Whodunnit

"Whodunnit" is the twenty-first episode of Season 2 in the American sitcom Ghosts and its 39th episode overall. It premiered on May 4, 2023.

Synopsis[]

Sam, Jay and the ghosts go into detective mode when Sam's podcast editor gives her one last episode to wrap up Alberta's murder. Also, Trevor, Flower and Pete discover an email from a Nigerian prince asking for help.

Plot[]

A plot: The new editor of the Ulster County Review, Spencer Magnussen Cooke, gives Sam one more episode to wrap up her podcast about Alberta's murder. He makes the deadline for the episode tomorrow, giving Sam one day to finish solving Alberta's murder. Jay builds a "murder board" with red string and information from the murder to help solve it.

Alberta flashes back to the night of her murder: New Year's Eve, 1928. Hetty is shown watching her son Thomas Woodstone argue with Alberta's bootlegger boyfriend Earl Boudreaux, supposedly over money. Thorfinn compliments Hetty on her son's fun party. Sasappis and Isaac are watching Alberta get ready with Earl in her dressing room, hoping to watch them have sex. But Earl leaves and a bottle of moonshine is left outside Alberta's room after Earl leaves. She drinks it and is poisoned to death from it.

Jay believes Teresa, Alberta's sister, is the murderer because the note to Earl about getting rid of Alberta so they could be together is signed "T," and Teresa began dating Earl shortly after Alberta died. Alberta wants it to be Clara, the singer she used to sing backup for. Alberta ratted Clara out for bootlegging to get the lead singing job, and Clara was at the party after spending only one night in jail. Jay notes that's an extremely short sentence for bootlegging, meaning Clara might have cut a deal with the cops. Sasappis remembers the cops showed up unusually faster after the murder, which means that Clara wouldn't have killed Alberta, because she was trying to get her arrested for bootlegging.

Jay suggests they look into the murder weapon, strychnine, which is the main ingredient in rat poison. They used to keep the rat poison in the basement, so the gang heads down to ask the basement ghosts if they saw anything the night of the party. The basement ghosts remember that they saw a man with a scar on his face grabbing the rat poison and saying "that'll teach Alberta to face-palm me." Jay figures out that must've been Al Capone, who was at the party that night and Alberta rejected.

But just when they think this murder mystery is solved, Nigel Chessum comes in. He recognizes Al Capone and witnessed him at the party with the rat poison. In a flashback we see Al Capone pouring the rat poison into the bottle of moonshine, but then he tries to drink it himself, because he doesn't want to live if Alberta doesn't want him. Teresa, Alberta's sister, catches him and takes the bottle away from him. Nigel identifies Teresa on the board as the woman he last saw with the poisoned bottle of moonshine.

Now that all signs point to Alberta's sister as her murderer and Alberta is stricken, Hetty speaks up: she was there that night and has known who Alberta's murderer was the whole time. She knows it wasn't Alberta's sister, but was her son, Thomas Woodstone. Teresa gave the bottle to Thomas and told her to get rid of it, but Thomas went and placed the bottle in front of Alberta's dressing room, knocked, and went away. Hetty reveals Thomas had been having an affair with Earl, and the fight over a "bootlegging deal" that Alberta thought they were having that night was actually a fight over Earl not breaking things off with Alberta and instead ending things with Thomas. Alberta is furious Hetty never told her that she knew who murdered her. Isaac claims he always knew Thomas was gay.

Hetty tries to apologize to Alberta for not telling her sooner. Alberta rejects her apology.

B plot: Pete has an email account which he uses to receive an email from Reader's Digest with their "joke of the day." Trevor helps him with this. Pete receives a second email today from a Nigerian Prince asking for $1,000 in the classic Nigerian prince scam. Trevor, Pete, and Flower all fall for it and use Sam and Jay's bank account to help the prince. Excited to find out if they saved the prince, they google "Nigerian prince" and find out it's a well-known scam. They admit their error to Sam and apologize. She reveals she got a fraud alert on her phone an hour ago and canceled the transfer, so she didn't lose any money. The ghosts promise not to use email anymore or touch Sam and Jay's bank accounts. Pete, Flower, and Trevor end the episode getting excited about a reverse mortgage commercial they see on TV, thinking it will help Sam and Jay financially (it will not).

Quotes[]

"I have one day to solve Alberta's murder"
— Sam

Thorfinn: You just drink alcohol even though no idea who gave it to you.

Alberta: And you just traipsed through a field wearing a metal helmet during a lightning storm, what's your point, Thor? We all got here somehow.

"Alcohol is highly addictive, without any of the productive or medicinal qualities of cocaine"
— Hetty

Cast[]

Main cast[]

Guest cast[]

Co-starring[]

Historical notes[]

Hetty mentions that "the stock market is roaring and there is no end in sight." Ironically the following year the stock market would crash.
Theresa catches Al Capone about to drink poison and stops him. As she's walking away she tells him to pay his taxes. Al Capone famously went to prison for his tax evasion.

Trivia[]

Trevor mentions his possession attempt at Christmas and was banned from using Sam and Jay's computers.
Clara, one of the suspects, only spent one night in prison.
As of this episode Alberta is the only one that has an official date of death.
Flower mentions that she robbed a bank again.
Nigel, Sasappis, Thorfinn, and Hetty were in the house when Alberta was murdered.
This episode is one of the few that shows the ghosts halfway through the door.
Pop culture includes: Readers Digest which was popular when Pete was alive and still active online, Al Capone was a suspect in the murder, Morley Safer was a journalist for 60 minutes in the 80s that Pete talks about, the online Nigerian Prince scam
This is one of the few times we see Woodstone in the past and filled with people.
Alberta reminds Thorfinn about how he died.
While not there Todd Pearlman was mentioned.
It takes Trevor an hour to type two words.
Trevor reveals he was thirty-three at the time of his death.
The Ulster County Review gets a new editor, Spencer Magnussen Cooke. He replaces the previous editor, Lewis, who according to Shiki was fired for a "screen sharing incident" that resulted in him going to rehab for porn addiction.
Flower, Pete and Trevor fall victims for the Nigerian Prince scheme, and only find out when searching the internet for news. However, this scam is known since the early 1990s, and someone Trevor (a Wall Street broker well in touch with schemes for making money), should definitely know about.
- As Sam pointed out “senior citizens” fall for those types of scams. Pete was born during the end of WW2 and Trevor would be in his mid 50s if he was still alive, so it's still possible for people that age to fall victim to scams and in the The Work Retreat it's shown that Trevor is somewhat out dated on pop culture when he interacted with the real world via his online job to cause his co workers to think he was in his 60s before he got Jay to impersonate him in order to keep his job and status of being an actual ghost who died at the turn of the millennium an secret from those co-workers.