GHOSTS: Joe Port and Joe Wiseman on ‘Halloween 3’ and Revealing the Ghost Powers

It’s Halloween time on the Thursday, March 7 episode of GHOSTS!

In “Halloween 3: The Guest Who Wouldn’t Leave,” Sam (Rose McIver) and Jay (Utkarsh Ambudkar) desperately try to throw a very cool Halloween party…while also juggling a seance that they (and the ghosts) hope will bring back Flower (Sheila Carrasco). 

“We were really motivated to do a Halloween episode—and we weren’t going to let the calendar keep us from doing that,” GHOSTS co-showrunner Joe Port tells Give Me My Remote. “Those are our favorite GHOSTS episodes. It’s just a good opportunity: Last year we set in motion that it’s a way that you can try to bring a ghost back [on that day]. We thought that that would be something that they would try to take advantage of. We’ll see if it’s successful.”

Though the series is technically in the past right now, the EPs say this holiday installment is a special, storyline-dictated, treat during the strike-shortened season.

“We loved the Christmas episode last year and I think in a longer season we would definitely do it, but, no, Halloween [is it]…it is very sort of specifically-themed for this show,” co-showrunner Joe Wiseman says. “And also there is a mechanism that we’ve established that was important to the story we wanted to tell [centered around Halloween].”

But despite the timeline, “I don’t think there’s going to be any obvious, huge, time jump [to present day],” Wiseman says. “I guess we’re being a little bit loose with the timeline.”

What is ahead? “We will learn a couple new ghosts’ powers and we’ll learn about how one of our ghosts died,” Port previews.

As the writers slowly reveal the ghost powers, they have spirited debates about what they should be in the room. “We come up with various ideas, what would be a cool power? What’s a fun one, what have we not seen, what’s going to give us stories, but also not break the premise of the show,” Wiseman shares. 

For the recently-revealed Sass (Román Zaragoza) power—he can go into dreams and communicate with alive characters that way—it “seemed like a very, like fun idea that would allow us to do out of the box, we get to go to crazy places,” Wiseman recalls. “Anywhere that Jay can dream, we can go to. And then I think, most importantly, it allowed us to center Jay a little bit. It’s always a challenge with that character to get him involved in stories and I think we’ve done a great job. But you have to engineer some stuff because he can’t see or talk to 80 percent of the cast. And we all thought this power was a fun way to get him in scenes with a ghost.”

And we’ll see more of Sass’ power, too. “It’s not the last time Sass is going to try to use the power to solve a problem—it’s [just] a kind of a weird power where it requires the person to be asleep,” Port says with a laugh. “So it only comes in handy at very specific times. But we definitely want to revisit him visiting Jay in his dreams and that budding friendship.”

GHOSTS, Thursdays, 8:30/7:30c, CBS

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