There was a collective gasp by General Hospital viewers on Oct. 16 when Sasha opened the door at the Quartermaine mansion and greeted Holly with, “What are you doing here, Mother?” That reaction was fitting, as it is the same way Holly’s portrayer, Emma Samms, responded to the news when executive producer Frank Valentini shared the storyline with her upon her recent return to the soap!

“I knew there was something drastic they had conjured up,” Samms told Soap Opera Digest. “I went into Frank’s office, and he said, ‘This is what’s happening.’ And I gasped! Seems to be the universal reaction to this story point.”

Sharing that she’s “thrilled” by the plot twist, Samms acknowledged that the second bombshell — Robert is Sasha’s father! — may understandably aggravate GH viewers. “It’s going to please some people, it’s going to upset some people,” she stated. “But it’s going to surprise everyone! And that’s what you want from a daytime drama.”

As viewers learned, Holly and Sasha’s last contact was when a con went bad with David Vickers over in One Life to Live’s Llanview and Holly bailed, nearly costing Sasha her life. While it remains to be seen why Holly didn’t visit her daughter the last time she blew through town — or tell Robert about Sasha back when Ethan Lovett was revealed to be Luke’s son, not his, in 2009 — Samms insisted that the soap will connect all those dots. “They’ve built up a very elaborate backstory to explain it all,” she confessed. “Which I’ve had to relay multiple times to multiple characters in the show.

“They have done a very good job of helping Holly justify it — not that she can justify it, but it’s explained how it’s ended up this way,” Samms added. “They have dug down deep into past history, the timeline, where everybody’s head was at at the time, and I thank them for that, because it must have taken some digging to come up with that! And all in all, it just boils down to the most fantastic plot twist that I’ve ever done, I think!”

Sasha’s parentage, of course, makes her and her boyfriend, Cody, first cousins, thus the urgency by Holly to finally come clean with her daughter about who her biological father is. The revelation also raises the question of why, when Sasha used her own hair instead of Cody’s a few months back for a DNA test between him and Mac, the results didn’t show a relation between her and a man who, it turns out, is her uncle. Unless this twist is just a ruse by Holly to run yet another con!

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