Once a year “Ghosts” lets the rules of Woodstone Manor go slack, and this year the night is spent on an antique mirror, a séance and a question the show has carried since last spring. CBS aired “Halloween 6: The Mirror” as a one-hour, two-part special on Thursday, October 29th, at 9 p.m. ET and PT, with a stream on Paramount+. The network’s own episode database counts the two parts as the first two episodes of season 6. That makes this an unusual premiere for a broadcast comedy, a holiday special doing the work of a season opener, with the rest of the season not due until 2027.
Part One was written by Guy Endore-Kaiser and Part Two by Rupinder Gill, and CBS credits Cortney Carrillo as the director. Together they reunite Hetty (Rebecca Wisocky) with her estranged sister Margaret (Maria Thayer) while the ghosts of Woodstone try to settle what became of Pete (Richie Moriarty), who vanished in the season 5 finale, “Across the Pond”. Whether a holiday episode can carry that much, and whether the answer it gives about Pete is a kindness or a trick, is the question worth taking into the spoilers. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Ghosts” and for the cold open, the mirror plot, the closing scene and every reveal in both parts of the Halloween special.
That makes this an unusual premiere for a broadcast comedy, a holiday special doing the work of a season opener, with the rest of the season not due until 2027.”
The special opens a couple of months after the finale, with Sam (Rose McIver) away in Australia on the set of her new film, “Polar Opposites”, a storyline written to cover McIver’s maternity leave. The house is left to her husband Jay (Utkarsh Ambudkar) and to Kyle (Ben Feldman), whom CBS lists as a new series regular and who can see the ghosts as Sam does. There is a plan, and Alberta (Danielle Pinnock) is behind it, a Halloween séance to bring him home. Then Sasappis (Román Zaragoza) reveals that Pete left a standing order against it, a “do not séance”, because he feared that talking too freely about the afterlife would make his face melt.
Before anyone can settle that argument, Jay and Kyle break the house mirror during an indoor basketball game, and Jay hurries to replace it with an old-looking one so that Sam never finds out. The replacement arrives with a tenant. Margaret has been trapped in the glass since her death, caught there because she glimpsed her own reflection as she died and Hetty had uncovered the mirror to snort cocaine. Hetty has spent her afterlife blaming Margaret for telling their father about her love for a painter. Margaret, who can get out only on Halloween and only by swapping places with someone, pretends to bury the grudge, lures Hetty into touching the glass and walks free while her sister is shut inside.
Downstairs, Bela (Punam Patel) is hosting a Halloween party meant to win over Evan, a man from her gym, and she loses him to Amanda from Jay’s restaurant. Alberta, meanwhile, decides to honor Pete’s order and calls off the séance, and Kyle finds an old television ad for Pete’s travel business so that she can see him one last time. Then Jay and Mark (Tristan D. Lalla) carry the mirror off and drop it, and the glass shatters with Hetty still inside. The fall is the right type of sitcom disaster, small in cause and enormous in consequence.
Hetty gives the household until Halloween ends to reassemble the mirror and bring Margaret back to it, and the second half becomes a scavenger hunt for the one piece of glass still missing. Margaret, meanwhile, heads for Paris, the city she always wanted to see, and runs straight into the ghost boundary. Trapped, Hetty watches memories play back through the glass. She learns that she had the family quarrel backward, since Margaret loved the painter, Julian, first and told Hetty so, and Hetty, fixated on her sister’s mustache, never heard a word.
Wisocky tells TV Insider that “the mustache is a metaphor” for whatever left Hetty “incapable of actually truly seeing and listening” to the one person who might have been her ally. The joke earns its place by showing how a person can look at someone for years and see only the surface. The mirror is also the special’s best piece of design, a prison that doubles as a loophole in the ghost boundary, because a spirit inside the glass can go wherever the glass goes. Wisocky calls the hour “the most effects-heavy episode we have done, by far”, telling TV Insider that she and Thayer spent days “talking to tennis balls in front of a green screen”. The sisters make peace, Hetty is freed, and Margaret agrees to go back into the mirror so that it can be sent to Paris, to live with Abby, the daughter of Trevor (Asher Grodman).
By the end of the party, Kyle and Bela share a moment that hints at a romance. Pete’s ghost power lets him leave the estate only for short stretches, and last season he stayed away too long on the way home from England with Jay and Kyle and vanished just short of the property line. The hour jumps ahead to the anniversary of his death, when the ghosts gather for a moment of silence. Pete reappears on the very spot where he died and walks into the house, and the ghosts greet him with joy before they realize that he remembers nothing of the afterlife and behaves as if he has only just died. The special does not say where he has been or why the anniversary brought him back. The closing image of an old friend turned stranger is perhaps the best-judged beat in the hour, and it is also the riskiest, because a reset can restore a character or quietly erase him.
What the hour does to the ensemble is harder to call than what it does to Pete. With Sam away, Kyle and Jay become the house’s two living spokesmen, and ScreenRant’s Mads Misasi writes that “Kyle’s greatest potential is that he doesn’t need to replace Sam to justify his presence in the series.” Gissane Sophia of Lady Geeks Media is less settled, calling it “the first Halloween special that I can’t imagine rewatching” and finding that “Without Sam or Pete, everything about it feels wrong”, though the review likes that Feldman is now a series regular.
Collider’s Tania Hussain writes that “a sitcom that offers this kind of escape has real value” even though the show “isn’t quite the laugh-out-loud comedy it used to be”. She also credits the premiere with “wisely” avoiding “dragging out a disappearance”. Grodman, who plays Trevor, told Hidden Remote that the ghosts have just lost one eighth of their circle, since “even if he’s there, that’s not our guy.” Wisocky takes the brighter view, telling TV Insider that “one of the themes of this season is new beginnings” and that the change is “an opportunity and a challenge for Alberta for sure”. Next comes a “Die Hard” themed Christmas special on Thursday, December 10th. Whether the amnesia pays off, or merely buys time until the season resumes in 2027, may be the real test of this opening.
What Do You Think? Did the Halloween special work as a season opener, or did it lean too hard on Hetty and Margaret to hold the hour together? Will Pete’s lost memory become the season’s richest story, or a reset the show is eager to undo? And can Kyle and Jay carry the house until Sam is back?
See you on the next binge!
