Headscratchers / Ghost Ship

• Ferriman's scheme is to tempt people to commit grave, even deadly, sins in order to be able to deliver a boatload of souls to hell. But most of the souls on the ship are innocent victims, and, if the ship is lost before delivery, the whole batch will be be free to escape to heaven, sinners and innocents alike. It seems that the survival of the ship is more important in determining where you end up than whether you had been sinful or not.
  • Presumably, that's the whole point of his mission: if the people whose souls he's collecting were bad to begin with, they'd have wound up in Hell anyway. His job is to cheat the system, whether by trapping souls outright or by suckering people into damning themselves.
    • That is exactly what the point of the ship is, it seems to be a floating Soul Trap, as long as the ship is in at least "servicable" condition, your soul stays there, dragged to Hell, the Trap part of the plan isn't about damning people while they are alive, otherwise they would already be hellbound and the ship would be pointless, the Gold is just to make a few go murderous, and kill the rest. Mind you, Ferriman was a massive idiot anyway, if he had just let the salvage crew do their job and kept the "Marked" in check, the ship would have been fixed and he could continue to use it, then kill them, he literally lost the ship and it's "cargo" of several hundred souls, because he couldn't stop himself and the ghosts from adding to the cargo a measely 6 extra souls.
    • You mean that the guy who was trying to exploit folks' greed fell victim to his own greed?
    • Actually, he mentions having a "quota," so he presumably needed to add the souls of crew members he killed to complete his mission, since those on the ship weren't enough.
  • Small argument on how this could actually circle back to Fridge Brilliance - Remember, this job is Ferriman's PUNISHMENT for his life of sin. He's not just stuck doing a "hard" job, this is literally supposed to be him suffering in the afterlife as consequence for his actions in life. This whole movie could be seen as a new version of Sisyphus; Ferriman is always going on about keeping Management "happy". A never ending task that he is compelled to complete no matter how many failures. And then he screws himself due to greed - he couldn't help trying to get just six more souls and in doing so ruined decades of "hard work" - the very same vice that is his main MO throughout the movie.
• Ferriman states that if they lose the boat "management" won't be happy, after all, it's their punishment, but, at the end of the movie Ferriman reappears loading a cargo of gold into another ship, so apparently "management" wasn't that bothered by the loss of several hundred souls.
  • Or being sent out to do it again is his punishment? After all Ferriman is also damned, perhaps being forced to come up with ways to get more souls is his punishment and if he fails he has to start again.
  • As far as we can tell he's been pretty successful with his method, and this is the only time it's really failed, so he might have been given another chance simply because he is actually good at his job, we don't know how long he has been doing this, so one batch might not be as big of a deal as he thought it was.
• Out of all of the ghosts, why is the little girl ghost the only one who actually wants to help the crew and stop them from dying? Why do all of the other ghosts want to kill the salvage crew and make them a part of the "quota" if it means damning everyone to Hell? In fact, why does the salvage crew's ghosts show up at the end helping Ferriman, the man who murdered them? What is compelling them to do all of this?
  • Katie isn't the only ghost that tries to help them; the Captain also tells Murphy the basics about what happened on the Graza. What's interesting about this is the Captain only shows up after Murphy spends a while in his cabin and interacts with his possessions, but Katie shows up freely whenever she wants. Maybe Katie is the only unmarked ghost that's "powerful" enough to do that. Most of the other ghosts don't really show up at all until the ship is destroyed. As for the ghosts that are trying to kill the salvage crew, they are marked by Ferriman, so they're completely under his control. The crew members that appear in the final scene are Santos (who was rushing to get away with the gold out of greed), Greer (who tried to have sex with Francesca's ghost), and Dodge (who "murdered" Ferriman), all "sins" that would definitely get them marked.