You will believe...or not
Gus Roberts (Nick Frost) is the number one engineer at Smyle, Britain's biggest mobile network operator and internet service provider. In his spare time he's also a keen investigator of the paranormal. Gus is initially disappointed when his boss partners him up with new recruit Elton John (no, not that one), but the two rapidly form a friendship, working together both professionally and on the paranormal. However, Elton is less enthusiastic than Gus in this area. Seemingly unrelated is Astrid (Emma D'Arcy), a young woman who is chased through a house and later a hospital by several ghosts. She escapes the hospital and runs through the countryside. Also introduced are Gus and Elton's boss Dave (series co-creator and co-writer Simon Pegg), Elton's agoraphobic sister Helen, a nervous cosplayer, and Gus' grumpy father-in-law Richard (Malcolm McDowell).
The series launched on Prime Video in 2020 and was cancelled after one season.
This show provides examples of the following:
- Aborted Arc: You'd think that the lady possessed by her dog in the first episode would feature later but she is quickly forgotten.
- Ambiguously Human: JoJo74 and Dave, Gus' boss, look and act human, but The Reveal in the season finale indicates that this may or may not be their true forms, although if they are human is unknown; the finale would seem to imply they're otherworldly beings that look human.
- Analogy Backfire: Gus rigs up some helmets with wifi-connected webcams for their first livestream exploration of a haunted location. An impressed Astrid points out that it's sort of a basic off-the-shelf version of the camera rigs used by the space marines in Aliens (1984) to coordinate with their command APC...then notes that the aliens proceeded to pick them off one by one, to heighten the tension back at mission control as their camera feeds went dead.
- Arc Number: 1-5-9-7 appears frequently, most obviously as the output of the Numbers Station Gus listens to, but in several other places, including the model number of the burning washer/dryer in Astrid's visions.
- Bad Boss: Toynbee sees his followers as resources to be exploited, and talks several of them into sacrificing themselves for his plan. He reveals at the end that he never really intended to bring anyone to Eternis with him.
- Battle in the Centre of the Mind: A humourously off-screen variant: In the finale, Elton channels Astrid's spirit into the Ellexatron in order to wrest control of it away from its current occupant, Alaura. We can only hear them grunt, wince, and insult one another through the machine, but it is clear that they are experiencing their confrontation as a physical fight.
- Benevolent Boss: Dave, Gus' boss in Smyle Internet looks like is this, since he treats Gus and the opther with respect, and sees Gus as his best worker, all this change in the last episode when is revealed he knew all along about Gus' hobbies, and he actually was using the company to block the Big Bad's plan, exactly why it has not been revealed yet.
- Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: While staying with Richard, Helen first wants to order Italian, then changes her mind to Chinese. They order from a restaurant called Signorina Wong's.
- Dead All Along:
- Astrid died in the house fire in 1997, but her mother (the burnt ghost) managed to send her back to the living world through the connection provided by Elton's conduit powers.. The situation is so complicated even the expert doesn't have a name for it.
- Subverted in 'The Watcher On The Water' as Byron the caretaker is set up as this with only Elton encountering him and the owner's initially puzzled reaction when he is mentioned.
- Foreshadowing:
- Elton John's ability to find hidden rooms foreshadows his mysterious powers.
- Astrid's occasional lapses regarding dates, her clothes and her habit of referring to things from the 90s as if they are still current, foreshadow that she is actually a ghost who died in 1997. For example, she says he favorite show is Friends and that she saw Princess Mononoke twice in the theatre (which came out in 1997) - but everyone assumes she just likes classic TV and goes to film festivals. There are also running points throughout the series where she seems unfamiliar with current events and technology (she doesn't know what "Wikipedia" is), but the others just assume she isn't tech-savvy.
- Fun with Acronyms: In episode 1, Gus mentions that his previous partner went and joined ISIS. Elton is shocked, before Gus explains that ISIS is actually another internet company note . Elton responds that he thought Gus meant "ISIS" ISIS, which turns out to be another company entirelynote .
- Ghostly Chill: Room 2 at the Portland Beacon is haunted, freezing and affected by electrical anomalies. The management interpret this as heating and wiring problems, and closed the room to visitors.
- Hell Hotel: Double-subverted with the Portland Beacon, 'the only horror-themed hotel on Dorset's Jurassic coast'. Gus considers it to be banal and tacky, and wrote a derisive review of it in the White Sheet. It turns out that one of the rooms is haunted, but the management had closed it to visitors because of what they believed to be faulty wiring.
- Immortality Seeker: Dr. Peter Toynbee's ultimate motivation is to achieve eternal life in another dimension.
- Lightning Can Do Anything: At the start of "The Watcher on the Water", lightning hits the aerial of a prototype radar jamming device, killing a soldier and transferring his soul into the device.
- The Lost Lenore: Emily for Gus.
- Nanomachines: That's how Dr. Toynbee is able to control 200 people for his ritual, they are created by a combination of magic and technology.
- Numbers Station: Gus has been listening to one (which uses the well-known 'Lincolnshire Poacher' musical tag) for the last twenty years. Surprisingly, it's explained in only the second episode as a case of Haunted Technology that's resolved without much trouble.
- Our Ghosts Are Different: The majority of ghosts in the show are living souls transplanted into other objects or creatures at the moment of death, a process which can be achieved voluntarily or involuntarily by occult or scientific means. Ghosts can return to the mortal world from 'the other side' of their own accord, but can seemingly only do so in the vicinity of a conduit like Elton.
- Properly Paranoid: Dave becomes increasingly paranoid each episode that the Chinese or the Russians are spying on him, and emailing him photos and videos of himself at work while he's working.
- Punny Name: One of the rooms at the horror-themed Portland Beacon hotel is the "Nightmare on Elm Suite".
- "Scooby-Doo" Hoax: "The Ghost of the Beast of Bodmin" turns out to be one of these.
- Shout-Out: Malcolm McDowell gets hypnotized by being shown a rapid montage of film clips in a theater, not unlike in A Clockwork Orange (except this time he was just in a theater full of people, all being hypnotized).
- Soul Power: The plan of the Big Bad relies on this, he wants to sacrifice 200 souls so he can Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence
- Spooky Séance: Gus recruits Janey Feathers to conduct one to contact the spirits haunting Astrid. The seance immediately goes wrong, with unnatural darkness, shaking, and flying objects. Janey, realizing the entities involved are far more dangerous than she expected, ends the seance and kicks them out.
- Technologically Blind Elders: Richard starts off as this: he doesn't realize he can access the internet on his phone, and embarrasses himself attempting to record a video response to Helen's YouTube channel.
- The Remnant: The ghost of Private Adkins believes that World War II is still ongoing, and jams all communications signals near the Portland Beacon in an attempt to frustrate German air raids.
- The Shut-In: Helen has intense anxiety around crowds and public places, to the extent that she has entered the cosplay contest at Conventry Collectibles and Cosplay Convention 5 years running, but has been unable to leave the car to attend. This is revealed to be a psychological reaction to being emotionally neglected due to her parents being absorbed with the negative press attention around her brother being 'The Hinckley Boy'.
- Tome of Eldritch Lore: The Praecepta Mortuorum, a book made of human skin and written in human blood, contains forbidden spells that deal with human souls and human sacrifices.
