Ghosts Foreshadowed Flower’s Sharper Season 5 Personality A Year Ago
Although Ghosts hasn’t explored Flower’s personality too deeply, the CBS sitcom did secretly hint at some upcoming character development before season 5. The ghosts of CBS’s Ghosts are the heart of the series. Thor, Sass, Isaac, Hetty, Alberta, Flower, Pete, and Trevor drive the show’s action, even though the human characters of Ghosts facilitate their misadventures.
Admittedly, the ghosts can’t leave the grounds of the Woodstone Mansion, except for Pete, and even he is limited in his ability to interact with the outside world. However, each of the ghosts has a unique power, from Thor’s ability to manipulate electricity to Sass’s powers of dream invasion. As such, they can bring about change in the outside world.
For example, Trevor might only be able to move small objects short distances, but this means that he can type. As a result, the former stock market broker has been able to return to his old career decades after dying, thanks to remote work in the Internet age. This storyline set up one of season 4’s most unexpected revelations.
Ghosts Season 5 Will Explore Flower’s Sharper Old Personality
The Show’s Creators Promised A New Side of Flower
Sass and Flower standing together in an episode of Ghosts
Throughout the show’s first four seasons, Flower was a reliably funny but largely inconsequential presence in the sitcom. Her open relationship with Thor is probably the healthiest of the many romantic entanglements between the ghosts, but her solo role in the CBS show is limited. In season 3, she was thought to be dead for seven episodes in a row.
Fortunately, the sitcom’s creators have big plans for Flower’s future. Speaking to TVInsider for their Fall TV preview, showrunners Joe Port and Joe Wiseman said that “Flower has some big developments early on. We’re going to see what she’s like when she’s a little bit more lucid, before she was so drug-addled.”
This is an intriguing premise, since Sheila Carrasco’s character has only ever appeared as a figure of fun so far. Since she died while high on LSD, attempting to embrace a bear that then mauled her to death, Flower is perpetually a little bit out of it. Her involvement with a mystical, highly suspicious cult before her death didn’t help matters.
While Ghosts season 4’s cliffhanger ending involved Jay accidentally selling his soul to the Devil via a contract with Hetty’s demonic ex, Elias, season 2’s ending saw Flower seemingly get “Sucked off” and transcend to Heaven off-screen. The reason this seemed so believable during the episodes where she was missing was because of her minor role in the show.
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Flower rarely played more than a supporting role in seasons 1 and 2 of Ghosts, so her exit seemed like a natural development. Since then, Ghosts has done a little more to foreground her character, but she has remained mostly one dimensional. Although Ghosts is one of CBS’s biggest sitcoms, the show is not without its writing shortfalls.
For example, season 4, episode 12, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It and What Were We Talking About?,” centered on Flower, but the outing didn’t introduce a new side of her or complicate the character’s straightforward persona with its plot. Due to the cult she was part of, Flower believed the apocalypse was coming.
She thwarted Sam and Jay’s restaurant launch as a result, but this plot didn’t add a new layer to the character or deepen her simplistic persona. Instead, it was a subplot from episode 18, “Smooching and Smushing,” that showed a surprising, compelling new side of Flower.
In this outing, Flower scolded Trevor for spending his income on movie memorabilia instead of giving it away to charity. Trevor and Hetty tried to teach Flower a lesson by tempting her to spend Trevor’s money on scented candles, proving she was a hypocrite in the process. Instead, Flower managed to trick Trevor into giving his income to charity.
Flower brought the movie memorabilia Trevor wanted, doubled the price, and demanded that he pay up lest Thor use his powers of electricity manipulation to destroy the props. While the human characters of Ghosts rarely receive this level of depth, Flower finally got a new, intriguing edge in this subplot.
As such, it is exciting to hear that season 5 will double down on this new, more uncompromising version of Flower. Portraying Flower as a credulous, gullible hippy was funny in the show’s first two seasons, but it soon made her feel like the show’s least developed character. After all, the rest of the ghosts are layered and complex.
Flower’s Ghosts Season 5 Character Change Is Overdue
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Hetty was initially established as a bigoted blowhard, but her backstory made her unexpectedly sympathetic. Similarly, Trevor proved to be much more than a heartless day trader when viewers learned about the circumstances of his death, and season 4 doubled down on prioritizing showcasing his humanity with his daughter’s first appearance.
Although Pete and Alberta’s season 5 romance has a lot of potential, those are two supporting stars who have already received plenty of plot focus and character growth as a result. In season 4 alone, Alberta helped Sam gain the lead role in a local drama group’s play and communicated with her great-grandniece in separate episodes.
Meanwhile, Pete solved a murder, traveled to Norway, met Sass’s crush, Shiki, and even possessed Jay’s body. Clearly, Flower has been sidelined compared to these other ghosts. Fortunately, after season 4 teased a cannier side to her personality, Ghosts season 5 can now follow through on this promise.
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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
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