The Devil’s In the Details: What Season 5 of Ghosts Is Really About

For much of Season 4, Ghosts has established two things: first, the ghosts love Jay as a key part of their little found family, even though he can’t see or hear them, and second, Jay’s restaurant, Mahesh, is struggling. Now, it’s important to know that the restaurant is having trouble is not Jay’s fault. His opening night nearly failed to get off the ground after Flower and the basement ghosts gave the line cooks temporary cholera in an attempt to save everyone from the impending end of the world. Then, shortly after opening, Mahesh became a hotspot for the local mafia. Jay was not only forced to take a popular dish (an Italian-Indian fusion appetizer he’d crafted with Pete’s help), but also forced to inconvenience other customers while under the thumb of the mafia boss.

Earlier this season, Elias returned to Woodstone with the express intent of getting at least one of its residents to sign their soul over to hell. After Hetty, Trevor (Asher Grodman), Alberta (Danielle Pinnock), and Thor (Devan Chandler Long) all refused to join him on the demonic management track — which Elias revealed allows him to visit Earth while posing as a living — he then set his sights on Jay, the most unsuspecting soul on the property. Elias poses as a publicist and promises to make all of Jay’s dreams of a successful restaurant come true. While Jay is initially hesitant to sign, the hits just don’t stop coming at Mahesh.

Just weeks after the cholera incident and the mafia intimidation, a (admittedly hot) stripper crashes through the roof of the restaurant while performing an act gone wrong. When his parachute refuses to open for the “It’s Raining Men” package, Chris (Deniz Akdeniz) falls through the roof during lunch service at Mahesh, smashes into the ghost table, which is blessedly empty, and dies right there in the middle of the restaurant. With multiple people witnessing the tragedy, word of mouth travels fast around the Hudson Valley, and Jay struggles to get patrons back at his restaurant.

In the penultimate episode, despite the strength of Sam and Jay’s marriage, they both have a bad habit of occasionally making major decisions without discussing it first. Last week, Sam hired Kyle without telling Jay first; now Jay has signed with a publicist without talking to Sam about it. While that seems harmless enough in theory, if Jay had spoken to Sam about it, she might have been able to tell him that the man posing as a publicist is actually an evil demon from hell.

‘Ghosts’ Season 4’s Cliffhanger Is More Deadly Than Ever Before

While Ghosts is a feel-good sitcom, and it’s ultimately unlikely Elias will actually kill Jay and send him to hell, the threat builds upon previous season finales with dire circumstances in a big way. Ghosts is no stranger to a cliffhanger ending — and this isn’t even the first time Jay’s fate has been left up in the air. In Season 1, the floor falls out from underneath him and Sam while they attempt to welcome their first guests, and Jay doesn’t wake up from the fall before the season cuts to black. In Season 2, we got arguably the scariest finale, in which a ghost in the house got sucked off, and we were meant to worry that it was one of the main eight. And just last year, we watched Isaac get pulled into the dirt by his old frenemy Patience. Though all of these moments certainly left us on the edge of our seats during the summer hiatus, there was a little more wiggle room with each of these season-enders.

With Season 4’s finale, it’s really unclear how Jay, Sam, and the ghosts will get out of this predicament. After Sam’s book party goes off without a hitch, including Patience’s bleeding walls working in their favor, Sam and Jay are approached by a food magazine editor, saying she wants to feature Mahesh in their next cover story. It seems as though their luck is finally turning around when we get the reveal that it wasn’t luck after all: Jay hired a publicist. And he just so happens to be in attendance at the party. Introducing a man he knows as Brett to Sam and a handful of ghosts, Jay quickly learns that this man is no publicist but is, unfortunately, an emissary for the devil, and he’s been tricked into signing over his soul. As Trevor says, you gotta read the fine print, bro.