Why Did Flower Leave Ghosts in Season 3? Details

Warning: this post contains spoilers for the Season 3 premiere of Ghosts.

Thanks to its highly entertaining central conceit, Ghosts has proven to be a remarkably durable and widely acclaimed hit for CBS. Now that Season 3 has premiered, some fans are wondering how the show resolved one of its central cliffhangers from the end of Season 2.

In that episode, the show revealed that one of its central ghosts had been “sucked off,” meaning that they had found peace and no longer needed to stay in the world of the living. Now, we know that that ghost was Flower, which has led some to wonder why she was the one who left the show headed into Season 3. Keep reading for all of the details.

Joe Port and Joe Wiseman, the show’s showrunners, explained to Entertainment Weekly that they weren’t sure who would get sucked off when they wrote the initial cliffhanger.

“We had a lot of different notions, but our plan was to talk it out and see which path we wanted to follow,” Port explained. “You gotta go down the path to see how fruitful it is and see what it leads to and what it does for the whole next season, so that’s what we did.”

Ultimately, Flower made the most sense to them.

“Flower checked a lot of boxes for a candidate,” Wiseman said. “It would be believable that she got sucked off because she had some growth toward the end of Season 2, and there was a lot of different reactions people could have to her disappearing.”

“Thor [Devan Chandler Long], obviously, is going to be crushed,” he continued. “It’s the person he loves most in the world. And then other people are going to be jealous or be happy for her. It just seemed like it created a lot of stories for us to mine.”

Flower’s departure is more bittersweet than a typical death might be, in part because she’s already dead.

“The other ghosts are somewhat used to this and they probably see it a little differently,” Wiseman said. “It’s not like Flower died. This is the thing that they all want, this is the thing that they’re all desperately trying to have happen. It’s not that they’re not sad, obviously when someone leaves your life, you’re sad to see the person go, even if it’s to a good thing, but it’s complicated. To Sam, it is sort of like she lost someone.”

Sheila Carrasco, the actor who plays Flower, only left the show because the writers chose to write her character off. While actors sometimes leave shows because they get a bigger role somewhere else, that wasn’t the case here. The show’s creative team wanted to allow Flower to move on, and that unfortunately meant that Sheila had to leave the show behind.

Flower’s departure will have major ramifications on the rest of the season and those will be fascinating to watch.