SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from the two-part Halloween special for CBS‘ Ghosts.
More ghosts from Hetty Woodstone’s (Rebecca Wisocky) past come back to haunt her in Thursday’s Ghosts Halloween special, which finally introduces audiences to her mustachioed and estranged sister Margaret (Maria Thayer).
She arrives at Woodstone when Jay (Utkarsh Ambudkar) replaces a broken mirror inside the mansion with a similarly old-looking one from a nearby flea in the hopes that Sam (Rose McIver) won’t notice. Turns out, Margaret’s ghost is inside that “new” mirror. Well, good thing Sam is on that book tour for a while and Kyle (Ben Feldman) can also see the ghosts, so he’s able to alert Jay to the new problem at hand.
“I’ve been begging to meet my mustachioed sister Margaret ever since I mentioned her in a like almost throwaway quip in Season 1, and I’m so glad that they did it,” Wisocky tells Deadline.
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To Hetty’s surprise, Margaret’s mustache has disappeared, because her spirit has been trapped inside a mirror since her untimely death and exists as a reflection of herself. Apparently, if a spirit catches a glimpse of itself in a mirror as it passes from its human body, it’ll be trapped. That mirror used to belong to the Woodstone family. It was in Margaret’s room as she died from disease, and Hetty distracted herself from the horrors of losing her sister with lines of cocaine on said piece of furniture.
“We make such delicious light of Hetty’s adoration for cocaine, and it, in fact, would have been prescribed medicinally in health at that time. But nonetheless, she was escaping. She was escaping pain, escaping the truth,” Wisocky said. “She was, I think, disarmed and confused and made very, very uncomfortable by the fact that her sister was dying, and her sister was also the person that she loathed the most in the world. That’s an interesting landscape. I’m not at all surprised that in that moment she chose — not to do something selfish. She didn’t know that her sister was going to be sucked into the mirror, but she chose to do something to numb the pain of it.
“So I think that that’s that that’s interesting, and might be an interesting thing for her to take a look at at a certain point,” she adds.
Margaret, understandably, does not give Hetty the grace that Wisocky does. She does blame Hetty for ending up in the mirror, just as Hetty has blamed Margaret throughout her entire mortal life and afterlife for stealing her one true love.
“I think Hetty has clung to this idea that the tragic turning point in her life was her inability to be allowed true love and to marry this painter, Julian, and that her sister was the villain that prevented that all from happening,” Wisocky explains.
One might imagine Hetty’s surprise then, when, she comes to discover all these years later that isn’t the truth. In fact, her sister had expressed interest in Julian first, and Hetty simply couldn’t be bothered to listen.
“When she realizes that this fundamental pivot point in her life, she was not seeing clearly, I think that opens her up to being, I think, a little more malleable to her interpretation of love, to her expectation in relationships, and to her capacity to trust her own version of history,” Wisocky said. “So that sounds like there’s room for a whole lot of growth that could come out of that.”
She adds: “I also love learning more about young Hetty and about all the turning points in which she might have become a different, happier person. I love the historical accuracy that at this period of time, both of these young women lived in a world in which their only potential hope for happiness was to marry well, and that they were forced into competition with one another rather than being one another’s allies. All that feels very accurate and very tragic, and I love that Hetty is proven to be wrong about the opinions that she has about the history of her own life. I love it when my character is proved to be wrong.”
Hetty and Margaret make amends, and Hetty actually helped her younger sister finally fulfill her dream of seeing Paris by sending the mirror to live with Trevor’s daughter Abby. At its core, Wisocky says, forcing Hetty to take a literal and figurative look in the mirror is what the CBS comedy series is all about.
“It’s a comedy about death and regrets. It’s about all the ways in which people were incapable of living their own truths in their own lives, and you can’t help but touch on some really intense, deep themes, and ask these characters to take a hard look at what really happened and whether or not they’re actually reliable narrators of their own lives,” she said. “Hetty is an especially great character through which to do that because she so brazenly believes in her own status and her own rightness of her opinions.”
After Thursday’s two-part special, Ghosts goes on hiatus again until the upcoming Christmas episode. Season 6 premieres in the spring. Luckily, as promised, the Halloween episodes also address what happened to Pete (Richie Moriarty), but the outlook there is concerning — even if its ripe with storytelling possibility. At the end of the second episode, Pete reappears on Woodstone property at the exact anniversary of his death, but he seem to remember nothing. It’s as if he just died.
“It was terrifying for us to start the episode in a post-Pete world, because when Flower disappeared, we were really sad, but we thought at the very least she was likely sucked up. But when a ghost disappears, we’ve never experienced that before. We have no idea what happened to him,” Wisocky said. “Getting to experience being a new baby ghost all over again, and to see how the other ghosts maybe use that to their advantage, or how people will interpret or misinterpret Pete’s reality back to Pete, I think there’s a lot of fun to be had with that.”
The actress knows that audiences are likely chomping at the bit to find out what happens next.
“We’ve put them through the ringer with this oddball introduction to Season 6, and they’ve waited so long to see us…we feel badly they’re going to have to wait so long to see the Christmas episode too,” she acknowledged.
In the meantime, she left viewers with a taste of what’s to come in Season 6.
“We have our 100th episode. We are so so grateful for our fans for supporting us in a way that has allowed us to get it to 100 episodes. It’s honestly an incredibly strong season to be six seasons in. There’s so many of these episodes are just incredibly exciting and have such a really wonderful motor. You’re going to see more of Elias. You’re going to see much more of Bela. You’re going to see a lot of Nancy. There’s a really particularly beautiful and moving storyline with Sheila Carrasco’s character Flower that I think is really going to surprise people,” she said. “I’m so sorry the fans had to wait so long to see us for Halloween. I’m so sorry they’re going to have to wait more than a month to see the Christmas special. But boy, is it worth it! It’s so good. Utkarsh is full on comedy action hero mode, and there are a lot of zany things that happens. It’s the episode that has the highest stakes that we’ve ever done. I’ll leave it at that.”
The two-part Ghosts Christmas special will air December 10 at 9 p.m. ET/PT on CBS.