SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for the Season 5 finale of CBS’ “Ghosts,” streaming on Paramount+ as of May 22.
Is that it for Pete? The fan favorite “Ghosts” character vanished — seemingly for good — at the end of Thursday’s two-part Season 5 finale, and star Richie Moriarty is wondering the same thing.
Moriarty, who has played the spirit of late 1980s-era Pinecone Troopers leader and travel agent Pete Martino since the show’s launch in 2021, is eagerly awaiting word from “Ghosts” showrunners Joe Port and Joe Wiseman about the fate of his character — but is bracing for the worst.
“They got back in the writers’ room about a week ago, and they’re trying to figure it,” he told Variety. “Everyone, the whole cast is a little nervous, including myself, obviously. We’re five seasons into this show, and we haven’t yet lost any of the main eight ghosts. I think at a certain point, as hard as it may be, you do kind of have to lose someone to keep the stakes of the show feeling real. So, I don’t know what they’re going to decide to do. I’m anxiously awaiting the news! I hope for my sake that it’s not Pete, but we’ll see.”
In the back-to-back episodes, “Up the Creek” and “Across the Pond,” Sam (Rose McIver) and Jay (Utkarsh Ambudkar) learn that the evil conglomerate Ever Creek Water has purchased a controlling interest in Woodstone — and plan to tear it down in order to build a data mining facility in its place. The couple is told they need to secure a historic landmark designation for the house in order to stop the destruction. Although plenty of people have died at Woodstone, none of them have lived enough of a historically significant life — until cholera victim ghost Nancy (Betsy Sodaro) reveals her secret: She was actually once a princess, until she decided to run away from her castle and come to America.
That could work — and Nancy’s necklace, found on the premises, even proves her history. But it’s still not enough for town historian Joe (James Austin Johnson). Nancy then reveals there’s a painting of her, as a princess wearing that necklace, somewhere in the U.K.
Pete, whose ghost power allows him to leave Woodstone for a limited amount of time, volunteers to join Sam and Jay on a trip across the pond to find that painting. Sam ends up having to stay in the U.S. to work on her Hollywood script, so fellow living-who-can-also-see-ghosts Kyle (Ben Feldman) joins Jay and Pete instead, and off they go to London.
But as we mentioned earlier, if Pete is away for too long, parts of his body start to vanish — something he noticed first while on vacation in Season 3. Luckily then, he was rushed home, and his body parts all returned once he was back at Woodstone. But this time, he is down to just a head as Jay and Kyle race him back home. They don’t make it in time, and soon he’s completely gone. And no one knows what happens next.
This isn’t the first time “Ghosts” has toyed with the idea of one of the main characters disappearing (or, in the show’s lingo, being “sucked off” to the afterlife). In the Season 2 finale, it was believed that Flower (Sheila Carrasco) was gone — but in Season 3, it was revealed she actually just fell into an old well.
Would “Ghosts” tease its fans with another fakeout? Moriarty doesn’t think so.
“I think it starts to feel cheap if you do it too much,” he said. “We’ll see what they’ll do. Look, this show has been like the greatest. It’s been so fun. The fact that we are finished with five seasons, and we’re going to be filming the 100th episode a couple months into Season 6, we feel so damn lucky that we’ve gotten to do this thing at all. Six seasons of anything is so unusual in this industry. So it just feels so grateful for the time I’ve had on the show.”
“Ghosts” has also spent quite a bit of time examining Pete’s history, so the show’s producers may have decided that they’ve mined all they could out of the character. In Season 5, Pete’s ex-wife, Carol (Caroline Aaron) — who had cheated on him, and wasn’t such a great spouse when they were alive — made the ultimate sacrifice by striking a deal with Elias (Matt Walsh) to save Pete’s and Jay’s souls by going to hell in place of them.
The story of Pete has unfurled over the course of five seasons as viewers learned how he died in 1985 on the Woodstone grounds after one of the Pinecone Troopers accidentally show an arrow through his neck. In Season 2, Pete’s daughter Laura gets married at Woodstone, an emotional event Pete gets to watch as a ghost; he’s also had a chance to see his grandson, Pete II, on the premises. In Season 3, Carol dies while eating donut holes at Woodbridge, and the two maintain a cordial but separate relationship; when Carol makes her sacrifice for Pete and Jay, she winds up in heaven.
Meanwhile, with his ghost power that allows him to travel outside the estate, Pete’s swagger finally wins him the affection he’s been craving from Alberta (Danielle Pinnock). The two shared a kiss at the end of Season 4, and started a relationship in Season 5.
“After learning that he can leave the property, Pete sort of moved into being a problem-solver ghost,” Moriarty said. “As things would come up, he became the person that they could send on these different missions to find andchat with other ghosts in different areas and get more information about any sort of problems that arise. That was exciting because it gives me a more active role in the Sam and Jay plot lines. And also as an actor, it opens you up to a whole new world of guest stars, too, that come in. We have such amazing casting on this show, and it’s been so fun to be introduced to all these new ghosts on all these missions that I go on.
“I love our core cast to death,” he added. “We’re like family at this point, but it’s really fun, obviously, to play with new people too. A lot of the guests that come to the mansion, we can’t interact with, so we’re sort of a peanut gallery around them. But now that I’m going out and meeting new ghosts, I’m getting to interact with them directly, which is super fun.”
Moriarty said he’s enjoyed seeing Pete’s status at the mansion rise because of his ghost power. And he has an idea for a CBS crime procedural spinoff: “It is kind of the coolest ghost power, because I get to do a lot more and meet more people,” he said. “It feels so ripe for the spinoff where I’m paired with Samantha or even Ben Feldman’s character, solving crimes. Send Pete to Dallas to find out who really shot JFK. He’d chat with the other Dallas ghosts, and they’d help him solve mysteries.”
He’s even pitched Port and Wiseman on the idea. “It does feel like it’s ripe for something like that, a comedic spin on a crime-solving procedural,” he said.
Of course, he’d still have to wear that arrow around his neck. “I think the No. 1 thing that people say to me when they see me out in the world is, ‘I almost didn’t recognize you without your arrow,’” he said. “It is funny that my character is one of the few that, by silhouette, you know who this guy is. It’s been interesting to feel so tied to that symbol. It’s a blessing and a curse, because everywhere I go, somebody’s talking about an arrow for one reason or another.”
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