The season finale of the Eva Longoria-produced ABC series Grand Hotel came to a close with shocking results. After spending months searching for answers about what happened to his missing sister Sky Garibaldi (Arielle Kebbel) at the Riviera Grand Hotel, waiter Danny (Lincoln Younes) finally learned the truth — and it may have been darker than some fans were expecting.
Sky, a cook at the Miami hotel, went missing the night of a terrible hurricane. Danny decides to investigate her disappearance, going undercover at the Mendoza family-owned hotel in order to learn the truth about his sister. Unfortunately for Danny, he also happens to fall for Alicia (Denyse Tontz), daughter of owner Santiago (Demián Bichir) — but hey, that’s par for the course when you sleuth around on an ABC soap.
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As Danny looks into Sky’s disappearance, he becomes more and more suspicious of the Mendoza family, especially Alicia’s stepmother Gigi (Roselyn Sanchez). Late in the season, he learns that Sky was hooking up with Gigi’s daughter Yoli (Justina Adorno), and that the two would sneak around in a secret room where Alicia’s mother Beatriz (Eva Longoria) was found dead by suicide.
When Alicia and Danny search the room for clues, Danny discovers Beatriz’s suicide note. The note reveals a shocking Mendoza family secret: Jason (Chris Warren), the son of the hotel’s longtime manager Helen (Wendy Raquel Robinson) and custodian Malcolm (John Marshall Jones), is secretly Santiago’s biological son. It’s this note that Sky stole from Gigi in order to blackmail her for major money. Gigi feared that Santiago learning that Beatriz ended her life because she could not cope with Santiago’s secret would devastate him.
In the season 1 finale of Grand Hotel, Danny discovers that Sky was murdered by someone in the hotel, though not a member of the Mendoza family. He threatens Gigi to tell him the truth about what happened to his sister, and she spills all the tea.
Earlier in the season, we saw security footage of Gigi Mendoza (Roselyn Sanchez) sobbing in the hallway the night of the hurricane, covered in blood. Santiago had the security footage scrubbed to protect Gigi, who he believes really did kill Sky. What actually happened, however, isn’t entirely Gigi’s fault.
Gigi discovered that Sky stole Beatriz’s note from her jewelry safe (she hid it in Beatriz’s secret room in the hotel, so Gigi couldn’t find it) and chased Sky outside during the hurricane, with a gun. Sky laughed off the prospect of Gigi shooting her, but during the women’s confrontation, Malcolm hit Sky in the back of the head with a baseball bat, killing her. The blood on Gigi’s outfit came from Sky, but the only thing Gigi was guilty of was covering up the crime for Malcolm.
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Malcolm killed Sky because he couldn’t bear the thought of this secret blowing up his family — a secret which he himself knew about. Years earlier, he had overheard Beatriz and Helen discussing the truth, and kept it to himself. Sky’s blackmail threatened to hurt his family, so he killed her.
Since Malcolm is dying of cancer, Danny decides not to report Malcolm’s crime to the police in order to protect his friend Jason from further pain. Malcolm makes amends with his wife Helen, telling her that despite knowing Jason is not his biological son, he’ll always be his child. Malcolm dies, and no one tells Jason the truth about his parentage — though there’s a chance Jason may lose more than one dad. In the final moments of the episode, Santiago is shot by an unseen person.
When one mystery ends...another begins. The only issue here is that Grand Hotel has yet to be renewed for season 2 — yet another crime to be solved. (Refinery29 has reached out to ABC for comment on the show's standing.)
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