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A Temporary Insanity is episode 34 of Extreme Ghostbusters. It first aired on November 28, 1997 as part of the show's first season. The episode was directed by Tim Eldred and written by Richard Mueller, with animation by Koko Enterprise Company, Ltd. Fed up with going unappreciated, Janine Melnitz finally cashes in her overdue vacation time, and the temp who replaces her at the firehouse turns out to be more than she seems.
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The regular voice cast featured Tara Strong (credited as Tara Charendoff), Maurice LaMarche, Jason Marsden, Pat Musick, Alfonso Ribeiro, Rino Romano, and Billy West. Guest voices were provided by Nora Dunn and John Mariano.
A power-draining crisis hits the city after dark. Street lights and traffic signals cut out, gridlock and police sirens follow, and utility workers Stan and Charlie track the trouble into the sewers. There they find a leech-like entity siphoning power from an electrical panel. The leech turns and attacks them.
At the firehouse, Janine is buried under filing and bills when Slimer brings in the mail, including a postcard announcing that she has won seven days in Bimini courtesy of "Li'l Earth Vacations." Janine dismisses it as a timeshare scam and tosses it, insisting she would rather stay where she is appreciated. The rest of the day chips away at that conviction. Roland dumps a stack of supply catalogs on her without marking anything, including a need for spark plugs, beakers, and Uranium-237. A burst kitchen pipe rains water through the ceiling. The Ecto-1 returns caked in grime after Egon Spengler, Eduardo, and Kylie spend three hours slogging through sewage chasing the leeches. When Eduardo snaps at her, Janine asks Egon how much vacation time she has built up. His estimate of 243 days is all she needs to hear, and she leaves.
The firehouse falls apart almost immediately. No one can get into Janine's computer or her filing system, the team can't find the checkbook to pay a plumber, and the Ecto-1 is towed away after the company's payment checks bounce. With every temp service in Manhattan refusing to work for the Ghostbusters, Egon hires a replacement from a clipping for a service called "Gal Friday": a woman named Lilith.
While the team treks back into the tunnels by subway to fight the leeches again, Lilith proves to be a miracle worker. She repairs the Ectomobile and offers to fit it with new spark plugs, pays the outstanding bills, fixes the pipes, restocks Egon's chemical cabinet, and cooks dinner. The Ghostbusters are charmed. What they don't see is Lilith studying the schematics for their proton packs, throwers, and proton canister, and draining a P.K.E. Meter of its power. She also assembles an upgraded comm link, which she uses to encourage the team mid-bust, steadily winning their trust.
Janine cuts her Bimini trip short and returns, tripping a new perimeter alarm Lilith installed. She quickly notices that only Slimer knew her destination, finds no listing for "Li'l Earth Vacations," and realizes the name is an anagram of Lilith. Suspicious, she tails Lilith from the firehouse to Penn Station, loses her, and later discovers that Lilith does not appear in any of the surveillance photos she took. Beneath Penn Station, Lilith is revealed to be feeding on the leeches and building a containment field around a giant vat. She plants two leeches back in Egon's lab and traps Slimer when he catches her in the act, making it look as though she was the one being attacked.
When Janine returns and announces that Lilith is a ghost, the team is skeptical until Slimer turns up missing and Roland finds an energy surge building under Penn Station, exactly where Janine followed her. Egon refuses to let Janine come along, telling her she lacks proper training. Left behind with dead proton packs, Janine takes the functioning proton pack off the statue of Peter Venkman on the second floor, suits up in a spare uniform, and follows, invoking the "Who Ya Gonna Call?" motto as she gears up.
In the fallout shelter below the station, the team finds Lilith with the Ecto-Leeches and discovers their gear has been drained. Lilith reveals her true form, freezes the Ghostbusters in a stasis field, and lifts them over her Bio Containment Vortex, explaining her plan to adapt their technology and use all of humanity as a limitless power source. Janine blasts her from behind, freeing the others. As the leeches swarm Janine, Kylie frees Slimer from a charged trap below. Slimer slimes the leeches, flies up behind Lilith, and traps her, the force of the vortex slamming him into the vat before he seals the trap and drops it into Janine's hands. Back at headquarters, Garrett apologizes and declares Janine an official Ghostbuster, but she insists her proton-slinging days are over and that she would rather keep an eye on the firehouse, punctuating the point by shooting out the new perimeter alarm.
Lilith, voiced by Nora Dunn, is the episode's primary antagonist: the queen of the Ecto-Leeches and a Class 7 corporeal parasitic entity. She had established a lair in an abandoned fallout shelter beneath Penn Station and had been tracking the Ghostbusters for years before devising her infiltration scheme. In human form she retains the ability to command the leeches and drain electrical power; in her true form she is physically larger, capable of flight, and far more powerful. She can generate an ectoplasmic stasis field to immobilize humans, and the Bio Containment Vortex she builds using adapted Ghostbusters technology was designed to store captive humans as a living battery.
A notable detail: when Janine photographs Lilith, the developed images show no image of her at all, an attribute the episode implicitly links to vampire mythology. The name connects to a deeper mythological tradition; Sumerian records and Jewish demonological texts identify "Lilith" as a demon that consumed the blood or soul of victims, and the character's energy-draining nature maps directly onto that folklore. According to the Insight Editions Tobin's Spirit Guide, she is catalogued in Section III: Metaspecters, pages 60-61.
The Ecto-Leeches are small, leech-shaped entities that drain electrical energy from city infrastructure, triggering the power outages at the episode's opening. They respond to Lilith's commands and serve as both her foot soldiers and food source: Lilith feeds directly on the leeches to sustain herself and power her containment apparatus. Slimer defeats the final swarm by coating them in slime before trapping Lilith.
The villain's aliases are built on wordplay: "Li'l Earth," the vacation company that lures Janine away, is a phonetic play on "Lilith." The Bimini destination is a real island chain in the Bahamas near Florida.
The vacation invite supplies a couple of incidental details about the series' version of the firehouse, giving its address as "3960 Ince Boulevard, New York, NY" and a post date of November 4, 1997.
Uranium-237 turns up on Roland's supply list, the second time the material is name-checked in the series after Glutton for Punishment. The plot also echoes Fallout, in which the firehouse likewise descends into chaos without Janine to run it.
The proton pack worn by the Peter Venkman statue on the second floor is shown to be a working model, which Janine uses against Lilith despite the series' running premise that the team needed stronger equipment than the original Ghostbusters carried. The statue's face is digitized out in the finished episode; the reason for the edit was never officially confirmed. A widely accepted fan theory holds that a Sony licensing restriction barred Adelaide Productions from replicating the exact character designs from The Real Ghostbusters, requiring the face to be obscured.
This is not the first temp the Ghostbusters hired who turned out to be a supernatural entity. The earlier case was Dixie in the The Real Ghostbusters episode "Til Death Do Us Part." Lilith's tactic of secretly studying the team's equipment schematics to build her own gear mirrors Paul Smart in "Robo-Buster."
Garrett is called "Romeo" again in this episode, this time by Eduardo. Garrett in turn calls Kylie "Calamity Kylie" during the tunnel chase, a likely nod to Calamity Coyote from Tiny Toon Adventures.
Writer Richard Mueller also scripted several episodes of The Real Ghostbusters.
At the 6:46 mark, Garrett's costume switches from his jumpsuit to civilian clothes when the tunnel wave hits, then reverts to his jumpsuit in the next shot.
"A Temporary Insanity" was preceded by Mole People and followed by Rage.
Extreme Ghostbusters, "A Temporary Insanity" (Season 1, Episode 34, November 28, 1997). Lilith character background: Tobin's Spirit Guide, Insight Editions, Section III: Metaspecters, pp. 60-61.
