing instead of having Emily once again be the one to give all to Alison with little in return to her.

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