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Image via CBS
The wonderfully hilarious CBS television series Ghosts is known for its facetious, playful humor. The show does not mind making lighthearted references to the past credits of series lead, Rose McIver, who portrays Samantha Arondekar. A recent Season 4 episode, "The Not-So-Silent Partner," featured a quick reference to one of her previous starring roles in the 2017 Netflix romantic comedy, A Christmas Prince, and its sequels, A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding in 2018, and A Christmas Prince: The Royal Baby in 2019, where McIver portrayed Amber Moore. It's a good time to explore how Ghosts playfully jokes about McIver's previous credits.
Sam References 'A Christmas Prince' During Season 4
Image via CBS
During the cold open of Season 4, Episode 10, "The Not So-So-Silent Partner," Sam is enjoying the fictional show-within-a-show, Bodices & Barons, with her spectral pals Thorfinn Thor (Devan Chandler Long), Flower Montero (Sheila Carrasco), Pete Martino (Richie Moriarty), and Hetty Woodstone (Rebecca Wisocky). The snooty, pretentious Hetty brags about the Woodstones' rumored relation to the British Royal Family, noting that her grandfather, Bernard Woodstone, apparently wooed a cousin of the Royal Family, married her, and brought her back to America. An impressed Sam responds, "So I’m a royal? This is just like one of those movies where a regular girl becomes a princess."
It's a swift joke, and the cheeky reference connects to McIver's filmography when she starred as Amber Moore, an aspiring American journalist, who falls in love with a royal prince, Prince Richard Bevan Charlton (Ben Lamb), in Netflix's A Christmas Prince. The two characters eventually fall in love and marry in the film’s 2018 sequel, A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding, ultimately making Amber a princess. It's a playfully amusing gag, but the joke comes full circle when Hetty's dreams of the Woodstones' Royal Family connection are ultimately destroyed. After checking an ancestry website, Samantha reveals that the Woodstones descended from an Irish commoner. Later, Thorfinn confirms the Woodstones' dark secret and his withholding of the revelation to Hetty for years due to her prejudice against the Irish.
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Thorfinn Helps Hetty Overcome the Angst Over Her Lineage
Hetty eventually overcomes her anguish about the truth of her lineage after a heart-to-heart with Thorfinn, who consoles her. The Viking explains, "You know, Thor been around for a thousand years and seen many groups of people hate other groups of people for silly reasons. But what Thor learn is that we are all basically the same. Except the Danes, whose brains are rumored to be mostly cabbage." It’s almost, but not quite, sage wisdom from the ghostly Viking. Nevertheless, the reference to A Christmas Prince acts as a great accompaniment to the larger B-plot of Hetty's moral dilemma after learning about her family's Irish heritage.
'Ghosts' Has Previously Referenced Rose McIver's Other Work
Image via CBS
Ghosts has playfully referenced some of McIver's other past works as well. In Season 4, Episode 7, "Sad Farnsby," Margaret Farnsby (Kathryn Greenwood) brandishes a copy of the Alice Sebold book, The Lovely Bones. McIver previously costarred in the book's 2009 film adaptation as Lindsey Salmon, the younger sister of the main character, Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan). During Season 4, Episode 9, "A Very Arondekar Christmas, Part 2," Jay's spirit becomes disembodied after a botched exorcism, and Pete temporarily takes over Jay's body for a while. However, after Pete's spirit finally leaves Jay's body, Jay becomes a grunting, brainless "zombie."
Of course, Sam and her ghostly friends figure out how to get Jay back to normal by the end of the episode, but not before one last trick from Jay as he jokingly grunts, "Brains!" While embracing her husband, a relieved Sam exclaims, "Oh, I hate zombies!" McIver previously starred in the zombie horror-themed hit television series, iZombie, which ran for five seasons on The CW, where she portrayed Olivia Moore. In the series, McIver's Olivia is a medical resident who unwittingly becomes a zombie and helps solve zombie-related crimes while trying to keep her undead lifestyle a secret. Thankfully, Jay avoids becoming a full-fledged zombie in Ghosts, but, interestingly, the Ghosts version of zombies are physical human bodies who lose their spirits. However, they appear to be relatively harmless, not necessarily craving human flesh after their human souls become disembodied. There's been more than a few times we've seen mention of McIver's past credits and we doubt this will be the last time.
New episodes of Ghosts debut on Thursday on CBS. Every episode of the series is available to stream now on Paramount+ in the U.S.
Ghosts (US)
Release Date October 7, 2021
Network CBS
Directors Christine Gernon, Jaime Eliezer Karas, Katie Locke O'Brien, Nick Wong, Jude Weng, Pete Chatmon, Richie Keen, Alex Hardcastle, Kimmy Gatewood, Matthew A. Cherry, Cortney Carrillo
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Rose McIver
Samantha Arondekar
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Utkarsh Ambudkar
Jay Arondekar
English (US) ·