Review: The Ghost and Molly McGee “Jinx vs. The Human World; The End”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Due to Scratch’s negligence of leaving the Chairman Cloak lying around, Jinx takes it and attempts a takeover of both the ghost and human worlds. Both the ghost and humans team up to stop her and her forces with even more joy, including Molly helping with finally getting Ollie’s dad to reconcile with Geoff, the ghost who scared him all those years ago, and Jinx is sealed away for good. To make sure no one can misuse the Chairman’s powers again, Scratch uses his last decree as Chairman to send the cloak to fly until it finds someone worthy of its power.

Later, Scratch starts getting flashes of his old life, believing he was actually a great adventurer with Aria, only to find out his human body isn’t even actually dead, but still in Brighton and living a humdrum life with no risks or challenges. Despite worries that he may lose all his memories with Molly and their friends, Scratch returns to his body. He does seem to lose all of those memories, but regains his yearning for adventure, though there is hope he may regain his time with Molly again someday and he does reunite with Aria.

OUR TAKE

As the title of the second episode pretty transparently implies, this is sadly the untimely end of The Ghost and Molly McGee. There are reports confirmed by people who worked on the show that there was seemingly some order for further episodes, but a change in management reversed things, with the final episode only ordered so the story could have a decisive conclusion. Looking at the episodes themselves, the Jinx episode definitely feels like a SEASON finale, resolving just about everything set up at the start of the second season, such as finally getting Ollie’s parents fully on the side of the ghosts they were ready to hunt to the bitter end and Jinx finally making a big swing at vengeance against Scratch (and being the only real recurring villain the show has). Basically, the slate was wiped pretty clean of remaining plots, only possibly setting up one for the cloak if it ever finds a worthy host, but even just letting it float around forever is somewhat of a resolution to that. If they ever got a third season, that would probably be a way to introduce at least a couple new characters along with a bunch of new story threads, but alas that does not seem to be happening any time soon.

That just leaves “The End”, which then gets to spend its time focusing on just definitively finishing the plot regarding Scratch’s past and basically slamming the door shut on the show’s premise…unless they decide to kill Scratch’s human body off between seasons, which oddly enough doesn’t sound too out of the realm of possibility. The revelation that Scratch is actually the ghost of a living human does work within the established rules of the world, as people can lose their spirits without actually dying (in fact the episode before this seems like it was partly there to give more ghost designs of living characters while they had the chance), though the idea that Scratch lost his ghost simply by becoming so depressed seems like a bit of a stretch. It does feel like they had the idea of Scratch’s body being alive in their back pocket to use for later. Or at least, if they came up with that on the fly for this makeshift final episode, I will be very surprised. As a finale to the entire show, it’s good enough for the circumstances. They at least got an episode to focus on giving the core dynamic of the series a proper goodbye and showing how far both Scratch and Molly had come. Molly has become a major part of the Brighton community, made several good friends and even has a boyfriend now, while Scratch has revived his zest for life and has rekindled his own greatest friendship. As someone who binged this whole show in two weeks, it’s definitely one of the better shows of the decade, so give it a watch.