This post contains spoilers about the season 4 premiere of How to Get Away with Murder.
If last night's episode of How to Get Away with Murder is any indication, this season's biggest mystery isn't a whodunit. In fact, it's not about murder at all. Instead, we're left wondering what happened with Laurel's (Karla Souza) pregnancy.
Laurel might be the smartest member of the Keating Four; at the very least, she's the most manipulative. Last night, we saw her tell her father, Jorge (Esai Morales) that she had an abortion — but later in the episode, she tells the other Keating Four members that she wants to have the baby. We see her holding her stomach later on, so the latter statement appears to be the truthful one.
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The flash forward at the end of the episode, though, throws everything into confusion. We see Laurel in a medical gown in what might be a mental institution. And for some reason, Frank (Charlie Weber) and Annalise's therapist, Isaac (Jimmy Smits) are there, too. Laurel starts screaming, asking Frank where the baby is; her stomach appears flat.
Why is Isaac there? What happened to Laurel?? And #WhereIsTheBaby?!! Mysteries galore to come. Strap in. #HTGAWM
— Pete Nowalk (@petenowalk) September 29, 2017
If you're like me, your first assumption was that Laurel lost the baby, and she doesn't remember what happened. We don't know how long she's been at the institution (or hospital?) in the flash forward; this might not even be the first time she's asked where the baby was.
But as Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya points out at The A.V. Club, there could be another answer. When Laurel tells the Keating Four she wants to keep the baby, she says she's four months along. That means that in the flash forward, she'd be seven months pregnant. That's far enough along that Laurel could have (possibly involuntarily) had the baby prematurely, and the child could be doing just fine.
That's a much more positive take than imagining that in addition to losing Wes (Alfred Enoch), Laurel has also lost her unborn child. But if the baby was born prematurely and is alive, why isn't she allowed to see her child? Upadhyaya proposes that Annalise (Viola Davis) could have taken the baby, which is pretty dark, but, then again, she has already lost her biological child as well as the boy she considered a son.
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We might not know the answer to this mystery anytime soon, but in the meantime, I'm looking forward to seeing the evolution of Laurel's path to revenge.