Ghost Wars is a paranormal action series by Syfy, distributed by Netflix.
The story follows a quiet city in Alaska, as paranormal forces take over it in a brutal attack. Social pariah Roman (Avan Jogia), hated for his paranormal powers, need to come to term with his powers and face the town's hate to try to save the town.
Cancelled after one season.
Tropes:
- Accidental Murder: Maggie's death. A friend of her father poisoned her to try to sleep with her, when he took her to her bedroom, she started convulsing and died of shock.
- Advertised Extra: Marilyn is marketed as a main character, and even appears in the promo. However, her wife Val has a much more constant focus and larger amount of screen time, let alone plot relevance. Marilyn herself only is relevant to the plot related to Abigail and Isabelle.
- Asshole Victim: Burke, the director of the Lambda facility, is an arrogant, weaselly Smug Snake who is far more concerned with saving face than doing right by his employees. The ghosts eventually drown him in his own ocean-wave screensaver.
- Bittersweet Ending: The city is fixed, the ghosts are gone and Val and Doug seem positive about their capacity to rebuild the town, but Maggie takes over Daphne's body and runs away accompanied by Roman and the stone that caused everything to begin with. Furthermore, Father Dan's ghost is still around, with implications he has become the Whistling Man ghost.
- Came Back Wrong: The people who are put inside the cocoons do come back, but they are no longer themselves or humans. They feed off other being's life energy, can puke seeds for more cocoons and have synchronized pain. Later tests reveal that they are also decaying quickly.
- Connected All Along: Billy turns out to be Roman's missing father. Val knew it all along because Nadine tried to blackmail their father with this knowledge and never told either.
- Creepy Child:
- Marcus Moon, who is possessed by a demon for a while. He manages to be even creepier when he turns into a ghost.
- Downplayed with Abigail and Isabelle. They might behave strangely and have a connection to ghosts, but they are well meaning. Played fully straight with Abigail once she Came Back Wrong.
- A Day in the Limelight:
- "The Curse of The Copperhead Rose" basically works as an origin story for Billy and how he stayed in the town.
- "The Ghost in the Machine" is basically what happened in the start of the plot focused on Landris and her team on Lambda.
- "The Exorcism of Marcus Moon" mostly deals with Father Dan as he wonders about performing an exorcism on the Creepy Child Marcus.
- "The Feast" tells Norm's story, and is almost exclusively shown from his perspective.
- Despair Event Horizon: Mort, once he has to kill Karla and the demonic spawn she created, after being forced to care for and feed her for weeks.
- Greater-Scope Villain: Daphne, the CEO of Lambda. She knew about what could happen if the experiment carried on, and forced it because she wanted to be able to manipulate paranormal forces in an attempt to avoid her own death, following her appearance, she becomes somewhat of a Token Evil Teammate as she believe that finishing the experiment will give everyone what they want.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Death's Door needs someone to be actually dying to be opened. When they realize this, Billy promptly decides he ought be the one to go, since he is already Secretly Dying. Marilyn kills him with an injection, allowing his ghost to open the door.
- A House Divided: The city gets really shared after a while. Winston and Mort form an armed militia, Val and Marylin isolate themselves to care for a mutated Abigail, against Isabelle's wish, Daphne leads what's left of Lambda to conclude her experiment, while Roman, Billy and Dr. Baker try to find a way to end the ghosts.
- I'm a Humanitarian: Mort was under an illusion for the whole time Karla was pregnant, the food he was feeding her wasn't game, it was corpses.
- Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: Mort.
- Master of Illusion: All ghosts are capable of creating hallucinations in people's minds, making them see things that aren't happening and even killing them, or forcing them to kill themselves.
- Meaningful Name: Port Moore is actually a misnombering for porte de la morte in Spanish and porte de la mort in French. The original colonists knew about the town's paranormal connection
- Missing Child: Marilyn and Val have their daughter disappear for a while. Even worse, she Came Back Wrong, feasting off life force and their other daughter became the vessel for the souls of both their daughters.
- Mystical Pregnancy: Karla has sex with Paolo at the bar or at least the being that came back as Paolo and immediately becomes pregnant.
- Never My Fault: Burke insists on activating the particle accelerator at the Lambda facility despite repeated warnings that they are not ready. He then tries to blame the resulting deaths on Landis.
- Plot Armor: While the city's citizens start to diminish by the scores, most of the main characters remain OK through the show, even though they seem to be risking the most, while the town folk is generally killed by the ghost's most basic mind tricks.
- Power Trio: Later in the plot, Roman, Billy and Landis.
- Sharing a Body: Downplayed with Abigail and Isabelle. After Abigail's body Came Back Wrong, Abigail and Isabelle's spirit inhabit the same body, with both of them being able to communicate with others, but Isabelle is in control most of the time.
- Token Heroic Orc:
- Maggie, Doug's dead daughter is a ghost, but she still tries to help Roman, believes he has a gift and uses her powers for good.
- Abigail is a ghost that is not interested in using her powers for evil, and in fact uses Isabelle's connect to the supernatural to try to warn her mothers against trusting the being in Abigail's body.
