Cast
Regular voices: Tara Charendoff, Maurice LaMarche, Jason Marsden, Alfonso Ribeiro, Rino Romano, and Billy West.
Guest voices: Edward Albert, Jennifer Darling, and Willie Lane.
Plot
A thunderstorm splits a lone tree, exposing a large cocoon. Something Grundel-shaped emerges and runs off. That night it knocks on a boy's window asking him to come out and play. By the time Ecto-1 arrives, the boy's mother can only tell the team her son screamed and the creature fled into the woods, repeating "come out and play." The phrase stops Kylie cold; she recognizes it from a memory she keeps to herself, brushing off Roland's concern with a claim of dizziness. Garrett Miller finds a slime trail, and Eduardo Rivera talks past the skeptical police by declaring the team are scientists.
In the woods the Ghostbusters reach the split tree, where Roland gloves up and takes a sample of ooze from the cocoon. They chase the Grundel to a cliff, where it ambushes them and throws Roland over the edge. Kylie freezes mid-rescue as another fragment of memory surfaces, then drags Roland to safety. Grateful, he tells her he owes her one. The creature is gone.
Back at the firehouse, Roland's young brother Casey has tagged along and slips loose during a tour. He locks Slimer in the refrigerator, sabotages Egon Spengler's lab work by smearing ear wax on a microscope slide, and torments Garrett with a spit wad and a broom jammed in his wheelchair. Egon eventually reports that the ooze carries traces he calls "Grundelesque." He explains the Grundel as a supernatural parasite that preys on children with a hidden capacity for wrongdoing, luring them with the promise of fun and games and trying to turn them into Grundels. Kylie ties the case to the mother's report and argues it must be the Grundel. Egon corrects her: there is only one, and the original Ghostbusters trapped it ten years ago. All of its victims, he says, returned to normal once it was captured.
To prove the point, Egon takes the team down to the Containment Unit and pulls a readout from the Ectoplasmic Frequency Monitor, explaining that every ectoplasmic entity has a unique frequency pattern, the way every person has a genetic code. The Grundel is still locked inside. Kylie remains unconvinced and floats the idea of questioning it. Egon shuts that down with the standing rule never to open the Containment Unit. After Casey is handed off to his mother, Kylie talks Roland into helping her anyway. Calling in the favor he owes her, Roland rigs the Ectoplasmic Entity Projection Unit to the unit's trap slot so the captured ghost can be projected into a containment field. Roland accidentally projects the wrong entity first, a minor ghost that is quickly sent back, before locking onto the Grundel's frequency.
The projected Grundel knows Kylie by name and admits he used to watch her sleep. When she proved too strong, he turned to her only friend, a seven-year-old boy named Jack. In flashback, Jack opens his bedroom window despite Kylie's pleading and turns to reveal a partial Grundel transformation. Jack vanished, no one believed Kylie's account, and she buried the memory. Egon nearly catches them mid-session, forcing Roland to kill the projector and hide. Roland reminds Kylie that Egon said every victim reverted, but she is shaken.
A second Grundel surfaces, calling to other children. One girl is saved only by her dog. Responding to the new call, Kylie recognizes the creature as Jack and chases it, but it leaps off a bridge into the river. She lies to Eduardo that it was not the Grundel. Determined to know the truth, Kylie returns to the basement, and Roland joins her again. This time the projected Grundel admits Jack resisted like Kylie, so it sealed him in the cocoon to transform him slowly; Jack stayed in the tree until the storm. While Casey, having stowed away to follow Roland, sneaks around the firehouse, the Grundel hypnotizes him and forces him to release it from containment. Roland cuts the projector and finds Casey dazed, with no memory of what he has done. Two Grundels are now loose.
The original Grundel recruits the second to help it steal "a very special child." A team meeting quickly lands on the answer: the Grundel will go after a child it already entranced, Casey. The Grundels lure Casey out of his bedroom, and the Ghostbusters give chase. Garrett finds Casey already partly transformed and gets payback on the second Grundel with a fence plank. The original Grundel seizes Kylie, taunting that it only wants to hurt her, but Roland blasts it from behind and Kylie traps it. Casey returns to normal, and Garrett brings out a restored Jack, who reunites tearfully with Kylie as Eduardo grumbles in envy. Back at the firehouse, Egon tells Kylie he is glad she disobeyed him, since Jack would otherwise have been lost forever. He admits his analysis was thrown off because the slime sample was saturated with Casey's ear wax.
Characters and entities
Jack
Jack was Kylie's only childhood friend, seven years old when he disappeared. Unlike the Grundel's other victims, who reverted to normal once the creature was captured, Jack remained in Grundel form. The Grundel had recognized his exceptionally strong will and, rather than risk a failed conversion, deliberately sealed him inside a cocoon that shielded him from the reverting effects of the original Grundel's capture. Within the cocoon Jack matured fully into a second Grundel over ten years, until the lightning storm freed him at the episode's start. After the original Grundel is re-trapped, Jack finally returns to human form. Kylie pledges that the team will help him find his parents. Jack's connection to Kylie is referenced in her Crossing Over Virtual Trading Card #31, released June 5, 2018.
Goofy Nose Ghost
When Roland uses the Ectoplasmic Entity Projection Unit to reach the Grundel in the Containment Unit, he accidentally locks onto the wrong frequency first and projects a minor incidental entity: a sickly green ghost with yellow beady eyes, needle-like teeth, and a large orange nose. Roland returns it to containment immediately and finds the Grundel on the next attempt. The same creature appears in the Extreme Ghostbusters title sequence, making this its only episode appearance outside the intro. In a draft of the episode's script, it is referred to as "Goofy-Looking Demon" or "Stupid Demon."
Casey Jackson
Roland's younger brother Casey serves as the episode's "willing child" figure. He is presented as a troublemaker throughout (trapping Slimer, contaminating Egon's sample, pranking Garrett) but it is precisely this hidden capacity for wrongdoing that makes him a viable Grundel target. The Grundel hypnotizes Casey into releasing it from the Containment Unit while Casey's conscious mind is occupied elsewhere; Casey has no memory of the act. He reverts to normal after the Grundel is re-trapped.
Continuity
The episode is the only return of a ghost from The Real Ghostbusters besides Slimer, tying directly back to the earlier-series episode "The Grundel." Egon places the events of that episode ten years before this one. With Extreme Ghostbusters set in 1997, that fixes the original Grundel case in 1987. Egon names Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz, and Winston Zeddemore as the team that trapped the Grundel; it is the second time Peter Venkman is mentioned in the series and the first time Ray and Winston are named.
Kylie's childhood haunting by the Grundel mirrors Egon's own childhood, in which he was tormented by the Boogieman. Two of the children the second Grundel approaches were also seen playing in Central Park in the opening of the earlier episode "Slimer's Sacrifice." Casey nicknames his brother "Rollie."
Production
Martin Olson wrote the script while on hiatus from "Penn & Teller." According to Olson, the show's producers initially considered the script too intense for children, with several settings (one set in a meat locker) judged too extreme, so it was revised to fit the series.1
Script draft differences
An early draft differs from the aired episode in a number of ways:
- Jack emerges from the cocoon naturally because it was set to open after ten years. In the episode, the tree is struck by lightning.
- The cold open was longer, including a sequence of a snake stalking a squirrel and the Grundel sensing Jack had exited the cocoon. Jack also abandoned his first target when the boy's mother entered the bedroom rather than when the boy screamed.
- Egon accompanies the team to the first call. In the episode, he does not appear until the firehouse scene.
- Egon takes the ooze sample from the cocoon remnants. In the episode, Roland takes it.
- Slimer eats some jellybeans before Casey shoves him in the refrigerator. In the episode, Slimer is simply looking inside.
- Casey's pranks differ: he shows Roland a bikini calendar he drew on, puts a spider in Eduardo's sleeping mouth, and puts a ruler in Garrett's wheelchair spokes. In the episode, he hits Garrett with a spit wad and uses a broom instead of a ruler. Eduardo's spider running gag is omitted.
- During the first projection session, Kylie snaps and fires a particle thrower at the Grundel. In the episode, they are interrupted by Egon and forced to hide. The draft also has Egon step on his pet cat while investigating; in the episode, Slimer prompts Egon to check the noise.
- The girl's collie attacks Jack and sprains his leg. In the episode, the collie barks and the girl simply shuts her window.
- Jack steals Garrett's wheelchair to escape. In the episode, he knocks Garrett off with a fence plank.
- Kylie drives to the bridge scene herself. In the episode, she arrives by taxi.
- The draft includes an extra firehouse scene after the bridge: Kylie lies about seeing Jack, Garrett swears revenge, and Eduardo offers Garrett a ride home.
- The Grundel gives Kylie a false location (Pier 23 shipyard) before hypnotizing Casey, leading to a wild-goose-chase sequence. In the episode, the Grundel hypnotizes Casey directly while talking to Roland and Kylie.
- The climax is considerably darker in the draft: the full team fights the Grundels in Casey's room, Kylie accidentally electrifies Egon and Eduardo with a proton pistol blast, and the Grundel is destroyed when caught between Roland's particle stream and his own energy blast, swelling up and exploding. Both Casey and Jack are shown reverting from Grundel form in a sequence described as reminiscent of the body-horror finale of "Akira." In the episode, the team is split up, Egon does not appear in the climax, and the Grundel is trapped rather than destroyed.
- The final firehouse scene ends differently: Roland realizes Casey's true capacity for trouble, Eduardo falls victim to "Hot Gum" Casey planted, and Janine does not appear. In the episode, Janine has a brief appearance, and the conversation between Kylie and Egon is shorter, ending on Casey trying to look innocent when Egon mentions the ear wax.1
References
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Martin Olson, draft script for "Grundelesque" (an episode of Extreme Ghostbusters), as posted by the author.
