Season three of School Spirits is over, but it went out in a blaze of glory. A literal blaze, what with all the fire. The season featured new ghost lore and new enemies, but it still managed to keep the same level of heartfelt relationships, high-stakes drama, and quippy humor we’ve come to know and love.
Despite the fact that shows like this are hard to keep consistent while still maintaining high stakes, School Spirits manages to do it without jumping the shark or retconning what they’ve established so far. They’ve found creative ways to introduce new ghost characters (and some living characters) while also still deepening our understanding of returning characters.
This season, it was particularly interesting to see Maddie in the world of the living. She was so present in the first two seasons — and so interactive with Simon and the other human friends — that it was easy to forget she wasn’t one of them…until she was one of them again. Then, suddenly, her ability to see and talk to ghosts was complicated, not only because she had to avoid looking like she was talking to herself among her peers who mostly knew her as “the missing girl” for months, but also because she has now had a taste of both worlds. She knows what it feels like to live as a ghost trapped at Split River High School AND she knows what it’s like to live as a teenager trapped at Split River High School. Even if she couldn’t see her ghost friends, she’d know they were there and how they felt.
The only person starting to understand this feeling is Simon, who went from being a regular human who could only see his best friend Maddie’s spirit to being in the spirit world despite being theoretically alive. So Maddie’s mission this season is twofold: Get her best friend back to the world of the living where he belongs and save her ghost friends from being forgotten entirely by keeping the school from being demolished.
I would like to take this moment to shout out Maddie and Simon’s living friends Nicole and Claire. Because while Xavier had his own near-death experience that lets him see ghosts in the hospital (a very fun bit of lore made a little sadder by the fact that Xavier can see Maddie’s father but Maddie can’t), Nicole and Claire are on this ride fueled exclusively on faith in their friends. And they are undoubtedly MVPs of this season, infiltrating mean girl cliques and investigating ancient souls inhabiting stolen bodies.
To be able to sufficiently talk more about the second half of this season, I do have to warn you that we’re entering the spoiler zone for the last few episodes, so scroll away if you’re not ready.
Unfortunately, we didn’t get to see all that much of Rhonda and Quinn since their kiss in episode five, relationship-wise. However, it’s clear to me they made their relationship known at least to the other ghosts. Because at one point, when Wally and Rhonda are having a heart-to-heart in the hallway about their doors and what potentially waits for them after, Wally asks if Rhonda would go through her door if she saw it, even if it meant leaving Quinn behind, understanding they are more important to her than anyone else. Rhonda says she would, not because she doesn’t care about Quinn, but because she believes none of them are meant to be stuck in high school, literally or metaphorically. Rhonda doesn’t know how any of this works — the scars, the doors, their afterlife — but all she does know is that, as desperate as she is to move on, she’ll miss the friends she made here in this in-between afterlife. Even Wally.
And Mr. Martin thinks it’s possible they’ll all get their doors someday. He sees that Rhonda has let down some of her walls, that Quinn has escaped the literal loop they were in that was a metaphor for their own stuck-ness, that Charley is more himself than he ever had the chance to be in life. His little gays are ready for whatever comes next.
Even though Rhonda and Quinn don’t have much alone time in the final chaotic episodes of the season, they are rarely seen without one another. Even when they’re just in the background, it’s clear they are a unit, and I love that for them.
In the end, some of the ghosts are left in Limbo, either the forest version of Limbo (where Wally runs into Janet and Dawn) or plot Limbo (goodness knows what happens to Mr. Martin), so the last of the ghost group we see are all the gays: Charley and Yuri, Rhonda and Quinn. And I know they’re already dead, but I’m still glad they all “survived” and in such a way that they’ll be back if the show gets more seasons. Also, as the ghost gays let out a breath once the immediate danger seems to have passed, they realize something: The events of this season may or may not have liberated the ghosts from the boundaries of the high school.
Overall, this season was a stunning evolution of what makes School Spirits great. Even though we didn’t get to see a ton of Rhonda and Quinn in the back half of the season, their stories in the front half were so important, Quinn finding their voice and being able to express their genderless feelings and be free to be themselves, and Rhonda helping them through that and being helped in return by getting some of those tough girl walls knocked down. They’re both really great characters to have in our queer canon, and it’s been great getting to explore who they were and who they are, together and separately.
As always, this show is a beautiful depiction of and metaphor for grief and trauma and guilt and forgiveness and how those things are so deeply human that they break down barriers between age and culture and decade and experience…and even life and death. This season in particular focused on the innate fear so many of us have: being forgotten. The fear that our lives were meaningless, the hope that we made some kind of impact on the world.
The actors truly carried the weight of these topics this season. While there were still lighter moments of snark and humor, a lot of this season was heavier than the past, and Peyton List, Sarah Yarkin, Ci Hang Ma, Kristian Ventura, Milo Manheim, and the rest of the cast really embodied that. And even when Jennifer Tilly leaned into the role of cartoonishly evil Deborah Hunter-Price, the way the younger actors reacted made the stakes of what her character wanted seem real and heavy.
The way this season ended left the story open to more seasons, and I really hope we get them, because I truly feel there is so much left to explore, including but not limited to Rhonda and Quinn’s relationship and what they might have to figure out (separately, together, or some combination therein) to get doors of their own and finally move on.
