Pretty Little Liars: Who Is On The "A" Team? : PLL Season 7B Spoilers: Spencer Hastings Family Dynamics Pays Homage to Sara Shepard’s Books

Spencer’s family dynamics will be explored in the second half of season 7. The show will explore Mary Drake being Spencer’s biological mother. Interestingly, this plotline was inspired by the one of Spencer’s plotlines in the Pretty Little Liars books written by Sara Shepard.

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The Spencer Hastings and Mary Drake reveal will play a huge part in the rest of season 7. “That was a huge revelation not just for Spencer, but for the Pretty Little Liars and the show and the storyline. It’s a driving engine of Spencer’s emotional story as we come back in April,” PLL showrunner Marlene King told Variety.

So how long did the writers know about this mother-daughter plotline? Not from the beginning of the show. Andrea Parker’s resemblance to the character of Spencer Hastings is just a coincidence. At the time she was cast, the writers didn’t know she would play Spencer’s biological mother. “We did not cast Andrea with that in mind, but once Andrea knew that she was going to play Mary Drake, she really did a lot of homework and started studying Spencer. She chose her hair color… she morphed into Mary Drake.”

In the second half of season 7, we will also find out more about Charlotte and Spencer’s fathers. “We will find out who Charlotte’s father is, and we’ll find out how Spencer came to be and her sort of entire family dynamic. The storyline came from the books. We have a lot of fun in the final season circling back to Sara’s [books]” Marlene explained. (In Pretty Little Liars "Heartless", Spencer suspects that she was adopted. She gets swindled when she tries to track down her biological mother. The woman, Olivia Caldwell, is a con artist who takes off with Spencer’s trust fund money. Spencer later finds out that the woman was actually her surrogate mother, but not her biological mother. Spencer’s mother used a surrogate because of heath risks related to pregnancy.)

Since Spencer’s family dynamic will be explored, we will definitely see Spencer’s parents back on the PLL in 7B. We might not get to see Spencer’s older sister Melissa, though. Actress Torrey DeVitto, who plays Melissa Hastings, is busy working on her show Chicago Med. Marlene King was asked if Melissa will be in PLL season 7B. “We talk about it all the time. She’s on Chicago Med and very unavailable to us. As much as we talk about it, I’m still hoping to get her into the finale, but we haven’t figured out how to do it just yet. But I hope she reads this and talks to her producers and helps me!”