Plot
A reopened oil field off the Hudson River pumps crude through the night. The work crew is unnerved when a 200-degree reading comes off the oil and the equipment goes haywire, and a face peers out from a vat of crude before the workers flee. The well had been shut down decades earlier because the men believed it was haunted.
In New York, Eduardo Rivera takes a driving lesson from Roland Jackson in Ecto-1, since Egon Spengler wants him licensed to drive the car. His road test is scheduled for that afternoon. At the firehouse, Janine Melnitz launches a side baking business, "Janine's Pralines and Miscellaneous Baked Good Dreams," with Slimer as her kitchen helper. Her first batch is a disaster after Slimer hands her a sack labeled "Salt" in place of sugar.
Reports start coming in of cars behaving strangely. A man's car transforms into a monster at a gas station and throws him into an alley, and a trucker calls in to say the vehicles around him seem possessed. Kylie Griffin tracks demon vehicles to the downtown area, and the team heads out with Roland driving. A possessed bus barrels into Battery Park and smashes the statue of John Ericsson, the engineer who designed the USS Monitor. The proton streams fail to stop it, and a possessed airplane attacks the team before crashing into a billboard.
Egon links the activity to the Hudson River Oil Refinery in New Jersey, where a crew foreman has reported odd noises, explosions, and apparitions. A historical search shows the original owners abandoned the adjacent oil field more than thirty years earlier because workers thought the rig was haunted; it had only recently reopened. Egon theorizes that a demon was trapped in the oil millions of years ago, formed from decaying carboniferous matter, and adapted to the muck as its home. The team visits the wrecked refinery, takes P.K.E. readings, and finds the whole area saturated with paranormal energy, though Kylie cannot pinpoint the source.
The demon's essence has been refined into gasoline and shipped to stations across the city. While the team refuels Ecto-1 at a station, a possessed pump quietly swaps tainted gas into the car. Eduardo's road test goes badly when Ecto-1 itself transforms into a demonic vehicle and takes him and his test marshal on a wild ride. The other Ghostbusters commandeer a learner's car from a DMV examinee named Jeremy by posing as marshals, then regroup at the firehouse for fresh proton packs as dozens of possessed vehicles converge on the Holland Tunnel, heading back to the refinery.
Following the vehicles through the tunnel, the team searches for the central locus of the demon's power. A spout of crude oil erupts and the demon, Campucho, reveals itself, drawing the ecto energy out of the possessed vehicles and reassembling itself into one enormous, oil-covered form. The vehicles, Ecto-1 included, revert to normal. The proton streams cannot penetrate Campucho's viscous oily exterior, so Roland improvises: the team sucks liquid detergent from nearby barrels into their throwers, washes away enough of the oil to expose the demon, then switches back to proton fire and traps it. The marshal fails Eduardo anyway, insisting drivers must be prepared for anything.
Campucho
Campucho is the oil demon at the center of the episode.2 Egon's theory is that it was trapped in an oil well formed from decaying carboniferous matter, including dinosaur remains, several million years ago, and settled into the oil as its home. In the late 1960s the well was discovered and a refinery built, but Campucho's haunting drove the workers off and the site was shut down. When the refinery reopened roughly thirty years later, the demon woke again. Pieces of it carried into the refined gasoline became the entity sometimes called the Oil Mine Ghost Remnants, possessing any vehicle that filled up on the tainted fuel. Drawn back together at the refinery, Campucho first appears as an amorphous, blob-like mass of oil with a donkey-like face; once the detergent strips away the oil, it is revealed to have pale pink skin and four-fingered hands. The script identifies it as "Campucho, the oil-demon."3
Cast and crew
The regular voice cast includes Tara Charendoff, Maurice LaMarche, Jason Marsden, Pat Musick, Alfonso Ribeiro, Rino Romano, and Billy West. Guest voices are D. Bradley Baker, Nathan Carlson, and Jack Roth.
Notes
Two drafts of the script are known: a first draft dated April 8, 1997 and a final draft dated April 15, 1997.1 Eduardo fails his driving test in this episode, leaving Roland and Kylie as the only two of the four young Extreme Ghostbusters who can legally drive. Janine's poor cooking is a running gag inherited from the earlier The Real Ghostbusters series, most recently in "Camping it Up", and her oatmeal raisin cookies prompt a nod to the snack brands Mrs. Fields and Famous Amos. Garrett nicknames her "Julia Vile," a play on the chef Julia Child.4 Kylie compares Campucho's contentment in the muck to Eduardo's apartment.5
The possessed bus destroys the Battery Park statue of John Ericsson, the mechanical engineer who designed the Civil War ironclad USS Monitor. Ecto-1 being possessed is a callback to The Real Ghostbusters, where the car was taken over in episodes such as "Killerwatt" and "Follow That Hearse."
Garrett also slips in a joke at New Jersey's expense, a style of regional humor more common in The Real Ghostbusters. A background computer screen displaying the old field's history reads "Oil well abandoned due to strage occurences" -- the misspelling of "strange" is visible on screen, a notable instance of readable English text appearing in animation.
In the production order this episode falls between "Glutton for Punishment" and "Dog Days."
References
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Cuden, Steve (1997). Extreme Ghostbusters, "Ghost in the Machine" (Final Draft, April 15, 1997), script title page.
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Cuden, Steve (1997). Extreme Ghostbusters, "Ghost in the Machine" (Final Draft, April 15, 1997), script p. 2. Line reads: "We see the GHOSTLY FACE OF CAMPUCHO (not clearly, just enough to give us a foreshadowing) appear in the bubbling, gurgling, swirling oil and fumes..."
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Cuden, Steve (1997). Extreme Ghostbusters, "Ghost in the Machine" (Final Draft, April 15, 1997), script p. 31. Line reads: "This is CAMPUCHO, THE OIL-DEMON!"
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Cuden, Steve (1997). Extreme Ghostbusters, "Ghost in the Machine" (Final Draft, April 15, 1997). Garrett's line: "Hey guys, let's go check out that refinery before Julia Vile whips up anymore snackages of death."
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Cuden, Steve (1997). Extreme Ghostbusters, "Ghost in the Machine" (Final Draft, April 15, 1997), script p. 20. Kylie's line: "Sounds like you're describing Eduardo's apartment."
