SPOILER WARNING- There are spoilers ahead for all of season one including the season finale
School Spirits is a TV series with notable actors like Peyton List, Milo Manheim, Sarah Yarkin and Spencer MacPherson. The show takes place in the fictional town, Split River, Wisconsin, and follows the main character, Maddie, played by Peyton List, navigating her new life as a ghost trapped in the high school she was killed in.
The show starts out pulling the audience in with a mystery that needs to be solved and balances the scary and sad story with some witty comments and humor. There are multiple clues thrown around throughout episodes that can lead the audience to different conclusions on who is the murderer.
The show currently has two seasons, the second being not fully completed, so I am only going to base my review on season one.
I loved the show initially and got hooked on trying to find who did it. There was so much mystery around what happened to Maddie especially because she couldn’t remember the events that took place either.
Many of the characters that weren’t ghosts still held out hope that she was alive, which we as the audience obviously know isn’t the case.
The TV show is elevated when Maddie’s friend, Simon, played by Kristian Ventura, is able to see Maddie in specific classrooms where other ghosts had died. They team up to solve the mystery using information Maddie has and Simon can get since Maddie can’t leave the school.
There is high school drama sprinkled in along with secrets that are just waiting to be uncovered.
That’s what I liked most about this show. Every episode you would have another person as a suspect or another theory on what’s happening. Whether you felt the theory was proven true or false it didn’t matter. Every episode the audience is taken on an adventure that they get to experience on their couch.
I loved the show, don’t get me wrong. It had some heartbreaking moments, but was also full of funny jokes. However, the love I had for it faltered in the final episode of season one.
In the final episode we find out that Maddie was not murdered, but actually possessed by an evil ghost and that the teacher, who was acting as a leader for the ghosts to understand this new world they were thrown into, was actually conducting studies on them.
Now this was an insane plot twist, don’t get me wrong, but at the end of the episode I was left lost. Throughout the show I was patting the writers on the back for the way all the clues seemed to fit and the hints they were cleverly leaving for the audience to connect, but then I watched the last episode and was confused what the point of all that good writing and attention to detail was if they were going to make the answer something that came completely out of left field.
We hear about this evil ghost, Janet, in the first episode. Maddie is told that she was a ghost that got to “cross over” and that the teacher helped her. In that first episode Janet seemed like a throw away character as a way to show the audience what Maddie’s end goal is, but clearly the writers had bigger plans for her.
Having Janet be the reason Maddie died, once again, completely ruins the point of the earlier episodes. There was so much emotion in the idea that Maddie was killed by a close friend or a cheating boyfriend. Maddie had a connection with what happened to her which made her even more desperate to find out what happened.
The teacher, Mr. Martin, played by Josh Zuckerman, always gave off a weird vibe to me, so I didn’t hate the idea of him being a conflict for the next season, but making him completely connected to Maddie’s death seemed unimaginable. It made her death a freak accident that occurred only because a ghost wanted to understand more about what’s happening and perform tests for scientific research. It again took all the emotion out of wanting to solve the mystery.
It also left me with so many questions, which many do get answered in season two, but not to the degree I had hoped for. Like why is Janet able to do all these things that the other ghosts can’t? What’s stopping any other ghost from possessing a human’s body both at the school or anywhere else. It’s some what of a plot hole that any person could technically be possessed by a ghost for what, forever? I also was wondering why all the ghosts even listen to Mr. Martin?
It never made sense how some of the characters were so willing to listen to Mr. Martin as if he was an expert in being a ghost just because he had some authority in his life before death.
Though I did not love the way that the season ended, I know I am going to watch and enjoy the second season when it is fully done. The show was really fun to watch and the actors were absolutely amazing in it, I just wish the mystery of it all wasn’t ruined with the final episode.
