Why Imogen's baby isn't with Ezra and Aria on “Pretty Little Liars: Summer School”

Showrunners explain why they backed out of that crossover.

Warning: This article contains spoilers from the first two episodes of Pretty Little Liars: Summer School, "Chapter One: Spirit Week" and "Chapter Two: The Spirit Queen."

At the end of its first season, Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin, the PLL reboot gave fans a wink at a crossover with the original Pretty Little Liars when Imogen (Bailee Madison) set an adoption meeting for her newborn baby with a happy couple in Rosewood who just so happened to be Ezra (Ian Harding) and Aria (Lucy Hale). But when season 2, Pretty Little Liars: Summer School, kicks off, it's revealed that Imogen changed her mind after meeting with them.

Imogen claims she called off the adoption after she "got a weird vibe from that Ezra dude." Furthermore, it seems she wanted her baby, Estelle, to remain in Millwood, so she chose a local couple.

"When we started season 2, we were talking about where we found Imogen at the beginning of the season and how she's processing her trauma," co-showrunner Lindsay Calhoon Bring tells Entertainment Weekly. "She's had a lot of loss. She's giving this baby up for adoption. And one of the things that she's grappling with at the beginning of our season, and throughout, is postpartum anxiety."

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And what better way to explore postpartum anxiety than to have Imogen's baby remain nearby? "We thought that was really interesting for her to play the idea that your body and your mind would still feel the effects of this baby that you no longer have with you," Bring continues. "The way that we could manifest Imogen's anxiety is by her, almost in a sense, stalking her own baby, stalking the parents of her baby."

Related: Pretty Little Liars: Summer School bosses preview more horror in season 2

And although it is possible that Ezra creeped Imogen out, Bring claims there's more to that story: "Dr. Sullivan says it best in episode 1. Imogen of course says, 'I got a weird vibe from that Ezra dude.' That may or may not be true, but Dr. Sullivan gets to the heart of it and says, 'And also, the parents of your baby live in Millwood and you want to keep your baby close, you want to keep an eye on her. You're sort of obsessively stalking this child.' It really felt right to us that we would be able to play story, have the baby close, have Imogen be able to be stopping by unwanted and kind of let her play out her anxieties that way."

As co-showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa puts it, "It felt like such a great dramatization of Imogen's fear that something terrible is going to happen to the baby."

Related: Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin star Bailee Madison says Lucy Hale told her to audition

As for Ezra and Aria, perhaps one day we'll see them again to know how they're doing.

New episodes of Pretty Little Liars: Summer School hit Thursdays at 3 a.m. ET/12 a.m. PT on Max.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.