#julian's death flashbacks and him and robin playing chess

[natjennie]

holy fuck ghosts has some hardcore lines that actually make me want to weep. I just remembered "I'm sorry you lost the sister you never had" "you're the sister I never had" and I was OVERCOME.

[levhach]

GHOSTS SEASON 4 TRAILER REVEAL

EDIT: after seeing the trailer that leaked today, I think I’ve definitelyyy misremembered things, either by missing key details or misremembering lines said. So please please take these with a grain of salt! I wrote this a full day after seeing the (very short) teaser so there will be stuff i missed!

As you all probably know by now, at the Edin Tv Festival today it was announced during a talk that Ghosts season 4 was being released in September, and the crowd was shown the exclusive first reveal of the trailer.

Luckily, I was in that crowd! So here’s some of the things I remember for it. spoilers (potentially) below!

none of these are in order btw, just shots that I remember happening :)

The trailer was over a rather chaotic piece of classical music - iirc it was In the Hall of the Mountain King

There is a shot of the plague ghosts running up a large staircase (presumably) in Button House. There is a substance splattered over the walls that looks like a very dark red - potentially blood?

Theres a shot of Mary turning around to face something off camera. The shot is highly saturated (but that may just be normal ghosts colour correcting) and she is standing in an empty grassy field

We see Annie (the ghost who had left before Alison arrived) leaning against a wooden panelled wall, looking worried (?) she is wearing her same maid outfit that we last saw her in

There is a shot of Thomas walking staggering down a small staircase in Button House. There is an effect which means he leaves a sort of “trail” behind him - like in movies when a character takes drugs ( i believe it’s called an echo motion effect). He looks very distressed/shocked and his voice is being played over him walking, also echoing. I can’t remember what he said, but I remember thinking “omg that’s from his death scene!” It’s been a while since i’ve seen the show but if I remembered the quote correctly Thomas may have been having a flashback? EDIT: Someone who was also there said that the voice was actually Alisons voice saying “kiss me thomas”, so maybe it wasn’t a flashback? All the shots were very quick so may memory may not be 100% accurate?

we see Robin outside holding a stone spear. Behind him there are two other cavemen, also holding stone age weapons. They are looking at something off camera - potentially they are going to hunt? We are definitely getting more backstory for Robin :)

halfway through the trailer we cut to Julian sitting on a chair next to his chess board. He says something along the lines of “are you done yet - what, there’s more?!”

we see a shot of Barclay - he’s looking cross and he says “not again!”

the captain uses his stick as a gun again and makes little ‘pew pew’ noises

i’ll add more if I remember anything else but that’s what stood out for me! Looks like we’re getting a very very interesting season!! My initial interpretation was that the ghosts seemed to be coming back to life but my friend (and indeed others at the event i talked to) all seemed to think that was hogwash so who knows!

i’m also making a post summarising some points of interest from the talk itself so check my page for that :)

[pointnumbersixteen]

Ghosthood Chronology at Button House with a Few Thoughts

(Obviously not covering whatever unknown ghosts that haunted the property in the past but have since been sucked off.)

Robin: died thousands and thousands of years ago. It’s just him and the moon left over from that time. If there were any other ghosts from his period all the way to the middle ages, they long ago got sucked off. The modern world is totally unrecognizable to the one Robin lived in, but he’s been dead long enough he’s somehow managed to adapt to all of it. Since he seems to enjoy seeing and learning new things, and seems to enjoy himself the most frequently, I suspect Robin is still a ghost because he likes to be. 

The Plague Pit Ghosts: died sometime between 1348 and 1349. This was before Button House was constructed, so presumably they just sort of wandered around the grounds at the time. I wonder if Robin used to hang out with them? I wonder if there were more of them at one point and some of them have been sucked off while others remain or if they find having a significant portion of their community there together satisfying enough that they’ve all been content to stay? I wonder when they decided to move into the basement? Was it like, right after Button (Highham) House was built or did it take them a while? And what made them decide to form their own little enclave?

Humphrey: died sometime between 1509 and 1603. Obviously, again, we don’t know what other ghosts might have been there at the time and later got sucked off, but from the ghosts we do know were present, his arrival must have reflected a huge class difference. Barring unknown sucked off ghosts, the rest of the ghosts were all lower class until Kitty came along. Like, how did the village’s worth of dead peasants react to suddenly having a decapitated lord also ghosting on the property? And how did he react to them plus a caveman? Humphrey is fantastically chill in modern times, but few Tudor noblemen actually were, so was he, like, a raging dick for the first few centuries before he mellowed out and that could be an explanation for why so many of the other ghosts just ignore him now? Or did, like, he and Robin hang out, since the Plague Pit folks seem content to be their own unit? I personally suspect that when his head ends up weird places, it’s Robin that’s putting him there. Robin’s almost certainly the one who put him Alison’s medicine cabinet, at the very least. 

Mary: died sometime in the seventeenth century, most likely in the first half of it. Annie, the sucked off Puritan, would have died in a similar time frame, and they seemed to be steady companions until Annie was sucked off. The composition of the house ghosts turns after Mary’s death from mostly peasants to mostly upper class. I wonder how Mary took the house slowly shifting from mostly peasant to mostly well off and frequently kind of snobby? 

Kitty: died somewhere between 1714 and say, the 1790s? I could probably pin it closer if I knew more about historical fashion- and presuming they went with period accurate fashion- but I don’t. Kitty’s a fairly sunny and gregarious person, but the distance between her and her predecessors in terms of class, culture, and time was pretty large. In the Thomas Thorne Affair flashbacks, she spends most of the time alone, until the duel, while Mary’s with Annie, Humphrey’s abandoned on the stairs, and Robin’s off doing his own thing. Series 2 sees her becoming friends with Mary, but that’s several hundred years after they both died. Maybe it never happened before that because when Kitty arrived Mary already had a best friend in Annie? 

Thomas: died in 1824. I suspect he’s spent most of his afterlife sighing and pining over women. Kitty seems to be in his fan club, probably because they both have romantic tendencies, but he’s never struck me as particularly close to any of the other ghosts. 

Fanny: died sometime between 1901 and 1910, but considering she identifies as Edwardian, I’m guessing it was toward the later end of that time frame. Fanny was the first ghost from recognizable modernity, with electricity and cars and such. She’s also the first to come out on our end of Victorian sensibilities and traditions, which were rather different from everything that came before them. She seems to prefer the company of Cap and maybe Pat, who died after her, but is willing to talk to- or at, at least- everyone in the house. She was the lady of the house and probably used to ordering everyone in it around. I don’t imagine her conception of herself as such changed after she died, so I imagine she took charge upon arrival, at least until Cap and Pat arrived and took over a lot of the day-to-day leadership- but they both noticeably still defer to her.  

The Captain: died in 1945 or later. I suspect 1945, personally, but it could have been longer. Pat didn’t turn up for nearly another 40 years, so I imagine he was pretty lonely in his initial ghosthood, with Fanny as his main companion (who, as the Edwardian matriarch, would have been rather more akin to his mother than him). But then, I imagine he was probably pretty lonely in his life, too. He envisions himself as the group leader, but the extent to which that is true outside of crisis situations is questionable.  

Pat: died in 1984. The world has changed enough since the eighties so that a lot of things from now are new and exciting to him but it hasn’t changed enough to be unrecognizable and he still has living family, so he isn’t as far removed from the world as the rest of the ghosts. Taking on the same sort of activity coordinator and facilitator role he had as a scout master, on a practical level, he’s the one who most frequently is actually the group leader.  

Julian: died in 1993. He lived to see the end of the Cold War, computers become common, and, depending exactly when he died, might have seen the start of the public internet, so the world isn’t particularly different for him from when he died, at least on the macro-scale. The circumstances of his death were awkward, though- naked below the waist and in some sort of sex act- and I wonder how long it took for it to stop being awkward with the other ghosts? Particularly the more repressed ones, like Fanny and Captain. He eventually developed a chess-playing friendship with Robin and I wonder when and how that occurred. Did Robin already know how to play chess? If so, when did he learn and did anyone else ever play with him? Also: did Julian ever try to smarm his way into the other ghosts’ good books or was he an obviously shameless immoral Tory from the start?