Plot
The Ghostbusters answer a call from Mrs. Hardenbauer, an elderly woman who reports that her husband has been acting strange, lurking around the house and seeming "off" even though he looks and acts the same. Garrett and Roland get no readings on their P.K.E. Meters, and Eduardo Rivera starts to suspect the wife herself. The team splits up to search the house. In the basement, Eduardo admires his reflection in a mirror when a red demonic entity leaps out at him. The others rush down to find his body on the floor and his soul drifting near the ceiling. Eduardo realizes he is dead.
A "new" Eduardo wakes up while the real Eduardo, now a ghost, watches the team walk straight through him. Back at the firehouse, Janine Melnitz and Egon Spengler are told the call was a false alarm. The possessed Eduardo communes with a demon through a restroom mirror and takes its orders: turn every mirror into a portal so the Ghostmakers can take over the city, and eliminate the team. He lures Slimer into the restroom and possesses him too, leaving Slimer's spirit to float beside the equally bewildered real Eduardo.
Small tells start to add up. The possessed Eduardo compliments Janine's sandwiches and eats one with mayonnaise, which the real Eduardo hates. Garrett Miller notices, and Roland Jackson brushes it off as changing tastes. When Garrett follows the possessed Eduardo into the kitchen and gets close to catching him turning dishes into portals, Egon calls the team out to another job: the Hardenbauers want to apologize for the false alarm. At the house, Roland's meter spikes, the couple's faces morph, and they bolt. The wife throws Roland into a row of trash cans with ease. While chasing the husband, Garrett is shoved into a full-length mirror by the possessed Eduardo and possessed as well. The possessed Garrett stands up and walks on his own legs, his paralysis corrected by the demon inhabiting his body.
Paranoia spreads through the team. The P.K.E. Meters turn up broken, sabotaged by the possessed Eduardo, and no one can tell who is compromised. Egon has Roland tune a thrower to a special frequency while Kylie lays down a Trap; they wrangle the demon out of Garrett's body, but the body has no pulse. Egon concludes they are facing Ghostmakers, demons that eject a victim's soul and inhabit the empty body.
In the demons' Mirror Realm, the leader confronts the captive Eduardo and Garrett and reveals he can inflict the agony of death a thousand times over. To fight back, Egon unveils his experimental Mass Maker gloves, built to make the ephemeral physical; a ghost who touches them while they are activated can be restored to a corporeal body. The possessed members overpower the team one by one, and Janine is possessed when she grabs the fire pole after the possessed Slimer touches it. Kylie slips in the bathroom, plays dead to fool the demons, then reaches the lab. When the possessed Egon tries to trap her by making her look into a pocket mirror, she turns it on him instead, then grabs the gloves and solidifies Roland and Egon.
With their bodies restored, the team blasts and traps the demons one by one, freeing each soul to return to its body. Slimer charges through the lead demon's head in the Mirror Realm and pulls Eduardo and Garrett toward the exit, but the demon grabs Garrett back and electrocutes him. Eduardo, returned to his body, fires into the mirror and drags the lead demon out, where Egon and Kylie hit it with crossing streams and Janine traps it. Garrett and Slimer return to their bodies. Kylie jokes that Eduardo nearly gave them seven years of bad luck, and the team smashes the mirror with a few miniature busts to be safe.
The Ghostmakers
The Ghostmakers are a legion of red demons that inhabit an extra-dimensional realm accessible through mirrors and other reflective surfaces. They are commanded by the Mirror Demon, their leader, who directs the invasion of New York City in this episode. The possessed couple from the Hardenbauer household appears to be the first known victims, with Mr. Hardenbauer possessed before the team ever arrives on the scene.
When a Ghostmaker passes through a transformed mirror and enters a human body, it ejects the victim's soul, rendering it invisible and inaudible to the living. The displaced soul effectively becomes a ghost: it can phase through solid surfaces and observe the world but cannot interact with it or be detected by standard equipment. If a Ghostmaker is forced out of a host body without the soul being returned, the body is left clinically dead, which is the crisis Egon faces after extracting the demon from Garrett.
Within a human host, Ghostmakers gain a range of enhanced abilities: greatly increased strength and speed, the power to transform any mirror or reflective surface into a portal, and the correction of any physical deficiency the host body has. The last of these is the episode's most striking demonstration of the Ghostmakers' power: Garrett, who uses a wheelchair, stands up and walks normally while possessed. It is one of the few moments in the series that directly engages with what it would mean for his mobility to be restored, even under these circumstances.
Ghostmakers in human bodies also give off high P.K.E. readings, which eventually allows the team to confirm possession. They have one additional behavioral tell: they tend to pause unnaturally between words when speaking, a sign of imperfect simulation of human speech patterns. Both details help Kylie piece together what she is dealing with.
The Mirror Realm itself is shown as the demons' home territory, where the leader can subject captive souls to the sensation of death repeatedly. Eduardo's trap is to enter this realm and drag the lead demon out through the mirror so the team can cross-stream it and Janine can trap it, ending the threat permanently.
Cast
The regular voice cast included Tara Charendoff (Tara Strong) as Kylie Griffin, Maurice LaMarche as Egon Spengler, Jason Marsden as Garrett Miller, Pat Musick as Janine Melnitz, Alfonso Ribeiro as Roland Jackson, Rino Romano as Eduardo Rivera, and Billy West as Slimer. Glenn Shadix was the guest voice, playing Mrs. Hardenbauer.
Notes
The Ghostmakers' scheme of possessing humans to seize the city echoes "Ghostworld," an earlier episode of The Real Ghostbusters.
Kylie calls the possessed townspeople "Stepford Guys," a nod to The Stepford Wives. When the possessed husband punches through a wall, Garrett yells "Freeze, Rocky!" after the boxer of the Rocky films; the Finnish dub renames the reference to Rambo, another Sylvester Stallone character.
The episode features a rarely-seen part of the firehouse: a third-floor bathroom and the adjoining hall, plus a bathroom reached through the door beside Janine's desk.
Garrett walking upright while possessed is notable for being one of the few times the series depicts what it would look like for his disability to be absent, even if only because a demon is doing it.
This episode aired between "The Luck of the Irish" and "Slimer's Sacrifice."
References
Extreme Ghostbusters, "The Ghostmakers" (Season 1, Episode 22, first aired November 4, 1997).
