WARNING! This article contains SPOILERS for Scream 6!Courteney Cox’s Gale Weathers imparts touching advice to Sam about family in Scream 6 that makes the tragic ending of Scream (2022) even more upsetting. While Gale and Sam’s Scream 6 reunion starts off on the wrong foot as the former questions the latter about if she blames herself for Ghostface’s return, the Woodsboro survivors go on to establish an even stronger camaraderie in the 2023 sequel. Not only does Sam Carpenter comfort the near-dead Gale Weathers before she’s taken away by paramedics, but Gale also gives Sam important wisdom about the importance and safety of choosing her own family, linking back to Dewey Riley’s tragic death in Scream (2022).
When visiting the Ghostface shrine, Gale asks about Sam and Tara’s mother Christina Carpenter, who Sam reveals cut her off after telling Tara that she’s Billy Loomis’ daughter. Gale responds by stating that she wasn’t close with her parents either and suggests that Sam is better off without her mother, advising her to choose her own family “even if it’s with one person.” When Sam questions what happens if she loses that one person, Gale says she just has to keep going forward, enlisting their increasingly familiar survivalist mindset. While Gale’s advice is important for Scream franchise characters like Sam who will continue to lose those they care about, her speech is a sad reminder of how much she lost after the events of Scream 5.
Gale Losing Both Dewey & Sidney Means Her Family Is Gone After Scream 5
Gale’s advice about choosing family is meant to reference Dewey and Sidney, with Dewey literally becoming her family after the pair married and Sidney becoming family due to their shared bond over the many years of battling Ghostfaces. However, after Dewey’s death in Scream 5 and the fact that Sidney had already relocated her own family away from Woodsboro, Gale no longer has her chosen family around. Gale also isn’t the type of character who presses on about her feelings in the Scream movies, so her open sincerity with Sam about her chosen family is one of her most vulnerable moments in the franchise.
While Gale will always have Sidney to fall back on, such as how she mentions that they spoke about the Ghostface attacks during Scream 6, the 2023 sequel establishes that she’s largely on her own now. Scream 6’s Core Four and even Kirby will be figures that she’ll continue to keep a camaraderie with in the future, but they don’t represent the same kinship that Gale shared with her ex-husband Dewey and friend Sidney. Since Gale survived Scream 6’s Ghostface attacks, she’s expected to return for a potential sequel, which could finally reunite her with Sidney as the only real family she seems to have left.
After Dewey’s death in Scream 5, Gale vowed that she wouldn’t write a book about Amber and Richie’s killing spree because they weren’t the ones who deserved to be immortalized. However, Scream 6 revealed that Gale betrayed Dewey’s legacy by writing the book about the killings, which was also a betrayal against fellow survivors Sam and Tara. Gale wasn’t right to publish the book, but her loneliness without Dewey and Sidney explains why she did it.
Jenna Ortega’s character Tara made a comment to Gale earlier in Scream 6 that writing the book was the only thing that kept her relevant and from being forgotten, which seems to actually be part of the reason why she broke her word to write it. Without Dewey and Sidney around, Gale found that writing the book was how she could keep a connection with the outside world – if she didn’t have her family, she at least had her journalism career. However, after reconnecting with the Carpenter sisters, the Meeks-Martin twins, and Kirby, Gale likely won’t jeopardize her relationship with them again by writing about the events of Scream 6.