Two Spirits, One Heartbeat: The Unexpected ‘Ghosts’ Ship That Stole the Show

In Season 3, things finally get a little mutual when Alberta agrees to pretend to be his girlfriend to up his street cred after his ex-wife Carol (Caroline Aaron) dies on the property. At first, Alberta says no, and even when she takes pity on him and agrees, she shudders through the process and cringes at his pet names. However, after seeing Pete stand up to Carol, ultimately telling her off for having cheated on him in life, Alberta sees Pete in a new light. Despite her protest that this fake dating scheme wouldn’t end in the two of them falling for each other, Alberta has a brief 80s movie moment where she suddenly finds Pete extremely attractive before he puts his arrow back, and she snaps out of it. This would’ve worked as a great tee-up to continue exploring their relationship if the show had picked it up again sooner, but for the rest of Season 3, this storyline once again falls away, and both Pete and Alberta end up seeing other people.

‘Ghosts’ Season 4 Takes a Slow Burn Shortcut for Pete and Alberta

Ghosts has certainly laid the foundation for this relationship, but rather than building out the rest of their dynamic with one-on-one storylines or even tiny moments of mutual interest and commonality, for the majority of Season 4, it seemed as though this plot line had been dropped entirely. For the most part, Alberta has primarily been annoyed with Pete, and not in the thinly veiled horny way Hetty (Rebecca Wisocky) is often annoyed with Trevor (Asher Grodman), Alberta seems to find Pete genuinely exhausting. Their only interactions before, as Hetty calls it, “Facepalm 2: Peter’s Revenge,” see her cringing at his phrasing or him making fun of her ghost power.

While Alberta does have some personal growth as she reflects on her own dating past, Pete never comes up in her reverie, and he isn’t even in her storyline during “The Bachelorette Party” to witness the change or be part of the motivation behind it. For Pete’s part, he spends the episode before the facepalm incident vindicating his girlfriend Donna, clearing her name and rekindling their romance after finding out she wasn’t guilty of murder. So his about-face in the finale to go break up with her to be with Alberta also feels abrupt. These final three episodes are doing all of the heavy lifting in this relationship, and the moments between them, as well as their mutual gossip sessions with Hetty and Thor (Devan Chandler Long), definitely work, but the whole friends-to-lovers trope relies on actually seeing their friendship develop.

Alberta’s change of heart is organic to her own personal arc of finding herself worthy of a good guy, and both Danielle Pinnock and Richie Moriarty play that moment of realization beautifully. However, Pete being largely disconnected from her story and involved in a separate relationship makes their connection feel like an afterthought. With an ensemble of ten characters and the tiny runtime of 22-minute episodes, it makes sense that some of the pairings on Ghosts may not get a lot of one-on-one time.