GHOST WARS – Episode Two – SPOILERS ⁓

“Great ghost stories are arguments with mortality. They don’t accept death as the end of needing people and doing things.”
—- Aurora Stewart de Peña

Val and Marilyn McGrath-Dufresne (Luvia Petersen and Kristin Lehman) and their two children, Isabel (Allison James) and Abigail (Sarah Giles), get a surprise visit froom Val’s brother Billy (Kim Coates). Billy uses his boat to smuggle stuff into Port Moore from Canada. (We don’t know what he brought in this time, but it was meant for Dr. Barker at Lambda. We know it likely came from Canada because he also delivered Canadian over-the-counter muscle relaxants to Marilyn, who is the town doctor.) Val and Billy don’t get along because Billy was responsible for the death of their younger brother Trevor some years previously, and she believes that he didn’t tell her the whole story of what happened. He eventually comes clean about that.

Isabel draws a picture of her Uncle Trevor, whom she has never met, and whose ‘ghost’ has been appearing to her Uncle Billy. Isabel’s ability to draw the creatures that others see will become important later in the series.

Then Trevor’s body washes up on shore, reasonably intact. This should be impossible since he drowned ten years earlier but Mayor Val, who does not yet believe in ghosts, suggests that someone kept the body in a freezer and then dumped it in the sea. (Val doesn’t mention it, but the town’s main employer is Lambda Technologies and they would have the capability for that.) Val asks the Coroner, Sophia Moon (Sharon Taylor), if she can test to find out if the body was kept on ice, and Sophia explains that she’s a pathologist, not a mortician.

Chewy (Nils Hognestad), Billy’s first mate, is killed when his arm is caught in the engine as he tries to repair it. Billy’s boat has a history. It originally belonged to Old Man Goler (Darcy Hula). Billy’s father, referred to as ‘Old Man McGrath’, scammed Goler out of the boat’s title, possibly in a crooked poker game. Val suspects that Goler might be behind the sudden appearance of Trevor’s corpse, so she and the Deputy Sheriff pay him a visit, only to find him hanging dead from a tree. Then Val mistakes the Deputy Sheriff (Jesse Moss) for Old Man Golan’s ghost, and shoots him in the shoulder.

When Billy brings Roman Mercer (Avan Jogia) with him to the morgue, a dolphin carcass is on the slab instead of Trevor’s body, which was apparently an illusion shared by several people. In a possibly related event, Chewie and Billy navigated through what looks like an entire pod of dead whales on their way into the harbour.

The local priest, Father Carpenter (Vincent D’Onofrio), gives Billy his own take on the afterlife, and tries to apply the notion of purgatory to the town’s plight. “Catechism defines purgatory as the final purification of the soul,” says the priest, “which is entirely different from the punishment of the damned. Sort of more like a transit point where the body and the spirit reconcile separation before the soul goes to heaven. Or hell.” Father Carpenter’s interpretation of Catholicism seems inconsistent with the Catechism, but “transit point” is something that fits well with physics theory described in the next episode, “The Curse of Copperhead Road”.

Roman says he can see the ghosts for what they really are and describes them as angry, imp-like pranksters. He tells Billy that his brother is not really visiting, but something is pretending to be Trevor. Whatever they are, the creatures seem to behave like experimental psychologists using ghostly guerilla theatre as a therapeutic tool.

Billy tries to leave town on his boat but is turned back by some sort of energy barrier. Billy reneged on his promise to take Roman with him when he left, and that could be why the barrier prevented him from leaving. Others might be affected in the same way, but one else has thus far attempted to leave by sea.

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All 13 episodes of GHOST WARS can be steamed on PLEX.

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**– Revised. Originally published in October 2017