That Night Ending Explained: Why Did Elena Not Show Up For the Trial?

The Spanish crime series ‘That Night’ (Originally titled ‘Esa Noche’) charts a nerve-wracking journey where three sisters find themselves involved in a dangerous murder cover-up. Paula, Cris, and Elena are three sisters who visit the Dominican Republic for a stress-free holiday. However, everything changes when the other two receive a call from the youngest shortly after she accidentally runs someone over with her car. Thus, the trio finds themselves alone in the forest with an impossible predicament. As they decide to bury the evidence of Elena’s crime and flee from the country, a timer goes off, counting down the days until the truth comes out in the open. In the process, secrets and sacrifices define the state of the interpersonal dynamics in the family, leading the three women down unexpected roads. SPOILERS AHEAD!

That Night Recap

After the Arbizu sisters’ first holiday in the Dominican Republic, the middle child, Cris, falls in love with the place and decides to stay behind and open her own animal shelter in the city. Around a year later, her family, including Elena, who is now a mother to a six-month-old, as well as Paula and her wife, Luisa, comes to visit her and vacation in the area once again. The other two sisters, specifically the eldest, ridicule Cris a little for her life choices, one of which involves a relationship with a man who is clearly a gigolo. However, Paula has personal complications of her own. She and her wife have been trying to get pregnant for a long time. Right before the holiday, Paula had discovered that she was indeed pregnant.

Nonetheless, due to her own past trauma, she decides to lie to her wife about the same and considers getting a medical abortion in secret. Meanwhile, Elena is facing problems of her own. After finding an article about her sister’s clinic in the area, consisting of a picture of her and her daughter, Ane, the biological father reaches out to her. As it turns out, Elena’s pregnancy had been a result of a one-night stand on her past holiday. In the aftermath, she ghosted her hookup, Wilfredo, and failed to tell him about carrying his biological child. Therefore, now he’s come to extort her for money, threatening to demand Ane’s custody otherwise. As a result, she spirals throughout the vacation, unable to amass his large asking sum in time.

Although her sisters remain oblivious to this problem, they urge her to go out and unwind for one night by offering to look after Ane for her. However, the night ends in a total unexpected disaster. Elena ends up killing a man in a car accident and calls her sisters in a panic. Paula, the first one to arrive, decides to come up with a sanitized version of the crime to share with Cris, painting the victim as a direct threat to their sister’s life. Thus, when the latter arrives, she’s more inclined to help the other two hide the body instead of insisting on contacting the authorities. Nonetheless, the eldest daughter soon finds out that even she wasn’t made privy to the entire truth. The victim turns out to be none other than Wilfred, the father of her child. As it turns out, Elena created a plan to seduce Wilfredo, then drug him long enough to take her and Ane’s passports from him and flee from the country.

Nonetheless, the plan devolved into a violent confrontation in the woods, which ended with the police officer under the new mother’s car. Paula understands Elean’s desire to keep the truth a secret. As a result, the sisters stick to the plan of immediately flying out of the country, feeding Luisa a fake story about Cris’ mounting debt to a local crime lord. Cris figures out the truth too shortly after returning to Spain, once news breaks out about the discovery of Wilfredo’s dead body. As the authorities from the Dominican Republic uncover his text messages with Elena, the Arbizu sisters quickly become the prime suspects in the case.

After their initial arrest, ensuing bail, and court trial, their father, Javier, tries to insist upon his daughters’ innocence. Nevertheless, as they’re proven guilty in court, the only real question remains about the nature of their sentence and future extradition. When the father tries to push the sisters to bend the facts of the case, Cris ends up going to the cops to confess the whole truth. On the other hand, Javier forces the other two daughters to go on the run with him and illegally cross the border into France. In the end, the family is caught. 23 years later, Ane, now a grown woman, finds herself looking into the facts of the curious case.

Why Did Elena Not Show Up For the Trial? Does Elena Get Parole?

Once Wilfredo‘s body is found, the Arbizu sisters’ fates are all but sealed. Their amateur cover-up job has left many loose ends, including the very obvious connection that Elena has to the dead police officer. As a result, despite their attempts to run from it, their crime catches up to the family in the worst way. In the end, Elena is imprisoned, Paula serves a sentence as well for aiding and abetting the crime, while Cris walks away fairly unscathed due to her cooperation. However, while she tries to move on from the incident, raising Ane, as her adoptive mother, the past eventually comes knocking at their door again. As it turns out, Elena is trying to apply for early release on parole and wants her daughter, who is now a woman in her 20s, to testify to the court on her behalf.

While they believe this request is coming straight from Elena, it is actually entirely Paula’s plan. After serving her sentence, she has been living in the Dominican Republic in order ot be close to her younger sister and offer her help in any way she can from the other side of the prison wall. After noticing her failing health, the eldest daughter becomes convinced that Elena has contracted Tuberculosis and would not be able to survive in prison for long. For the same reason, she’s pursuing the parole and wants her niece to speak in her mother’s favor.

In doing so, she is unwittingly perpetuating the cycle initiated by Javier, wherein toxic bonds of codependency rule the dynamics within the Arbizu family. Nonetheless, a few surprising things happen at the trial. For one, Elena decides against showing up in person for the hearing, even though her presence would have undoubtedly had an impact on the trial. Although her decision remains confounding to many, Ane ends up understanding it perfectly. The latter has never met her mother and has only known of her through stories, news articles, and case files. However, through it all, she has garnered one fact about her birth mother. Everything Elena did was in an attempt to keep her daughter safe.

The convicted criminal herself comes from a tumultuous household and carries deep trauma inflicted upon her by her own mother. For the same reason, after Ane’s birth, her safety and happiness became her number one priority. When the case of Wilfredo’s death is analyzed through a certain lens, it can be argued that everything Elena did, including the officer’s murder, was to ensure her daughter’s safety. Even afterward, from Elena’s attempts to dodge the conviction for the murder to her persistent refusal to confess to the crime, all of it was done with Ane in mind. The mother didn’t want to cause her daughter any more pain by forcing her to be a part of her family’s messed-up history. As such, she decided to forsake their relationship when the latter was just a baby.

Therefore, 23 years later, Elena is continuing to put her child before herself and her own happiness. She doesn’t want Ane to be forced into a family reunion she isn’t ready for. Thus, she chooses not to show up at the trial to spare her daughter the painful presence. Despite never having a conversation with the woman, Ane understands the same. She doesn’t lie in her testimony or paint her mother out to be a monster or a saint. She simply emphasizes that, even years later, her safety and comfort remain her mother’s top priorities. Her testimony, paired with the distance in time between the present and the crime, compels the court to grant Elena her parole, finally ending her imprisonment.

Do Elena and Ane Reunite?

Across its six episodes, ‘That Night’ follows the perspectives of six different characters of the Arbizu family. The finale centers around Ane, the family member who has been at the center of the narrative from the very start. At the time of the murder and the trial, Elena’s daughter was only a baby. Therefore, she doesn’t have a direct perception of the events. After Javier and his daughters are caught, Elena and Paula serve time in prison, and Ane goes under the custody of her aunt, Cris, who becomes her adoptive mother. At the time, Elena makes it clear that she doesn’t want to be a part of her daughter’s life anymore, not if it must be from within a prison. Therefore, she relinquishes her rights to see the baby at all, urging Cris to keep Ane away from her.

However, 23 years later, Ane receives a message from Paula, stating that her mother is requesting her to testify on her behalf in pursuit of a parole. It’s what sends her deeper into the journey of trying to figure out the truth about the night of Wilfredo’s murder. Like many others, Ane knows that murder is an extreme reaction despite the severity of the situation. Elena could’ve alerted the authorities or found another way to legally deal with Wilfredo’s uncouth threats. Nonetheless, she chooses to go down a dark path and then continues to lie about it. Until the end, Elena’s last recollection of the night claims that after Wilfredo realized that he had been drugged, he physically attacked the other.

As a result, an argument can be made that Elena’s actions, which resulted in his death, were a result of self-defence. Nonetheless, CCTV footage proves that she failed when she tried to drug his drink at the restaurant. Thus, she has been lying about a crucial aspect of the crime, namely her level of intention behind the murder, from the very start. This fact likely sticks with Ane, cementing her mother as a murderer by every sense of the definition. Therefore, even though she chooses to testify in her favor, when it comes time to meet her after her release, she decides to take her exit. Ane isn’t yet ready to face her biological mother, and she might never be. Even though Elena knows this, she still can’t help but hope she might get to see her daughter again. Nonetheless, in the end, when she’s released, her sisters are there for her.

Does Luisa Leave Paula? What Happens to Her Baby?

Over the course of the series, Elena isn’t the only one dealing with the complex emotions of motherhood. Her eldest sister, Paula, also finds herself in a similar boat. All the Arbizu sisters have a similar source of their childhood trauma, which revolves around their mother. It’s what has bound them together in a codependent and, at times, toxic dynamic. Ever since Maria and Roberto’s deaths, Javier has tried to hold onto the family with both hands, inadvertently choking them in the process. As a result, he has created a certain pressure on the girls, especially Paula, who often finds herself carrying the weight of the family’s problems. She needs to be a problem solver for her sisters to the point where she’s even willing to condemn herself and bury a body for them.

Paula’s wife, Luisa, sees the family dynamic for what it is. She knows Javier and the others are being unfair to her wife and asking her to sacrifice far too much at every turn. For the same reason, she tries to walk away from Paula’s life when the case initially begins to unravel. She’s worried that their relationship and the family that they’re building together would always take a backseat in her wife’s list of priorities. Ultimately, this fear is proven right when Paula allows her father to dictate her actions and runs away with him to illegally cross the French border. Luisa had been looking into safe ways to escape conviction, one of which included seeking asylum in Sweden.

Nonetheless, Paula chooses to abandon all of that and let Javier bully her into following orders. Worse yet, in doing so, she directly puts her own baby’s life at risk. The family treks through forests, which isn’t an entirely safe activity for a pregnant woman. It becomes even more dangerous when cops find them, leading to a confrontation, wherein Paula ends up falling to the forest floor in an early attempt to escape. This fall leads to the termination of her pregnancy. In the end, this arrives as a wake-up call for Luisa. She could’ve made peace with never being the most important person to her wife. However, she refuses to make a future with someone who won’t even put their own kid first. As a result, Luisa ends up walking away, leaving Paula alone with her family.

What Happened to the Arbizu Sisters’ Mother? Who is Roberto?

The incident of the night of Maria and Roberto’s death remains at the center of the narrative, haunting and influencing every character and their choices. In 2003, something profoundly traumatic happened to the Arbizu family. The matriarch, Maria, had a long-suffering history with mental illness. One night, she ended up locking herself inside the bathroom with her two toddler kids, Elena and Roberto. She seemed convinced that there was something wrong with her kids and tried to drown them in the bathtub. Paula, who herself was a kid, was the only one around at the time. She tried to call Cris for help, who was playing with the other kids on the streets. Nonetheless, her sister rebuked her calls.

Eventually, Paula was able to break through the bathroom door and stop her mother. Nonetheless, Maria ended up overpowering her and continued on with her episode. She took both her babies and jumped out of their apartment’s balcony. The impact of the fall killed her and Roberto instantly, while Elena was able to survive with only some scratches. As a result, one single night ended up changing the course of the Arbizu family’s life. Instead of facing the reality of his wife’s depression, Javier began blaming his daughters, Paula and Cris, for being unable to save their family.

This instilled an early lesson in the kids that they must do everything in their power for the best of the family. Even when Paul and Cris try to break out of this cycle, their actions remain influenced by it. On the other hand, Elena develops a strange relationship with motherhood. She begins to question her mother’s actions and wonders if even her abuse was a manifestation of her love. Therefore, her own relationship with Ane becomes influenced by it. She becomes terrified of the idea of losing her daughter in any way because she doesn’t want Ane to think her mother didn’t love her. Thus, she ends up going too far in her protectiveness to the point of homicide.