“Don’t forget me when I’m gone,” is said in the opening credits of Paramount+’s series School Spirits, which recently wrapped its third season, leaving fans wanting more as the series is still awaiting renewal for season four.
Spoilers ahead! The series follows Maddie (Peyton List), who has gone missing and presumed dead, when she wakes up in the ghost world inside her high school with no memories of how she arrived. She is quickly embraced by the other ghosts who died over the decades at Split River High—Wally (Milo Manheim), Rhonda (Sarah Larkin), Charley (Nick Pugliese), Dawn (RaeAnne Boon), and Mr. Martin (Josh Zuckerman). While her friends in the living world, Simon (Kristian Ventura), Nicole (Kiara Pichardo, Claire (Rainbow Wedell), and Xavier (Spencer MacPherson), stop at nothing to find what happened to her. Maddie is able to communicate with Simon, the only ghost to ever be seen by the living, and they’re able to work together to find out that her body was stolen by Janet (Jess Gabor), a student from the 1950s whose life got shortened after dying in a chem lab fire with Mr. Martin. While finally getting her body back from Janet, Simon got stuck in the ghost world with his breathing body, and season three saw Maddie trying to save Simon with both sets of friends while a new threat uncovered secrets linked to the town’s founding in the early 1900s. While Xavier became an asset to the team in being able to communicate with the ghosts at the hospital, including Maddie’s dad Dave (Danny Mac), after he almost died there in season two.
While each episode answered questions and then threw ten more at you, the characters are the heart of the show. Maddie and Simon’s friendship and platonic love they have for each other literally broke barriers between the dead and the living—they could not bear to live without each other. After three seasons, they were finally able to share a hug with each other after Simon got saved. Meanwhile, Maddie and Wally, two people who would have never met if Maddie’s body wasn’t stolen, fell in love against all odds and now have to deal with the fact that Maddie is alive again and wonder if they’re love story ends in tragedy. Charley and Yuri (Miles Elliot) and Rhonda and Quinn (Chihang Ma) also found love with each other in the afterlife. While they may have been stuck in high school for literal decades, they are still very much teenagers.
Music also plays a crucial role; whoever does the scoring, major props to them. The last five minutes of the pilot are set to Phoebe Bridgers’ “I Know the End,” and it’s just perfect. That moment truly locked me in and left me wanting more. The instrumental horns at the end of the song playing while both the characters and the audience learned that Simon can see Maddie is just magic. Similarly, the season one finale uses “Doomsday” by Lizzie McAlpine in a lyrically fitting way; the song became the unofficial School Spirits theme song on TikTok. Season two featured McAlpine’s song “The Elevator,” but season three got an appearance by McAlpine herself in a flashback with Rhonda in the 60s and covered “House of the Rising Sun.” Season three also used “Chicago” by Sufjan Stevens in a drug-induced hallucination of Quinn lip-syncing the song, but also expressing their feelings of coming out as non-binary and realizing their crush on Rhonda.
Should School Spirits get renewed for another season, there are still so many questions left unsaid seeking for an answer. One of my biggest theories is that season three’s villain, Alfred Van Heidt (Michael Adamthwaite), caused some kind of evil when the river in town was split, and that is why so much death has happened to this town and why so many ghosts are trapped. And he possibly wants to keep committing it to possibly be immortal, so far as we know, he has stolen someone else’s body 4 times. And why was he so hell-bent on destroying the high school and wanting the souls there to be forgotten? This season, we also learned about the ghosts stuck at the hospital—what are their stories? The finale also left Wally, Janet, Dawn, and Maddie’s dad stuck in a realm possibly between our world and the afterlife, and will they find their way back to our world or finally cross over to the next? Meanwhile, after a fire at the school in the finale, the ghosts discover that the boundary that kept them stuck there no longer exists. What does this mean now, and how far away from the school can they travel?
So, let’s hope Paramount+ renews School Spirits for season 4 because there is still so much story to tell.
This was written by our contributing writer, Demi Tsatsaronis.
Image Source: Unsplash, Christopher Ryan
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