Plot
Centuries ago, the Italian scientist Antonio Garibaldi mutters in his sleep about "celestial clockwork" and the "music of the spheres" while Luko hovers above him. Garibaldi wakes with an idea, sketches it, and forges the parts for a machine. Once it is finished, Luko possesses it, and Garibaldi grabs a crowbar to fend off his own creation.
In the present, a museum tour guide describes Garibaldi as a 17th-century inventor credited with the Filbert Press, the Skidmore, and the Clopstock, who was imprisoned for heresy in 1697. The same machine sits on display. When a boy and his mother leave the exhibit, Luko abandons the machine and possesses the boy's Robobot action figure.
At the Firehouse, Eduardo Rivera and Garrett Miller play one-on-one basketball while Kylie Griffin studies her Tarot cards, insisting her interest is purely academic. She draws the Tower card for Eduardo and explains its grim meaning before a racket interrupts them. Egon Spengler comes downstairs to find the noise is coming from Roland, who has been inspired by a documentary on a sculptor. In the workshop, Roland shows off a device the others mistake for modern art; it turns out to be a trash compactor. Eduardo's mockery leaves Roland fuming.
That night, Luko wakes the boy and, frustrated that the toy body cannot hold his power, demands the boy build him a proper machine. The team is called out and finds the boy claiming his toy attacked him. Kylie's P.K.E. Meter spikes. As they search the house, Luko jumps from a light fixture out a window, then hops between a Robobot, a lawn mower, a garbage truck, a power saw, a cement mixer, an elevator control panel, a nail gun, and finally a construction crane at the Laurel Construction Site. The chase nearly kills Garrett several times before Eduardo destroys the crane. The team concludes Luko is gone, over Kylie's objection. They never realize the demon has slipped into Roland's P.K.E. Meter, and as Roland sleeps it implants knowledge into him.
The next day Roland falls into a trance and refuses to stop working on his machine, grabbing parts from around the Firehouse. Kylie persuades the others to leave him alone and be supportive. Retracing the case, Egon studies Garibaldi's Principia Mathematica at the New York City Public Library, translating the Latin to learn that Garibaldi tried to reproduce the mathematical order of the universe late in life but was tricked by the demon Luko into building a perfect host. Garibaldi destroyed the machine hoping to trap Luko inside.
Roland completes his own version, the Infernal Machine, and activates it. Luko leaps from the P.K.E. Meter into the new device and begins a rampage, blasting everything with lasers. The team cannot escape in Ecto-1 because Roland stripped its engine for parts; Egon flags down a taxi instead. With their proton cartridges also missing (Roland used them too), they realize the machine's ionic transference circuit will overload and explode. Roland climbs onto the rampaging machine and activates a Ghost Trap, pulling Luko in just before the Infernal Machine safely detonates.
Production
The episode was animated by Hanho Heung-Up Company, Ltd. It aired as part of the first and only season of Extreme Ghostbusters, the 1997 follow-up to The Real Ghostbusters that paired an aging Egon Spengler with a new team of college-age recruits.
References and allusions
The script is dense with real-world references. Luko's implanted obsession centers on the "Music of the Spheres" (Musica Universalis), the ancient idea that the movements of celestial bodies form a kind of inaudible music. Roland's documentary inspiration is the sculptor Constantin Brancusi, and when the team mistakes his trash compactor for art they invoke Marcel Duchamp, the anti-Bauhaus Gestalt, and Jackson Pollock.
While searching the boy's room, Garrett riffs on the horror film Child's Play and its killer doll Chucky, and after Eduardo blasts a stuffed animal Garrett name-checks Mr. Potato Head. The three Ghostbusters admit they were each dreaming of a celebrity before the call: Garrett of Christie Brinkley, Eduardo of Christy Turlington, and Kylie of Christian Slater. Eduardo later mistakes the demon's name for Luka, the boy from Suzanne Vega's 1987 song, and Egon warns that the rampage will be a "disaster of biblical proportions," echoing the line he delivers to the Mayor in the first Ghostbusters film.
Kylie's studies pile on further nods: alongside the Tarot she reads the I-Ching, one of China's oldest texts. The Garibaldi book Egon consults shares its title, Principia Mathematica, with the early 20th-century treatise on mathematical logic by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. After the crane is destroyed she recites the Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy to argue Luko cannot simply be gone.
A framed photo on Roland's nightstand shows him with his younger brother Casey Jackson, who appears in the later episode "Grundelesque." The crane attack and elevator entrapment mirror a similar bust the original team suffers in the Real Ghostbusters episode "The Joke's on Ray."
Episode navigation
Previous episode: "Casting the Runes." Next episode: "Home is Where the Horror Is."
