[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Ghosts Season 4 Episode 12, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It and What Were We Talking About?”]
Ghosts‘ long-awaited restaurant opening for Woodstone’s Mahesh finally arrived in the latest episode, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It and What Were We Talking About?” but the celebration came with its challenges thanks to Hippie spirit, Flower (Sheila Carrasco).
Usually playing a pretty low-key role, Flower’s moment of mental clarity in this episode leads to some challenge-inducing shenanigans when she believes the end of the world is near. When the date, February 13, 2025, is uttered, it brings back to Flower, a memory of cult leader Bruce (Will Greenberg) declaring the world would end on that day.
Determined to save her friends, Flower tries warning Sam (Rose McIver) and Jay (Utkarsh Ambudkar) of the impending apocalypse and goes so far as to recruit the basement ghosts to incapacitate the kitchen crew with their ghost power. What is their ghost power, you might ask? It turns out they have the ability to give a living person cholera for a day if they walk through them.
Going to such an extreme leaves Jay without a crew to cook, and Flower faces Sam’s disappointment over the matter as the predicament leaves her and Jay uncertain they’ll even be able to open Mahesh. In the end, a solution is reached when Sam uses her ability to communicate with the ghosts to help facilitate the action in the kitchen, directing Bela (Punam Patel), Mark (Tristan D. Lalla), and Jay with the help of the ghosts speaking to her, Ratatouille style, for those who know.
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While everything works out for the best, the experience is a learning lesson for Flower who discovers that everything she was taught to believe by the cult isn’t necessarily true. “I was so excited to finally get to remember something as a character,” Carrasco tells us of Flower’s storyline in the episode. “Not only just to be able to have a story to really sink my teeth into as an actor, but for it to be something that is so dynamic and really kind of world-ending for the restaurant itself.”
Carrasco says the arc allows her to better understand Flower moving forward, “[Being] able to dive into the cult backstory was so fun because you actually get to see just how manipulative Bruce was and what a follower she was and how she believed him. It’s kind of heartbreaking, but also really endearing,” she adds.
As for why the date managed to stick in Flower’s mind, Carrasco notes, “Flower was in this cult for at least a few years. I mean, she was probably one of the top people in the cult by the time she left. We don’t know why she actually left, which I think is going to be another cool thing we can explore in the future,” she adds. “And we don’t know what happened to Bruce. We don’t know if he’s still alive, which is also very exciting, but she was in deep. And so I think that this spiel he gives at the beginning of the episode, she probably heard this almost every day for all of those years she was there… and so for her, that’s been the truth.”
Hearing the date triggered her into action, leading to the basement ghosts’ gift being revealed. But why couldn’t Flower have been the one to sabotage the kitchen, making the cooks high rather than sick? “I actually asked that and one of the things we realized was, well then that would just give the kitchen staff the munchies and not necessarily make them worse cooks. We actually saw in a Season 2 episode that getting high actually made Jay a better cook,” Carrasco points out.
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Luckily for Flower, asking the basement ghosts for help came easily because of their fondness for her. “I just love that they’re the ones that help her out and they believe her and have time for her. I think that’s a really cool relationship with them,” Carrasco adds.
While her attempt to save her loved ones from a non-existent apocalypse backfired, Flower’s lesson about unlearning the falsehoods she picked up in the cult is certainly going to stick, if she can help it. “I hope what she takes from this is that she has a newfound family in the house and what she was looking for when she left her life at law school and found the cult with Bruce, she actually found it here at Woodstone with everyone,” Carrasco says. “Unfortunately, she had to go out of her way and get lost in the commune and all those hijinks in order to find it.”
As Carrasco puts it, “I hope that she knows that she’s in a place with people she can trust and is just a little bit more skeptical of other people in general.” And she teases in upcoming episodes viewers will get to see her lucid side at play. “Without giving too much away, she’s actually very insightful and kind of has everyone’s number. And when people are up to something she catches them.”
In Carrasco’s eyes, this side of Flower is what she calls “Susan,” or her name before she joined the cult. “Susan is going to start peeking through a little bit more and having more fun with the other ghosts and surprising them in really cool ways,” Carrasco teases.
When it comes to that Ratatouille nod that helped salvage the evening and launch the restaurant Mahesh with a successful service, Carrasco says, “I’m just so happy that Flower was able to salvage a little bit of the destruction and in such a fun, cool way. First of all, Ratatouille is a great movie. I think everyone can agree on that. So it was cool to create this whole Ghostatouille episode because I think it’s something we can reference going forward and do more of actually.”
Carrasco even shares that she had hoped to go even more method with the concept. “I actually had pitched, ‘Could I please at least get confused as Flower and maybe get on Pete’s shoulders and try to actually do Ratatouille?’ But we didn’t have time for that,” she shares. Fingers crossed that vision can come to life in a future episode.
For now, stay tuned to see what else the spirits of Woodstone get up to as Season 4 of Ghosts continues, and let us know what you thought of the fun installment in the comments section, below.
Ghosts, Season 4, Thursdays, 8:30/7:30c, CBS