Voice cast
Regular cast for the episode included Dave Coulier, Frank Welker, Maurice LaMarche, Buster Jones, and Kath Soucie. Guest actor Roscoe Lee Browne voiced Edward "Big Ed" Zeddemore, Winston's father, in what was an uncredited role in the original broadcast.3 Frank Welker provided the voice of the Collector.3
Plot
At the firehouse, Ray Stantz and Winston turn the sleeping quarters upside down looking for a missing baseball and a sock. Peter Venkman needles them about losing things, then promptly loses his sandwich, his milk, and his sneakers. Slimer watches Peter's sneakers walk off on their own and disappear down a shower drain, while downstairs Janine Melnitz discovers her typewriter has vanished too.
In Brooklyn, construction workers spot a strange glow rising from the ground. Their boss, Big Ed, dismisses the idea of calling the Ghostbusters and tries to bury the chasm under a pile of dirt. It only grows wider, and a frightened worker phones the firehouse anyway. Egon Spengler stays behind to monitor a dangerously high P.K.E. surge while the others take Ecto-1 to the site. On the way, the road peels up behind the car and household objects fly through the air toward the dig as the rift pulls everything in.
A police officer is trying to talk Big Ed out of using dynamite when the team arrives. Winston recognizes the worker and then realizes the boss is his own father. Ed sets off the charge and seals the hole, only for a pair of Demon Miners to tear it open again. Both Ed and Winston fall through into the Land of Lost Objects. Ray drives Ecto-1 straight into the portal after them. As the car passes through, a painting of the Mona Lisa rendered in Slimer's likeness drifts past, and Slimer seizes the opportunity to grab a full cart of hot dogs from a street vendor.
On the other side, the team finds a landscape littered with lost objects and patrolled by bat-winged creatures searching for something. Ed and Winston wake in a prison cell, where they meet the Collector, an imprisoned entity who plans to hold them as leverage so the rest of the team won't interfere with his search. The Ghostbusters discover the Proton Pack throwers don't function correctly in this dimension. The firehouse itself, with Egon and Janine inside, is then sucked down into the realm; Egon arrives with Dimensional Compensator chips that recalibrate the throwers for use in the alternate dimension.
The Ghostbusters reach the Collector's fortress, part its moat with their streams, and send Slimer ahead through the traps. Slimer disguises himself as one of the warrior guards, finds Ed and Winston, and frees them. During the confrontation that follows, Winston's necklace comes loose and the Collector recognizes the pendant as half of an object he has hunted for ten thousand years: the Key. The other half hangs around Big Ed's neck. The Key had been in the Zeddemore family for generations, split between father and son.
The Collector explains that he was once a mage who dispelled spirits, "a Ghostbuster" in his own words, before a powerful demon imprisoned him in the fortress as the Keeper of Lost Objects. Believing his story, Ed gives up his half with Winston's blessing. The Collector joins the two halves, sets the Key into a seal behind his throne, and opens his escape. True to his word, he sends every lost object back to where it belongs and returns the Ghostbusters and Ed to the physical plane before vanishing through the portal with the Key. New York City is restored, and a pile of long-lost belongings lands in the firehouse: Peter's T-Bo the Bunny grade-school lunchbox, Ray's baseball and Boy Scout shirt, Winston's belt, Egon's childhood microscope, and Janine's high school yearbook among them. Slimer immediately swipes Peter's lunchbox and eats it.
The Collector and the Key
The episode's antagonist is the Collector, the central figure of the Land of Lost Objects. By his account he had been bound to the fortress for ten thousand years, drawing lost objects to himself in the hope of finding the one Key that would set him free. The detail that the Key had passed down through the Zeddemore family for centuries is what links the episode's cosmic plot to Winston's heritage. In his visual commentary, Mueller theorized from this that the Collector was likely African in origin, the same line his agent of misfortune had once traveled.4
The Collector was a sympathetic villain by design. Mueller said he based the character loosely on the writer Harlan Ellison, one of his mentors and a friend, describing both as "tortured intellects."5
One-off characters and entities
Edward "Big Ed" Zeddemore is Winston's father, a construction foreman experienced with dynamite. He dismisses ghosts as practical nonsense and is initially skeptical of his son's career choice. Big Ed wears one half of the family Key heirloom and is the only person alive who can authorize giving it to the Collector. His character reveals a dimension of Winston's background: when Winston was a child, Ed drove an old truck with a faulty lock that he had rigged a custom opener for, and Winston quietly internalized that lesson. In the visual commentary, Mueller correctly guessed the voice was Roscoe Lee Browne, noting it was an uncredited performance. The character's full name, Edward Lee Zeddemore, shares the "Lee" with Browne's own middle name.3
The Demon Miners are two blue goblin-like entities dressed as construction workers, complete with pickaxes and hard hats, who serve the Collector by expanding the dimensional rift in Brooklyn. Peter Venkman refers to them as "strange blue puppies." They are undeterred by dynamite and keep re-opening the chasm until both Ed and Winston fall through.6
The Bat Wing Demons are the Collector's aerial search agents inside the Land of Lost Objects. They sift methodically through arriving objects using magnifying lenses, hunting for the Key. Proton streams are initially ineffective against them in the alternate dimension, though Egon's Dimensional Compensator chips correct that.6
The Dimensional Compensator is a set of circuit boards Egon designs under pressure while the firehouse is being pulled into the Land of Lost Objects. The boards recalibrate the Particle Throwers to function in the alternate dimension. Egon fabricates three of them and distributes one each to Ray and Peter, demonstrating the insertion procedure on arrival.6
Production and trivia
Mueller named "The Brooklyn Triangle" his favorite episode in the visual commentary recorded for the home-video release.5 The story is steeped in references: the team's plunge into the rift echoes Dorothy's tornado ride in The Wizard of Oz, Slimer finds a pair of sparkling sneakers for Peter that recall the ruby slippers, and Slimer morphing into one of the warrior guards and falling into their marching column is a third Wizard of Oz nod. Ray parting the fortress moat is staged as a tribute to Moses parting the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments.7
The hot dog cart scene as Ecto-1 passes through the portal is a callback to the original Ghostbusters film, where Slimer raided food in a similar fashion. Winston uses a Swiss Army Knife to pick the prison cell lock, an echo of his practical upbringing under Big Ed.
The episode quietly fills in pieces of the team's pasts. Ray recovers an old Boy Scout shirt, a second nod to his scouting background after "Camping It Up." Egon gets back the microscope he received for his third birthday, Janine's recovered yearbook places her high school graduation in 1977, Peter is reunited with the T-Bo the Bunny lunchbox he lost in the sixth grade, and Winston recovers his belt.
In the broadcast and DVD running orders, "The Brooklyn Triangle" follows "Follow That Hearse" and precedes "Something's Going Around."
References
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Episode written by Richard Mueller; first aired November 19, 1988.
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Eatock, James and Mangels, Andy (2008). The Real Ghostbusters Complete Collection booklet, p. 31. CPT Holdings, Inc.
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Marsha Goodman (1988). Episode Call Sheet and SAG Report, "The Brooklyn Triangle" (1988).
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Richard Mueller (2009). The Real Ghostbusters visual commentary, "The Brooklyn Triangle" (1988). Time Life Entertainment. Mueller: "So he was like an ancient, presumably African, Ghostbuster, because the key was in Winston's family for forever."
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Richard Mueller (2009). The Real Ghostbusters visual commentary, "The Brooklyn Triangle" (1988). Time Life Entertainment. Mueller describes the Collector as "a loose homage to a writer named Harlan Ellison, one of my mentors and a friend," and "a tortured intellect."
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The Real Ghostbusters, "The Brooklyn Triangle" (1988). DiC Entertainment.
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Richard Mueller (2009). The Real Ghostbusters visual commentary, "The Brooklyn Triangle" (1988). Time Life Entertainment.
