Plot
The Ghostbusters are on a daytime bust when a building window shatters. They find Egon hiding behind crates, calmly studying his P.K.E. Meter. He has been picking up the same secondary and tertiary readings as the last several cases and concludes an outside force is controlling and directing the ghosts. Egon tells Peter they must first know the enemy, a principle from Sun Tzu's Art of War. A large entity then materializes and introduces himself as the Master of Shadows, announcing that he intends to destroy New York City. The team opens fire, but he teleports away, insulted.
Back at the Firehouse, Egon rushes together a Spectral Transmitter to broadcast on the Master's spectral frequency. The hasty build leaves the wiring poorly insulated. The team reaches the Master, who admits that threatening the city is only a way to demonstrate his superiority and that it is nothing personal. Egon goads him into a one-on-one challenge and proposes a midnight showdown at the corner of 15th and Madison. The Master agrees, warning that if Egon fails to appear he will destroy the city in a single night.
Slimer prods the holographic projector, and his ectoplasm shorts out and fuses the circuits, exchanging his mind with Egon's. Waking in Slimer's body, Egon recites Newton's third law of motion: "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." With Egon now in Slimer's body, the team scrambles to build a Dimensional Inverter to reverse the swap before the deadline. They keep working through more ghost calls, including a chaotic bust at a roller derby where Winston is forced onto the track and Peter coaches him through it using what he learned watching derbies as a kid. Egon, meanwhile, struggles to function in Slimer's body, slimes the real Slimer by mistake, pauses involuntarily at Mrs. Taste's Candy when Slimer's ravenous personality takes hold, and discovers that in Slimer's perception everything tastes like chicken.
The Master moves up the appointment and demands Egon's presence at once. Slimer, in Egon's body, runs off to the meeting and can only answer the Master with gibberish and a raspberry. As the Master hurls blasts of energy, Ecto-1 arrives and Egon flies out to distract him while Slimer is pulled to safety. Ray activates the rewired Dimensional Inverter, restoring both minds to their proper bodies, and the now thoroughly confused Master of Shadows is easily trapped. Back home, Egon and Slimer briefly prank the others into thinking the swap did not fully reverse, then share a pizza. Throughout the ordeal, Janine realizes that what she values in Egon is his mind.
Cast and voices
Regular voices were provided by Frank Welker, Maurice LaMarche, and Arsenio Hall. The episode exists in two recordings. In the original recording, Peter and Janine were voiced by Lorenzo Music and Laura Summer. For the redub, those roles were taken over by Dave Coulier and Kath Soucie.
The Master of Shadows and his minions were voiced by William Marshall, known for playing the vampire Prince Mamuwalde in the Blacula films. He was uncredited for the role.1
The episode was recorded on January 7 and 9, 1987, with Arsenio Hall and Maurice LaMarche recording on January 9.2
The two versions
This episode was re-dubbed with Dave Coulier and Kath Soucie because it was intended for syndication but was swapped with the ABC year-two shows. The original version, with Lorenzo Music and Laura Summer voicing Peter and Janine, surfaced in the UK broadcasts of the show and later re-aired in the United States on USA and Fox Family. The redubbed version with Coulier and Soucie was the one released on DVD, as part of Sony's Volume 7 release. As of 2017 the redubbed version was also available to stream on Netflix in the United States, and as of 2020 it could be found on CTV Throwback in Canada.
Because the original recording uses the first voice cast for Peter and Janine, the episode's events are placed before "Transylvanian Homesick Blues." The air-date swap was partly motivated by a desire to bring a noted J. Michael Straczynski script into the Season 3 broadcast run.
