{"id":658033,"date":"2026-05-22T07:35:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T07:35:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/658033\/"},"modified":"2026-05-22T07:35:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T07:35:09","slug":"ghosts-season-5-finale-will-pete-return-richie-moriarty-on-cliffhanger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/658033\/","title":{"rendered":"Ghosts Season 5 Finale: Will Pete Return? Richie Moriarty on Cliffhanger"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tSPOILER ALERT:\u00a0This article contains spoilers for the Season 5 finale of CBS\u2019 \u201cGhosts<\/a>,\u201d streaming on Paramount+ as of May 22.<\/p>\n

\n\tIs that it for Pete? The fan favorite \u201cGhosts\u201d character vanished \u2014 seemingly for good \u2014 at the end of Thursday\u2019s two-part Season 5 finale, and star Richie Moriarty<\/a> is wondering the same thing.<\/p>\n

\n\tMoriarty, who has played the spirit of late 1980s-era Pinecone Troopers leader and travel agent Pete Martino since the show\u2019s launch in 2021, is eagerly awaiting word from \u201cGhosts\u201d showrunners Joe Port and Joe Wiseman about the fate of his character \u2014 but is bracing for the worst.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThey got back in the writers\u2019 room about a week ago, and they\u2019re trying to figure it,\u201d he told Variety. \u201cEveryone, the whole cast is a little nervous, including myself, obviously. We\u2019re five seasons into this show, and we haven\u2019t 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\u2019t know what they\u2019re going to decide to do. I\u2019m anxiously awaiting the news! I hope for my sake that it\u2019s not Pete, but we\u2019ll see.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the back-to-back episodes, \u201cUp the Creek\u201d and \u201cAcross the Pond,\u201d Sam (Rose McIver) and Jay (Utkarsh Ambudkar) learn that the evil conglomerate Ever Creek Water has purchased a controlling interest in Woodstone \u2014 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat could work \u2014 and Nancy\u2019s necklace, found on the premises, even proves her history. But it\u2019s still not enough for town historian Joe (James Austin Johnson). Nancy then reveals there\u2019s a painting of her, as a princess wearing that necklace, somewhere in the U.K. <\/p>\n

\n\tPete, 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut as we mentioned earlier, if Pete is away for too long, parts of his body start to vanish \u2014 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\u2019t make it in time, and soon he\u2019s completely gone. And no one knows what happens next.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis isn\u2019t the first time \u201cGhosts\u201d has toyed with the idea of one of the main characters disappearing (or, in the show\u2019s lingo, being \u201csucked off\u201d to the afterlife). In the Season 2 finale, it was believed that Flower (Sheila Carrasco) was gone \u2014 but in Season 3, it was revealed she actually just fell into an old well. <\/p>\n

\n\tWould \u201cGhosts\u201d tease its fans with another fakeout? Moriarty doesn\u2019t think so.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI think it starts to feel cheap if you do it too much,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019ll see what they\u2019ll do. Look, this show has been like the greatest. It\u2019s been so fun. The fact that we are finished with five seasons, and we\u2019re going to be filming the 100th episode a couple months into Season 6, we feel so damn lucky that we\u2019ve 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\u2019ve had on the show.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cGhosts\u201d has also spent quite a bit of time examining Pete\u2019s history, so the show\u2019s producers may have decided that they\u2019ve mined all they could out of the character. In Season 5, Pete\u2019s ex-wife, Carol (Caroline Aaron) \u2014 who had cheated on him, and wasn\u2019t such a great spouse when they were alive \u2014 made the ultimate sacrifice by striking a deal with Elias (Matt Walsh) to save Pete\u2019s and Jay\u2019s souls by going to hell in place of them.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe 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\u2019s daughter Laura gets married at Woodstone, an emotional event Pete gets to watch as a ghost; he\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

\n\tMeanwhile, with his ghost power that allows him to travel outside the estate, Pete\u2019s swagger finally wins him the affection he\u2019s been craving from Alberta (Danielle Pinnock). The two shared a kiss at the end of Season 4, and started a relationship in Season 5.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAfter learning that he can leave the property, Pete sort of moved into being a problem-solver ghost,\u201d Moriarty said. \u201cAs 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\u2019s been so fun to be introduced to all these new ghosts on all these missions that I go on.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI love our core cast to death,\u201d he added. \u201cWe\u2019re like family at this point, but it\u2019s really fun, obviously, to play with new people too. A lot of the guests that come to the mansion, we can\u2019t interact with, so we\u2019re sort of a peanut gallery around them. But now that I\u2019m going out and meeting new ghosts, I\u2019m getting to interact with them directly, which is super fun.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMoriarty said he\u2019s enjoyed seeing Pete\u2019s status at the mansion rise because of his ghost power. And he has an idea for a CBS crime procedural spinoff: \u201cIt is kind of the coolest ghost power, because I get to do a lot more and meet more people,\u201d he said. \u201cIt feels so ripe for the spinoff where I\u2019m paired with Samantha or even Ben Feldman\u2019s character, solving crimes. Send Pete to Dallas to find out who really shot JFK. He\u2019d chat with the other Dallas ghosts, and they\u2019d help him solve mysteries.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHe\u2019s even pitched Port and Wiseman on the idea. \u201cIt does feel like it\u2019s ripe for something like that, a comedic spin on a crime-solving procedural,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\n\tOf course, he\u2019d still have to wear that arrow around his neck. \u201cI think the No. 1 thing that people say to me when they see me out in the world is, \u2018I almost didn\u2019t recognize you without your arrow,’\u201d he said. \u201cIt is funny that my character is one of the few that, by silhouette, you know who this guy is. It\u2019s been interesting to feel so tied to that symbol. It\u2019s a blessing and a curse, because everywhere I go, somebody\u2019s talking about an arrow for one reason or another.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SPOILER ALERT:\u00a0This article contains spoilers for the Season 5 finale of CBS\u2019 \u201cGhosts,\u201d streaming on Paramount+ as of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":658034,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[88,72609,283543,92],"class_list":["post-658033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-ghosts","tag-richie-moriarty","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=658033"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658033\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/658034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=658033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=658033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=658033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}