‘Ghosts’ Season 6 Officially Changes Everything With Major Plot Twist: “He's Not Our Friend Anymore”
Sam is a News Editor for Collider and a known lover of all things sci-fi and horror. She spends her days editing news stories, coodrinating exclusives, and working closely with writers to deliver their best work.
When she's not editing the daily news, she can be found hanging out with her wife (they're probably rewatching Ghosts for the millionth time), tweeting about romance, and cooking something delicious while belting to Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter's latest hits at the top of her lungs.
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At long last, Ghosts has officially returned for Season 6. Though we’ve been neatly dropped into another month-long hiatus, the Halloween special gave audiences plenty of treats to enjoy in the meantime. “Halloween 6: The Mirror” brings us back to Woodstone a few months after Pete’s (Richie Moriarty) disappearance and follows a chaotic Halloween night of otherworldly shenanigans when a newly purchased mirror brings Hetty’s (Rebecca Wisocky) long-estranged sister to the B&B. Ahead of the episode, I spoke to Asher Grodman and Rebecca Wisocky for an episode of our behind-the-scenes series Collider Set Stories.
During my conversation with Wisocky, we spoke about finally getting to meet Hetty’s mustachioed sister Margaret, who was previously mentioned in an off-hand comment about Hetty’s marriage to Elias in Season 1. “For a long time, I was pitching that Rose McIver should play her, but of course, she's unavailable,” joked Wisocky. McIver is taking a break from the series following the arrival of her new baby. “But who was available was the wonderful Maria Thayer. So she's fantastic. She's a wonderful match for Hetty. She was very kind and generous and funny.” Continuing, Wisocky heralded the episode as Ghosts doing exactly what it always sets out to do week after week, telling Collider:
“I think the show does what, you know, Ghosts does best. It's ridiculous and stupid and hilarious and also really touching. Hetty learns some lessons and changes her opinion about what previously had been the most pivotal moment in her life, losing out on her chance at love.”
Unpacking the opportunity of finally getting to explore this relationship on screen, Wisocky said, “I figured that there would be conflict, but it's interesting in that I assigned to her the role of having ruined my life. But she simultaneously, for the last 130 years, has done the very same thing.” Wisocky also noted the devastating historical accuracy of Hetty’s estrangement from her sister coming down to a man, saying, “I think it's interesting that it all also comes down to a man. It's disappointing and also historically obviously accurate that at this period of time, these women, their futures and their lives and their potential happiness, were entirely in the hands of whether or not they married well. […] If only they had been capable of truly listening to one another and supporting one another, things might have turned out differently for both of them.”
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Netflix Character Would Be Your Best Friend? Dustin · Emily · Wednesday · Gi-hun
Some friends drag you out of the house. Some sit with you on the worst night of your life. Netflix has written both, plus the one who tells you the truth you have been avoiding all week. Answer eight quick questions about how you actually do friendship, and find out which of them was always going to end up in your corner.
🧢Dustin(Stranger Things)
🗼Emily(Emily in Paris)
🕷️Wednesday(Wednesday)
🟢Gi-hun(Squid Game)
01
How do you usually end up making a new friend? The origin story says a lot about the friendship that follows it.
02
What is a perfect Saturday with your best friend? Friendship is mostly built out of very ordinary hours.
03
You call them at two in the morning. What happens? This is the real test of a friendship, and everybody knows it.
04
What do you want from them when you are clearly wrong? The best friendships are the ones that survive being corrected.
05
What do your friends actually value about you? The friend you attract says something about the friend you are.
06
You have a falling out. How does it go? How a friendship repairs itself matters more than how it breaks.
07
What do you actually need a best friend for? Everybody is missing something. The right friend fills that gap.
08
Ten years from now, what keeps the two of you close? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides who you get.
The Group Chat Has Spoken Your Best Friend Is…
Four Netflix characters, four completely different ways of showing up for somebody. This is the one who fits how you actually do friendship, and what having them in your life would be like.
Dustin Henderson
You do not do friendship at half volume, and neither does he. What you want is somebody who says yes to the plan before you have finished describing the plan.
- Dustin is the friend the entire show runs on: loyal past the point of sense, enthusiastic about everything, and incapable of leaving anybody behind.
- You have the same instinct. Your friendships are loud, specific and slightly ridiculous, and they last for decades because of it.
- He is also the one person who would take your strangest interest completely seriously, which is far rarer than it sounds.
- You would have a group chat. It would never once be quiet.
Emily Cooper
You are the friend who makes things happen, and so is she. Together you would be mildly exhausting to everyone around you and completely delighted with yourselves.
- Emily treats an ordinary Tuesday as something that could be turned into an occasion, which is either the best or the worst quality in a friend depending on your energy levels.
- You share her refusal to sit still. Neither of you has ever accepted a night in when something was happening somewhere else.
- She is far more loyal than people give her credit for. She defends her friends loudly, publicly, and occasionally before checking the facts.
- She would post the photo without asking. You would forgive her, because it is a very good photo.
Wednesday Addams
You have no patience for pleasant lies, and she has no ability to tell them. What looks like coldness from the outside is the most reliable friendship on this list.
- Wednesday never says a kind thing she does not mean, which makes the rare ones count for an enormous amount.
- You would rather be told the truth than be made comfortable. She is constitutionally incapable of offering you anything else.
- Underneath all of it she is ferociously protective. She simply refuses to make a performance out of caring.
- Do not expect a birthday message. Do expect her to ruin anyone who wrongs you.
Seong Gi-hun
You look after whoever is having the worst day. So does he. It is the least strategic way to move through the world and the best possible quality in a friend.
- Gi-hun is not the strongest player in Squid Game, or the cleverest. He is the one who keeps choosing to protect somebody else, over and over, at genuine cost to himself.
- You have the same instinct. You notice who is struggling and you stay with them, long after anybody would blame you for leaving.
- He is a flawed friend, and that is part of why it lands. He lets people down, then comes back and tries again, which is more than most manage.
- He would give you his last chance and never once mention that he had done it.
‘Ghosts’ Goes All Out With Flashbacks in Season 6’s Spooky Premiere
When I spoke with Grodman, who plays pants-less finance bro Trevor Lefkowitz, he confirmed that despite not having anything to do with Trevor, the Halloween special’s abundance of flashbacks had him eager to get back to set after reading the script. “If it were up to me, we'd be doing flashbacks left and right,” Grodman told Collider. “So I love when we get to do a flashback, because I cannot, sometimes I'm sure we sound like a broken record, but I cannot tell you how talented and creative our crew is. The artists who work on this show in Montreal, and particularly the costumes, and Zoë Sakellaropoulo, who does the sets. They just create these worlds in a matter of days.”
Hetty fans were absolutely spoiled with an abundance of flashbacks across the first two episodes. Wisocky felt the same excitement, getting to wear several different costumes and explore a different, less jaded era of Hetty, saying, "That's the thing I was most excited about because Carmen Alie, our costume designer, and her whole team of seamstresses and designers and craftspeople, they work so hard.” Wisocky went on to share high praise for Ghosts’ incredible costume team, saying:
“They're often given such little notice to create these elaborate costumes and flashbacks that you sometimes only see for 15, 20 seconds. [In] the Halloween episode, I think I have four or five different flashbacks. So, what a treat. And they work so, so hard. I feel like there should be a Ghosts retrospective costume museum show at a certain point with all the different eras and all the different looks that she's done because, frankly, she wouldn't have needed to go into such detail and such period accuracy, but they're remarkable creations. I'm honored to wear anything that she puts me in. But to have that many flashbacks was delicious and so fun. I like getting to do Hetty before her voice is also become so more leaden and wizened and sad, when she's a little bit more hopeful and coquettish. I like that doing that part too.”
Wisocky also graciously lifted up her hair and makeup team, Gillian Bruce and Jean Scarabin, who serve as the makeup and hair department heads respectively, as well as her personal hair and makeup people. “They get so excited when they get to do something different. People ask us all the time, what's it like to wear the same outfit every day, but these poor people have to do the same darn face of makeup and hairdo every day. So they love it when they get to play with something different,” she explained. Wisocky said Scarabin especially had a field day with getting to create four new hairstyles for Hetty. “The bangs, that was my favourite. I love to have a bang. Because especially as a curly-haired girl, it doesn't seem advisable to wear bangs, but it works with this one. So I really loved that. It was so fun.”
‘Ghosts’ Fan-Favorite Will-They-Won’t-They Duo Are “Natural Bedfellows”
Thanks to an ensemble cast with more than 10 series regulars, Ghosts has plenty of relationships — both romantic and platonic — for fans to sink their teeth into. One duo that has bewitched audiences with their particular mastery of “the secret third thing” between traditional romance and friendship is Hetty and Trevor. With Grodman having previously spoken about intentionally finding moments to leave clues that there’s always something bubbling below the surface between those two, I had to ask about the process of finding those opportunities in the script. “This is where Devan Chandler Long makes fun of us because we'll [go through the script] as a group, and then Rebecca and I will go off in a corner and just see, ‘Do you want to plant this? Do you want to plant this?’ And Devan will go, ‘Oh, they're doing it! They're doing it. They're doing the eggs. They're doing Easter eggs!’”
Grodman went on to explain that because of the nature of the series, the actors playing the ghosts have the unique challenge of barely, if at all, being able to interact with the set physically. That, in turn, leads to him and Wisocky using every tool in their wheelhouse to add more layers and dimension to the series. “There is a very limited palette of colors that you can play with, and so what I think just excites Rebecca and I so much is finding those really small textures that are just like, whether it's for an eagle-eyed viewer or it's not, if it does just enhance the overall picture,” said Grodman. “Finding the textures of the relationships between the 8 ghosts, and the people who have been around. That's so fun.”
He pointed out that the dynamic between Trevor and Hetty is simply too rich to resist returning to over and over, “Of course, just as far as relationships on the show go, Trevor and Hetty are so similar and yet diametrically opposed. They both come from these worlds of immense excess and hierarchy where they were used to being in the upper echelon of a thing,” Grodman told Collider. “Yet at the same time, they're competitive, and he's so fully sexually realized, and she's so fully unsexually realized, and that's a product of their time and their gender, and the very hard life and the very hard gender dynamics of the Gilded Age versus, you know, Trevor, who's free balling it. There's a similarity, and there's an opposition.”
At the heart of the many things that make Hetty and Trevor’s relationship so interesting is that it doesn’t look like any other relationship on the show. “We always look at these characters as like, when these two get together, [they] are the last two people you want to see emote with each other,” Grodman laughed. “It's not about the romance. It's about them fighting and the tension, and there's a lot of sexual tension, and so it's just a kind of like a will-they-won’t-they, Sam and Diane, type thing. It's a really fun dynamic again.” Continuing, Grodman left the door open for that tension to boil over again in the future, saying, “It's unlike any other dynamic on the show. So it is our own. It's just so creatively fulfilling to play with those colors because you can't find them anywhere else on the show. […] The Trevor/Hetty thing has been a simmering thing, and I continue to have faith that it's going to pop up. There's a very rich history there. They've been through a lot. So we'll see.”
When I later posed a similar question to Wisocky, she confirmed that playing with that relationship is practically second nature to her and Grodman at this point. “Well, you don't need to dig too deep. I mean, an episode doesn't need to be about Trevor and/or Hetty together or separately at all for us, for those moments to become obvious to us,” she told Collider. “Mainly because we both know our characters so well separately, and we know what their opinions are about anything that's being discussed, about how it relates to any of the other characters in the room. And most often, the most volatile conflict or difference of opinion or like-mindedness is going to happen between Hetty and Trevor. So we're not inventing things out of the blue. We're just trying to be good actors who have an opinion,” Wisocky explained. “And those two characters are just natural bedfellows. They just are.”
‘Ghosts’ Halloween Cliffhanger Will Echo Through the Rest of Season 6
While the majority of the two-part special is spent following the misadventures of Hetty and her sister, the episodes do end with a delicious cliffhanger and the return of one of Woodstone’s most beloved ghosts. In the final moments of the episode, as his friends are having a moment of silence marking his death day, Pete re-appears on the property. However, just because he’s back doesn’t mean the mystery and complications of his disappearance are over. When Pete re-forms in the exact place that he died, he has been seemingly reset to that very moment, leaving him with no memory of his last 40 years as a ghost.
When asked about the ramifications of rebooting Pete, Grodman highlighted the decades — and in some cases centuries — long relationships of the main eight ghosts. “The most interesting thing about Pete losing his memories, for me, goes back to the fact that I think that the most interesting relationships on the show are the relationships between the ghosts,” he explained. “Whether you're a big Alberta/Pete shipper, or not, it's the relationships of the eight of us that are changed. We have all just lost one eighth of this family,” Grodman continued. “He's not our friend anymore. He's a different guy.”
While we’ve seen very few flashbacks to the ghosts’ afterlives between their deaths and Sam and Jay’s arrival at Woodstone, Grodman, Wisocky, and the rest of the cast have their own ideas about what might have happened at various points in their history. “I always imagine that when Trevor showed up, he was a lot. And [he] came from a world that none of these other ghosts dealt with. It's hard to imagine Trevor living a life where he heard 'no' very often; he just kind of got everything he wanted. […] That would be a hard personality for a lot of these ghosts to handle, and I always imagine that Pete was kind of the one who was the olive branch that brought Trevor in.
So for me, it's always like, ‘Oh, that was my kind of gateway, and now he's gone.’” The ghosts are bound to have all kinds of reactions to what’s happened to Pete, and for Wisocky’s ever-conniving lady of the house, she may already be thinking of how to benefit from this particular twist. “I would imagine there's at least one or two ghosts in the room that are imagining how they might use it for their own benefit,” Wisocky laughed. “And Hetty's probably one of them.”
Wisocky also shared high praise for Richie Moriarty, who has been handed the exciting challenge of navigating this massive change to his character. “Oh my gosh, so much has changed. I mean, he doesn't know anything. He doesn't know about the relationship between the living; he doesn't know that he even maybe is a ghost,” Wisocky pointed out. “I think what a delicious conundrum to put a good actor in is to all of a sudden have to be forced to rediscover everything about yourself, live in a group of people that already know everything about you. And Richie Moriarty more than rises to the occasion throughout the season.” Grodman hinted that the Pete of the last 40 years may not be completely gone, saying, “There's a journey of Pete navigating what he remembers with what he doesn't remember. I'm very excited to see how that plays out.” Meanwhile, on a grander scale, Wisocky said, “I think someone said one of the themes of this season is new beginnings and [Pete is] certainly a wonderful representation of that.”
Ghosts will return for another 1-hour holiday special on December 10 at 9 PM ET on CBS, followed by the remaining 18 episodes of Season 6 in 2027. Stay tuned at Collider for more from our conversations with the cast and further updates on the hit sitcom. You can watch Grodman and Wisocky's episode of Collider Set Stories below.
- Release Date
- October 7, 2021
- Network
- CBS
- Directors
- Christine Gernon, Jaime Eliezer Karas, Katie Locke O'Brien, Nick Wong, Jude Weng, Pete Chatmon, Richie Keen, Alex Hardcastle, Kimmy Gatewood, Matthew A. Cherry, Cortney Carrillo
- Writers
- Emily Schmidt, John Timothy, Lauren Bridges, Sophia Lear, Guy Endore-Kaiser, Rishi Chitkara, Julia Harter, Skander Halim, Zora Bikangaga
-
Rose McIver
Samantha Arondekar
-
Utkarsh Ambudkar
Jay Arondekar
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.