At first glance, the CBS sitcom Ghosts is a lighthearted comedy about a woman whose life becomes way more complicated after an accident leads her to see a motley crew of spirits in her new home.
But while the Joe Port and Joe Wiseman ensemble comedy often uses death as a jumping-off point to explore life and our relationships, its latest episode touched on a much heavier subject through one of the show’s most beloved characters. In Thursday night’s antepenultimate episode of Season 3, audiences finally learned the cause of Hetty’s (Rebecca Wisocky) death at Woodstone. While the cause has been shrouded, the episode written by Sophia Lear put the series back at the top of its game amid a rather bumpy season.
In the episode, “Holes Are Bad,” Sam (Rose McIver) and Jay (Utkarsh Ambudkar) leave the spirits home alone for the weekend in an attempt to have a romantic getaway. But while the Livings are away, the ghosts discover Flower (Sheila Carrasco) is still very much alive and trapped in a well on the Woodstone grounds — and that Ralph, the basement cholera ghost, was “sucked off,” which is an underwhelming reveal. With one of the previous episodes informing how the ‘60s hippie can be rescued by using what’s attached to each ghost’s person, Flower is finally saved from that dark hole. But her rescue delves into a rather heavy topic and extends itself to Hetty’s death, which propels the show into a deeper conversation that humanizes the complexities of mental health.