“None of this would’ve ever happened if she hadn’t...if she hadn’t...why’d she have so many secrets, Dad?” – Sidney Prescott, “Scream 3”
One advantage “Scream” as a television series has over the movies is time and “Ghosts” effectively uses those extra minutes to delve deeper into the toll it takes being the star of a masked killer’s twisted games.
So while Sidney often had to shrug off the deaths of her friends and loved ones to keep the story moving, Emma gets to react to Will being butchered in front of her like most people would. She shuts down, going into a fugue that prevents her from sparing Will’s mom the trauma of seeing her son’s bloody corpse (and I guess the show was pulling its punches last week because the shot of her screaming – visible through Will’s split-open head – is pretty gruesome). She can’t answer Sheriff Hudson’s questions. She can’t open up to the psychiatrist she sees, who prescribes her anti-depressants. And she can’t stop listening to the tape she found of her father’s therapy session.
Emma then tries to act like everything’s normal, going back to school and work, but that doesn’t do any good either. As she tells Kieran, she’s worried that someone else close to her is going to get hurt. She feels betrayed by her mom after learning she’s still keeping secrets about Brandon James. Audrey and Noah are sympathetic, their love interests having been killed too, but neither had to watch it happen. Oh, and she also has several bloody hallucinations of Will. So it’s not surprising that things get so bad that Emma has to be hospitalized.
But in the end, her breakdown helps her make a major breakthrough. Whether it’s the lack of sleep or the meds or the shock itself, her brain shakes loose a memory of her mom and dad fighting the night he left, which she had thought was about her, but was really about something from their murky past. And with that, several pieces snap into place, like Maggie having left Lakewood for several months after the massacre. Emma also realizes that the figment of Will she’d been seeing was prompting her to look at the footage Audrey took at the abandoned hospital. It backs up her theory – Maggie had been pregnant.
When confronted, a tearful Maggie confirms it (Tracy Middendorf does some nice work in this scene) and tells Emma the whole story. She found out that Kevin had cheated on her with one of her best friends (shades of Will and Nina), Brandon comforted her, and they ended up sleeping together. Her parents covered up the pregnancy and arranged a closed adoption, conveniently not even telling Maggie whether it was a boy or a girl. But now, Emma and Maggie must face the scary possibility that the child she gave away is nuGhostface.
We also get a first glimpse of Emma’s dad Kevin as part of the reveal, played by Tom Everett Scott of “That Thing You Do!” fame. Emma’s the only one who sees him and she writes off his appearance as another hallucination, but I think it’s possible the first scene they shared was real. We know Kevin’s in the area because (an ever so slightly jealous) Sheriff Hudson tells Maggie that he used his credit card a few towns over. Scott is enough of a name that I think Kevin is a Cotton Weary character, dropped in briefly here, but set up to be a bigger part of the story, whether it’s in the final two episodes or next season.
The way I see it, there’s two clear candidates for Emma’s secret half-sibling slash stalker. The more obvious of the two is Mr. Branson (hey...Branson...Brandon’s son?). Or, should I say, Mr. Palmer. Noah’s fingerprint app finally spits out a match, a college professor who had an affair with a Brooke-esque student and was a suspect when she was subsequently found murdered. It also doesn’t look great for Mr. Branson when Noah and Audrey find a bloody knife and Tyler’s cell phone hidden in his classroom. And the coup de grâce is the police storming in to arrest him right as he’s comforting a bleeding, near-naked Brooke, who was attacked in the school auditorium by nuGhostface. Of course, this sudden cornucopia of evidence against Mr. Branson is highly suspicious with two episodes still to go.
If not Mr. Branson, it stands to reason that Maggie’s firstborn is Piper. Our favorite podcaster is in full big sister mode this week, offering up pep talks, paying Emma a visit at the hospital. There’s also possible hints in her dialogue, with Piper placing emphasis on Emma’s family of survivors and again mentioning her murdered father. I think it would be delightfully twisted if it was Piper, outwardly supportive while secretly reveling in her half-sister’s pain. And I have a feeling Amelia Rose Blaire would sell the hell out of it.
Speaking of Piper, with Brooke’s backing, she shows Sheriff Hudson the Mayor Maddox blackmail video. With no choice but to come clean, the mayor is able to confirm that his wife is alive (and sidebar – she sounds like a trashy mess who could be a fun character for season two. Also, any chance she’s the friend of Maggie’s who slept with Kevin?) and then confesses to Brooke that the body was that of her mother’s drug dealer, who he found OD’d in their house and disposed of to protect their family. Hudson dismisses the situation as a distraction and I agree. Seems to be the wrap-up of this subplot as we move towards the finale.
What haunted you the most about “Ghosts?” And how much did you love Noah making mention of “The Faculty,” another film from the Kevin Williamson oeuvre? Let me know in the comments section.
