GHOSTS Post-Mortem: Rebecca Wisocky Dissects Hetty’s Awkward Reunion with Molly

[Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Thursday, October 27 episode of GHOSTS, “Halloween 2: The Ghost of Hetty’s Past.”]

When Hetty’s (Rebecca Wisocky) former maid, Molly (Hannah Rose May), was brought back to Woodstone on the Thursday, October 27 episode of GHOSTS—thanks to a séance gone awry—Sam (Rose McIver) and some of the ghosts plotted to get the two women talking.

Their solution? Trap them in the vault (AKA where Hetty’s husband, Elias, died), which had walls the ghosts couldn’t pass through. Unfortunately, Sam got locked in with them…putting her in danger of suffocating to death in there.

But as Hetty continued to vent her frustrations to her husband’s mistress, Sam pointed out the power dynamics at play between Elias and Molly. And Molly confirmed she didn’t seduce Elias, she felt pressured and trapped.

“I think she’s reconciling all of the ways in which she was trapped by society, by her husband, by these gender roles, societal and class roles, and realizing and regretting all of the ways in which she could have lived her life,” Wisocky notes of Hetty. “And one of the things that I love that they’ve done is they don’t let her off the hook for the ways in which she participated in some of the societal ills of her time. She wasn’t entirely a victim. But she learns yet another lesson about feminism, and in the process is able to reconcile and see Molly as a human and as someone who suffered at the hands of her husband, just like she did.”

As the two women came to terms in the vault, things got a little close for the performers. “It wasn’t just figuratively tight—it was literally tight,” Wisocky says with a laugh. “Our set designer, Zoë Sakellaropoulo, continues to just give us all of these beautiful rooms and landscapes in which to play that are so rich and so texturally specific and detailed. You wouldn’t think that a little basement, hole in the wall, could be beautiful. But with the lighting department and the production design department, it ends up being, I think, one of the most beautiful scenes in the episode. And that’s the testament to our crew and the craftspeople people that are coming together to make our show look like a film.”

The tight space helped serve the story, too. “Truths will out when people feel like their back is against the wall,” Wisocky says. “Although Alberta and Flower kind of screwed up when they accidentally locked Sam in there, too, it was the thing that allowed the story to move forward and the relationship to move forward.”

Of course, the trio needed to find a way to get out of the vault. Enter the other ghosts, who used their collective powers to alert Jay (Utkarsh Ambudkar) to the fact that his wife was trapped.

“Another favorite thing is that Jay is the one—with the assist from the ghost Lassies—that saves the day by virtue of being a genre nerd and through his love of sci-fi,” Wisocky says. “[He knows] exactly how to get us all out and how to get [Molly] back to where she came from.”

The show will continue to have fun with how the ghosts can communicate with Jay…and he’ll take steps to make things easier. “Actual limitations provide strength for storyline, right?” Wisocky points out. “Jay is such a wonderful character, and Utkarsh, of course, does such a great job at not being able to actually interact with any of us, and he wants so badly [to]. He is a geek for all that; he loves it. He loves the mythology.”

“He’s starting to create a handbook of ghost rules, and Hetty is very appreciative of that,” she continues. “So you’ll see more of that. There are lots of new ways that we’ll be able to interact with Jay moving forward.”

And unfortunately for Hetty—but good for viewers—she’ll be around for a while. When Jay got Molly back to her proper afterlife, Hetty desperately clung on, hoping to get sucked off, AKA move on.

“As an actor, it’s obviously great fun,” Wisocky says of Hetty accidentally getting a little NSFW when she tried to go with Molly to heaven. And even though she insulted her friends, “It’s another great example of, when given the opportunity, Hetty will revert to her basest instincts, for better or for worse. Somehow, because they’re a big family and they all love one another, she’s forgiven these outbursts.”

“I think a big reason that she’s forgiven them is because many of the ghosts saw what Hetty was like when she was a child,” she continues. “They know why she’s the woman that she is. They haven’t only known her for over 100 years; many of them knew her when she was a child. One of my very favorite scenes ever is when Thorfinn interacts with little baby Hetty; that stuff is so sweet. I hope they explore more of that, the relationships of the ghosts that were there and watched some of us live there in the house before we die.”

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

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