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Ghosts Recap: Pete’s Deck

Season 2 Episode 19 Editor’s Rating3 stars ***

Photo: CBS ©2023/CBS Somebody’s getting married! No, not Hetty and Trevor, although I would welcome a ghost wedding should the day ever come — it’s Pete’s daughter Laura and her longtime partner Brian. Sam and Jay getting on that Martino family e-newsletter has been very nice for Pete and very helpful for us, plot-wise!

Pete, of course, is happy for Laura, but obviously sad to miss his little girl’s big day. Such is the life of a ghost. “Yeah, they never tell you about all the downsides,” Flower notes when Pete laments how hard it is to be dead. But Pete’s not just going to sit there and be sad about it — Troop Leader Pete Martino is a go-getter, as long as the thing he’s going to get isn’t in any way scary or able to cause physical pain or going to lead to conflict with someone else: He wants Sam to convince his wife, Carol, to move the wedding from the deck in their backyard to the Woodstone B&B. Sam and Jay can pretend like they’re looking to get photos to showcase the B&B as a wedding venue and offer it to Pete’s family for free.

This doesn’t work, and of course it doesn’t. Not shockingly, Laura doesn’t want to get married mere feet away from the place “where her dad bled out.” But Pete has a backup plan, and he decides it’s finally time to disclose his greatest shame: That … wait for it … the deck he built on his and Carol’s house, the very same one on which Laura is supposed to get married … was never permitted. I know, scandalous. Pete’s really torn up about it. He says at that time he just “went kookalooka,” which is a made-up word Pete uses for “crazy” that will definitely come into play later in case you didn’t pick up on that by the way it was wedged into dialogue. But now Pete sees that his past disregard for the law means he might have a shot at seeing his daughter get married: He wants Sam and Jay to anonymously call the Ulster County zoning board and tip them off about the deck, forcing Carol and Laura to find a last-minute place for the wedding.

The plan works! Before long, Carol and Little Pete arrive to get plans started before Laura shows up. It’s pretty much a disaster from the jump. Pete tries to voice his opinions on what should be done for the wedding through Sam, but Carol shoots down every idea. Sure, Carol seems like a tough broad, but also it feels right that she might not consider the input from a random lady that happens to own the property on which her husband died decades ago.There is one element of the wedding Pete really wants to fight for: We see a flashback to a time when little Laura was playing wedding and Pete walked her down the aisle to her teddy bear and he handed her a bouquet of lilies; there has to be lilies at Laura’s wedding. They go to extremes to try and get this one for Pete, forging a note in his trooper manual about loving lilies — Carol, Little Pete, and Laura figure it out almost immediately. And, again, having randos being so invested in your wedding that they would “deface a family heirloom” is insanely creepy, so they cancel their plans to have Laura get married at the B&B. Though upsetting for Pete, it’s a good, rational thought.

But all is not lost! When Sam tries to apologize and uses the word “kookalooka,” Laura is stopped in her tracks. That’s her dad’s word. I guess it’s supposed to be emotional, but one can only feel so much when it all hinges on kookalooka. Anyway, Laura feels something, and that’s all that matters. What she feels is her dad’s presence, and so she will have the wedding there after all. It’ll be as close as she can get to that time when Pete walked her down the aisle to her teddy bear while she held a bouquet of orchids. Yep, that dear, dear memory of his daughter Pete’s been holding on to? He had it wrong … and that’s, as he admits, very much on him. It doesn’t matter! Pete gets to walk his daughter down the aisle on her wedding day, and although it hurts like hell — something Pete is alarmingly familiar with! — he tries his best to hold on to Laura on her special day. The story line is sweet, although I wish we got some kind of character development for Pete aside from learning about his choice to flout local permit laws. Hey, I guess it is one step closer to becoming the type of bad boy Alberta might be into. But, like, baby steps.

Speaking of Alberta, while all this wedding scheming is going on, she’s off in the more entertaining story line of the two in this episode: Crash’s head has been discovered inside a tree stump, and Alberta and Isaac team up to investigate who stole Crash’s head and disposed of it out in the woods over a year ago. If you’re like, Wait a second, who is Crash and what’s this about a dismembered head?, it’s okay! We haven’t really seen or heard much about Crash, the 1950s greaser ghost who died by decapitation, since early season one. Lo and behold, his head has been sitting in a tree while his body has been wandering around the property. I, for one, am grateful for Crash’s return if only because it means we get to hear Hetty retell the story of how she found him while out for a walk and heard someone yell, “Yo, skirt, look over here.” But also because we get a fun Isaac-Alberta team-up; they even remark upon how it doesn’t happen much but feels so right. They’re a great pairing in a show littered with them.

Pony and Bangs, as Isaac and Alberta begin to call their detective duo, interrogate most of the ghosts — again, Hetty (and Rebecca Wisocky) is the MVP here, detailing how she would’ve done it if she had been the “headnapper” — and eventually, Flower, who had been hooking up with Crash at the time, confesses. But this is Flower, and Flower … well, Flower has no idea what’s going on. When Isaac lets a little detail from the headnapping night in question slip and Alberta realizes it’s a detail only the guilty party could’ve known, Bangs has to turn on Pony. Isaac finally admits he stole Crash’s head from his body and tossed him in the woods because, quite frankly, the guy was bored and thought a little mystery might be a fun way to pass the time. Unfortunately, things got busy in Isaac’s world — there was a new season of The Great British Bake Off, for one — and he forgot about the whole thing.

Since Crash doesn’t seem too torn up about his yearlong sojourn in the tree stump, it’s mostly no harm, no foul. Also, the moment Crash attempts to pick things back up again with Flower, Flower tosses that boy’s head away one more time. Who knows when we’ll see him again! It’s a tough go of things for a ghost who already has a pretty shitty afterlife (keeping track of your head and body for all eternity? I don’t think so), but it does set up a possible Pony and Bangs reunion and, well, maybe the end justifies the means in this case.

Ghouls Just Want to Have Fun

• Alberta is only initially interested in investigating Crash’s headnapper because she finished Game of Thrones and “Momoa isn’t in the spinoff.” Spoiler alert, I guess, but Momoa gets killed off pretty early in the series! Did Alberta really finish seven more seasons of the show without her beloved Khal Drogo?

• You learn something new every day, and that holds true even in the afterlife: Isaac thought “necking” was something that “seems a bit risky” for someone in Crash’s condition.

• DJ Jay? DJ Squared? What a dork, I love him so much.

• Great news! Jerry’s going to rebuild Pete’s deck for Carol, with the proper permits this time. Thor sums it up: “Jerry will give Carol the big deck that Pete never could.”

• Pete begins to worry that Laura might be a runaway bride, but Hetty sets him straight: “Peter, relax. She’s been with the man for ten years and they have a child together; the point is no one else wants her.”

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