SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from the Season 5 finale of Ghosts on CBS.

Woodstone Mansion’s fate is up in the air in the two-part Season 5 finale of CBS’ Ghosts.

Sam (Rose McIver) and Jay (Utkarsh Ambudkar) have to come up with a quick solution after they find out that the mayor sold his controlling stake in their bed and breakfast to a giant corporation that used to sell water but is now transitioning into AI, obviously, and they’ve decided the property surrounding Woodstone is a perfect place for a data center. No one in town is pleased, least of all the ghosts who would be doomed to an eternity of bright lights and noisy machines if that evil water conglomerate were to get its way.

The couple consults their town historian Joe, played by James Austin Johnson, about getting a historical landmark designation for Woodstone to prevent the planned demolition. But, that proves much harder than they anticipated when Joe asks for concrete evidence that something noteworthy actually happened in that mansion, which he says is pretty “run of the mill” for the area. Fortunately, a lot of really interesting people have died there. Unfortunately, none of them are interesting enough for Joe.

That is, except Nancy. Yes, the basement ghost. Turns out, before she arrived at Woodstone and contracted cholera, she was actually a princess. All Sam and Jay need to do is find proof. Jay, Pete (Richie Moriarty) and ghost babysitter Kyle (Ben Feldman) depart for London to locate said proof, while Sam stays behind to finish ideating on a movie franchise she’s about to sell. A lot going on here! Luckily, with a little help from everyone’s favorite mummy ghost Amunhotep (Farhang Ghajar), they’re able to find proof that Nancy was once royalty and that she died right there at Woodstone to save the day.

Just when everything is looking up, things start to get dicey again as Pete vanishes from the backseat of the car just moments before arriving back on Woodstone property.

In the interview below, showrunners Joe Port and Joe Wiseman weigh in on that cliffhanger, Nancy’s backstory, and more from the two-part Ghosts finale.

DEADLINE: I really enjoyed these last two episodes, and I feel like your answer is going to be, ‘well, look around,’ but I want to hear your inspirations for why Sam and Jay should go against this giant conglomerate that wants to build a data center in the Season 5 finale.

JOE WISEMAN: Well, you know, data centers are kind of having a moment. So, it actually turned out to be a very fortuitous villain for our heroes to bump up against. We’ve all dealt with faceless corporations, and they can be so difficult to deal with.

JOE PORT: I think also it’s become a big problem in rural communities where people move for peace and quiet. So that’s coming now to kind of bite Sam and Jay in the butt in this episode.

DEADLINE: Yeah, I recently saw a video about how loud they are. It had no idea. 

WISEMAN: Yeah, it’s also not great for our ghosts who won’t be able to get away from it. They’re facing this reality of noise and constant lights.

PORT: As bad as data centers are for humans, they’re worse for ghosts. 

DEADLINE: I also thought it was hilarious that Nancy is a long lost princess. How long has that been in your back pocket?

PORT: We’ve been just inspired by the phrase ‘Fancy Nancy’ for a few seasons now and wanted to do a back story kind of based on that, and just the idea of Nancy being a princess struck us all as very funny. It converged well with the need in this story, so we thought it was a good time to delve into that.

DEADLINE: I love just kind of getting away from Woodstone again for a minute and getting some of the characters out of New York. How is it for you to kind of get to write more of those little stories into the show and just get them in these other settings that we’ve never seen them in before?

WISEMAN: Oh no, it’s very fun. With Pete, it makes more sense. They’re easy to do, because we can have one of our ghosts go along for the ride, but yeah, no, but it’s always fun. It’s always fun to go to different sets and different locations and to meet some ghosts. I was happy that we were able to bring Amenhotep back, the mummy-bound ghost from our Halloween special. He was a crowd favorite, and it’s always fun to see people again.

DEADLINE: Speaking of Pete, should we be afraid about his fate? That was a pretty big cliffhanger to leave the season on.

PORT: We’ve teased Pete disappearing a couple times now, and it’s gonna be very interesting to figure out where he went and where he is and what he’s like now. It’s sort of an existential question that we’ve been wrestling with about what would happen if he disappeared. So we’re going to answer that question when we come back.

DEADLINE: What was exciting to you about leaving the season on such a big cliffhanger with one of your lead characters’ fates just so up in the air?

WISEMAN: As Joe mentioned, it’s something we’ve teased a couple of times, where we’ve had these close calls with Pete, and in this the stakes are real. One of our main characters just disappeared, and who knows, will he be back? Where has he been? It just seems to bring up a lot of enticing questions.

DEADLINE: Season 6 won’t premiere until the mid-season, but you’ll get those Halloween and Christmas specials. What are you looking forward to about that structure and getting to do these one-off episodes first?

WISEMAN: Well, I’m excited. They aren’t going to be free standing. We are going to deal with the Pete cliffhanger. They will sort of be part of the season, so I look at it as we’re just premiering a couple weeks later than usual, and…we’re getting an hour-long Halloween special for the first time. The Halloween episodes are always a fan favorite. They’re the writers’ favorite. They’re really fun to do. So we’re getting an hour, and then we’re doing another Christmas hour-long special, which we’ve done a few times now, and those always turn out great. So we’re just starting out next season with a bang, and I think they’re going to be promoted heavily, and we’ll get a lot of eyeballs and a lot of excitement for when we then do start airing ‘regular episodes’.

PORT: I thought it was a really clever solution to them having three comedies right now, and to have us come out of the gate on Ghosts with these two holiday specials, it’s really something kind of fun to write toward. It gives us a clear target. It’s sort of a very British solution, because they’re always doing movies after the season and Christmas specials after their seasons. This is obviously before our season, but it’s kind of a cool, clever way to dive into the season for us.

DEADLINE: Well, and you mentioned three comedies, two of them are yours. What are you looking forward to about Eternally Yours finally seeing the light of day?

PORT: Yeah, it’s so crazy for us, because we wrote this so long ago. It was 11 years ago, and it’s the reason they called us to develop Ghosts, because we had written this pilot, the supernatural comedy about vampires…and now it’s come full circle, and Eternally Yours is going to be on. I mean, the cast is incredible, Trent O’Donnell did a fantastic job directing. He did the Ghosts pilot as well. We have the room up and running, and the stories seem to be really flowing, and it’s going to be a very grounded show, despite having vampires. It’s really about relationships and marriage.

DEADLINE: Three network comedies is a good problem to have, I think, for CBS. Do you guys feel like comedy’s been resonating more with viewers recently?

WISEMAN: Yeah, it’s always hard to tell. We’re kind of just having our blinders on making the show and everything, but yeah, I think, you know, comedies are always in fashion. People need to laugh. There’s a lot in the world that people want to escape from, and like Joe was alluding to, Eternally Yours is going to have a similar DNA to Ghosts, where it’s going to be fun but grounded. We sort of have a sort of a positive worldview. We like to sort of end on or have emotional moments that have a positive worldview, and we’re not going to shy away from that.

PORT: But not positive when it comes to data centers.