After a full season of twists, turns, and gardening, the biggest mystery of NBC’s Grosse Pointe Garden Society has finally been solved.
Since the premiere fans have asked themselves one question: Who is Quiche? Aka the person Birdie (Melissa Fumero), Catherine (Aja Naomi King), Brett (Ben Rappaport), and Alice (AnnaSophia Robb) kill and bury in their club’s prized garden? As it turns out, the answer is more complicated and unexpected than we could have imagined, and it’s all unveiled in Episode 11’s “Monaco Under the Stars.”
Who dies in Grosse Pointe Garden Society?
By the end of “Monaco Under the Stars” we learn that it’s Doug’s (Alexander Hodge) father Keith (Ronald Winston Yuan) who died the night of the gala. In a twist of events, while many viewers have assumed that Quiche was killed by Birdie, Catherine, Brett, and Alice, it was actually what showrunners Bill Krebs and Jenna Bans call, “a tragic accident.”
After finding out at the gala that it was apparently her mother-in-law who killed her beloved dog Molly — another mystery that’s be unraveling since Episode 1 — a furious Alice and her friends plotted the best act of revenge. After a few drinks and relatively innocent, light-hearted scheming, they came up with the perfect plan: Destroy Patty’s treasured quilt that Keith just helped her win at the auction. And to make it even better, they’d call Patty to Brett’s garden store so she could witness the destruction of her prize.
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However, in a twist nobody saw coming, it was Keith who showed up. He saw the texts and calls Alice left Patty and came instead to save his wife the headache. Heated words were exchanged and Keith was determined to save the quilt. An intense tug of war started between Keith and the crew, with the quilt ending up in the wood chipper. With great effort, Keith was able to wrestle away the blanket, but the powerful rebound from the machine involuntarily shoved him into the wall of extremely sharp gardening tools. The wounds were instantly fatal.
As it turns out, Birdie, Catherine, Brett, and Alice didn’t commit a murder. Instead, they witnessed a freak accident.
“It’s how accidents like that happen,” Krebs tells NBC Insider. “You know? It’s always people who’ve been drinking. They’re around. They’re just saying, ‘Oh, let’s just do this fun, harmless thing.’ And then it takes a drastic turn. A dark turn. It’s really a prank gone wrong. And of course they couldn’t know that Keith would show up. They didn’t know that he’s just been through this emotional journey with Patty that would force him to yank on that quilt so hard and wanna save it.”
Why was Keith chosen to be Quiche?
The reveal likely came as a surprise to many fans because Keith was a relatively unassuming character throughout the season, removed from most of the drama. But this is actually what made him the perfect victim.
“So from the beginning we circled everyone. We thought everyone could be a suspect,” Krebs explains. “The one thing that we really wanted was to make sure that in the rear view mirror, it all felt earned and it all felt like it came from a place that was thought out. And so everyone that we kind of looked at checked up all those boxes, and Keith to us, became a really interesting person because he was one of the few people that didn’t actually deserve it in the traditional way.”
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And with the names Keith and Quiche closely resembling each other, it seems that the answer to the victim’s identity was staring viewers in the face. However, Krebs and Bans insist that that particular detail was a total coincidence.
“You know what was so funny?” says Bans. “I guess as writers we don’t have them say each other’s names. They rarely say their names. So we see ’em in scripts, but we don’t address people… So in cuts [of the episodes] we’re not hearing it that much. But my dad, funnily enough, guessed it was Keith early on, and his reasoning was Keith sounds like Quiche.”
So with two more episodes of Grosse Pointe Garden Society left, what more do we have to look forward to this season? The showrunners tease that there are “a lot more twists” and a bigger reason for the frenzied cover-up of the Keith’s death that we’ve seen so far in the series.
“We initially laid this out as we keep saying, as a thriller movie where by the end of act two, you think it’s all wrapped up. And then in the third act the call’s coming from inside the house. So something else is looming there that people don’t realize yet.”
