Warning: major spoilers ahead for the Season 4 premiere of How to Get Away With Murder. If you haven't caught the episode yet, you may want to check back once you've seen it for yourself.
How to Get Away With Murder has finally returned for Season 4 following a long hiatus, and the story that seemed to be bringing our core characters back together ultimately sent most of them in opposite directions, away from Annalise. The status quo will be quite different in Season 4, which should be fun to explore. That said, the premiere also introduced the big mystery of at least the first half of the season, and it definitely wasn't funny.
In the cliffhanger flashforward that took us ahead three months, Laurel woke up in a medical facility to discover that she was no longer pregnant. She frantically began to shout for her baby while Frank and Jimmy Smits' new character hovered around her. We have our mystery of the season, and it's all about what happened that Laurel's baby was taken from her. How to Get Away With Murder executive producer Pete Nowalk spoke about how he and the rest of the team settled on the mystery of Season 4, saying this:
It takes a really long time for us to come up with our mystery for each season, and I think it's because I don't want to keep doing the same thing. I love the one we did last year, and it was really painful as well, and I didn't want to do 'Who's dead?' again. So coming into the season, Laurel being pregnant and deciding to have the baby is a huge emotional thing for our show. That's Baby Wes. Wes was the heart and soul of our show, and I still miss him. So I'm really attached to that baby, so from there, what I loved instinctively about this image was just the horror of putting yourself in Laurel's shoes. To wake up and not know what's happened to you is really terrifying and gave me the chills. Once we had that, I was like, 'Let's just go with it!' It just felt different and new to me.
Well, the good news is that nobody died. The bad news is that something was obviously done to Laurel without her knowledge and likely without her consent that resulted in the loss of her baby. Of course, we don't know what happened to the child, and at this point it could simply be down the corridor in a nursery. Still, we should probably be nervous about what has or hasn't taken place. Pete Nowalk's comments to Variety about Baby Wes may indicate that he wouldn't be so cruel as to kill off the infant son or daughter of the character he killed off in Season 3, but we can't be too sure of anything at this point. Is it possible that the writers decided Laurel would choose to keep the child, only to tragically lose it?
I certainly hope not. Personally, my money is on Laurel's dad having a hand in whatever happened to her that she quite literally lost her baby. She lied to him in the Season 4 premiere by claiming that she had been pregnant and got an abortion, and she very nearly asked him point blank (although via text) why he killed Wes. If her dad finds out that she lied and/or knows he had something to do with Wes' death, he could take drastic actions that land Laurel in her unfortunate flashforward predicament.
We can only wait and see. New episodes of How to Get Away With Murder air on Thursdays at 10 p.m. ET on ABC, as part of the ongoing TGIT lineup. Check out our fall TV premiere schedule for what you can watch on the other nights of the week.
