Who Is The Baby In The Flashback and What Connects Her or Him To The Killer?

The most talked-about TV show of this Fall season, Scream Queens, just premiered with a double- episode full of deaths, pastel colors, on-point one-liners and unanswered questions. Here we are not afraid of getting our hands dirty, and since we love to speculate and give our opinion even when no one asked us to, today we launch a new section called Speculation Queens. The purpose of this section is to try our hand at solving some of the mysteries the show presents or, at least, fuel a little friendly discussion. So, without further ado, please find the first edition of Speculation Queens below these lines.


Scream Queens is set in present day, 2015, but the pilot episode opens up with a flashback sequence that takes place in 1995 and shows us the first of many deaths to come: the pregnant pledge who dies after giving birth in a bathtub at a sorority party. This very first scene serves to set the tone of the show, introduces Kappa Kappa Tau and its typical pledge class, and presents the audience with a handful of crucial questions: Who is the girl? Who is the baby? Did she/he grow up to be one of the characters we know? What does the Red Devil killer have to do with all this?

We won’t be getting these answers any time soon, as Ryan Murphy himself said that “the mystery of the girl dying in the bathtub and the baby is played out through the whole season”, but we’re happy to speculate! What is certain is that we will be seeing a lot more of 1995 through flashbacks, since the bathtub incident is somehow related to the killings happening in present day.

Prior to last night’s premiere we had no idea why the Red Devil would blame Kappa for a death that occurred while a girl was giving birth with apparently no foul play involved, but now we know that what happened twenty years ago was actually a murder by omission. Except for one (who is she? Another loose end that may be critical!), all of the pledges ignored their sister when she was in need of urgent medical attention, and because of that she ended up dying in that bathtub.

With this new information on the table it’s much easier to understand why the bathtub baby would blame the sorority for his or her mother’s death, thus bringing us to the next key question: is that baby the Red Devil killer? It’s obviously too soon to draw any conclusions, but it’s fair to say that, as of now, this baby has more motives than anyone at Wallace University to be targeting Kappa Kappa Tau and its pledges.


It’s also reasonable to assume that the killer is not working alone, among other things because there would be very little mystery in figuring out who is hiding behind the Red Devil mask if we could just discard right away every other character who’s ever been in a scene with them. And since when is that Ryan Murphy’s style?

So back to the main query: who is the baby in the flashback? The only thing we know for a fact is that the aforementioned baby was born in 1995, so today she/he is 20; presumably a junior at Wallace University. Grace Gardner (Skyler Samuels) is the obvious choice, even to her own eyes. Indeed, Ryan Murphy has said that Grace “is convinced she is the baby”, which probably means that she is not and we are in for a hell of a plot twist. The truth is that the bathtub baby could be any other 20-year-old character, and we won’t be able to discard anyone until we know more about their backgrounds—up to this point purposely kept under wraps.

In my opinion, though, if the baby in the flashback turns out to be the killer, then that baby can’t be Grace. Grace Gardner is not the killer. The show is written in a way that makes everyone look suspicious and gives everyone a reason to act badly. That’s how they want us to perceive it, that’s the whole point of the “whodunit” plot, and that’s why we won’t be able to scratch off Grace from the list until the very last episode of the season. Still, she is not the killer, we all know that. In this game of ambivalent personalities, Grace leans more towards the ‘good’ end of the spectrum, and even if the character has layers that we have yet to discover, I personally believe that she will remain the heroine of the story until the end.

Now, the fact that Grace is not the killer doesn’t mean that those close to her can’t be. Whether or not Grace Gardner is the bathtub baby, it’s important to note a couple of things here that may or may not be clues: when she expressed her intention to join Kappa Kappa Tau, way before the news of a serial killer wandering freely around campus broke, both her father Wes Gardner (Oliver Hudson) and Pete Martínez (Diego Boneta) strongly advised her against it. Why? It certainly looks as if they knew what was about to happen and they were trying to protect her. From my humble point of view, this only serves to introduce two more suspects:

Wes Gardner: if Grace is in fact the baby in the flashback, Wes would be one of the main suspects. He lost the mother of his child to Kappa’s antics, and that would be a good enough reason to go on a killing spree. If Grace is not the baby and Wes has no connection to that 1995 death, though, his motives are just as foggy as everyone else’s.

Pete Martínez: we know that Pete despises fraternities, sororities and everything that has to do with the Greek system, but why? What happened to him that brought him to this point? We barely know anything about this character, except for the fact that he was obsessed with Chanel just a year ago—something that seems completely out of character for him. Perhaps Pete is the baby? Perhaps he only approached Chanel when he was a freshman because he was already conceiving a plan to get his revenge? We’re only two episodes in and it’s too early to point fingers, but there is something truly unsettling about Pete Martínez so I will say it now and I urge you to mark my words: my money is on him being the killer.


Our final conclusion is that, at this point, we know nothing; but that won’t stop us from trying!