Plot
Janine Melnitz takes Egon out to dinner for his fortieth birthday, enduring his lectures on the pagan and Aztec origins of the calendar. When they return to the Firehouse the lights are out and Egon suspects an intruder, but the surprise is Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz, and Winston Zeddemore, whom Janine has invited back to celebrate. Slimer turns up with a half-eaten cake, and the younger team, Garrett Miller, Roland Jackson, Kylie Griffin, and Eduardo Rivera, arrive to meet the originals. Eduardo is unimpressed and writes them off as old geezers.
Catching up, Peter says he has been trying to sell another Ghostbusters movie in Hollywood, claiming he is holding out for Brad Pitt to play him. Ray admits his pyrokinesis research at a major university in Idaho ended in an explosion and that he now works as a sales manager at a used car lot called Perpetual Motors. Winston has earned his pilot's license and taken up traveling. When a call comes in, Peter answers the phone ahead of the new team and insists the originals suit up for old time's sake. They dig their jumpsuits out of storage and head to Power Bowl, a bowling alley, where they fumble with the unfamiliar new equipment before Egon traps the ghost.
The originals settle back into the firehouse routine and keep reminiscing, leaving the Extreme Ghostbusters feeling sidelined. Out on patrol the next day, the week before Thanksgiving, the new team confronts a metal-eating ghost in an alley in Hell's Kitchen. When they blast it, identical copies appear, and the duplicates drain the power from Eduardo and Garrett's throwers. The originals arrive by taxi and finish the bust using a "carrot on the stick" lure, baiting the ghosts with a severed parking meter. Discouraged, the younger team begins making excuses to stay home, and Garrett tells Janine the "Real" Ghostbusters can cover any calls.
The duplicating ghosts turn up again on the George Washington Bridge, chewing through the support cables. Egon realizes that trapping the four of them will only create eight, but as the bridge starts to collapse, Peter goes over the edge and clings to a cable. Janine calls Roland for help; he saves Peter while the others trap the ghosts despite Egon's warning. Back at the firehouse, the teams compare notes. Kylie observes that the entity feeds on metal and gives off a high ion discharge, and she reasons that proton blasts displace those ions into the air, where each ghost duplicates. Ray concludes the only way to stop the creatures is to fuse their ions together, so the teams build Fusion Blast Adapters for their throwers. Ray warns before the final engagement that forced ionic fusion carries the risk of releasing enough energy to vaporize the immediate area into a crater the size of Death Valley.1 They corner eight of the entities chewing on a radio antenna and fuse them in a single trap. As they celebrate, Egon's meter picks up a massive reading, miles wide and larger than any ghost on record, and a dark cloud mass passes overhead. The story continues in Part 2.
Ghosts and entities
Power Bowl Ghost: A Class 3 Semi-Corporeal entity with a full-torso form and a vaporous lower half, the Power Bowl Ghost had been haunting its namesake bowling alley and attacking patrons with thrown pins. Peter convinces the original team to handle the bust for old time's sake, and after the four of them struggle to adapt to the modified proton packs, Egon traps it. Back at the firehouse, the originals describe it as a Class 3 when depositing it into the Containment Unit.1
Ecto-Clone: Classified after investigation as an extremely rare Class 4 Self-Replicating Specter, the Ecto-Clone is a metal-eating entity visually resembling a cross between a chameleon and a traditional animated ghost. Its defining ability is self-replication: when hit by a proton stream and then trapped, the protons displace self-replicating ions into the atmosphere and the entity reforms, producing one additional clone. Conventional trapping therefore makes the problem worse. The Ghostbusters first encounter one in Hell's Kitchen feeding on a dumpster; by the George Washington Bridge encounter, there are four; after those four are hastily trapped by the Extreme team, there are eight. Kylie's analysis and Ray's proposed ionic fusion solution drive the resolution. The Ecto-Clones behave somewhat like dogs and can be distracted with metal objects, which the originals exploit with the parking-meter lure.1
Continuity
When the original team dumps the bowling-alley ghost into the Containment Unit, Egon compares it to a Class 4 shape-shifter they busted in the Poconos, a reference to the Metamorph from The Real Ghostbusters episode "Drool, the Dog-Faced Goblin." Ray also recalls an off-screen bust of an Egyptian water spirit that dragged Peter fifty feet underwater in the East River; the creature is described only in dialogue and never appeared on screen. The self-replicating nature of the Ecto-Clones also recalls the Imps from The Real Ghostbusters episode "Janine's Day Off," another creature that multiplied when attacked. The second Ecto-Clone is captured using a ghost trap carried over from The Real Ghostbusters era rather than the newer EGB trap design, and the originals toss their throwers back into their holsters as they often did on the earlier show.
Production
The producers had always intended to close out the first season with the return of the original team.2 According to writer Shannon Muir, the two parts were originally scheduled to air on November 14 and 15, 1997, before settling on the December broadcast.
Cast
The episode features the regular Extreme Ghostbusters voice cast: Maurice LaMarche as Egon, Tara Charendoff as Kylie, Jason Marsden as Garrett, Pat Musick as Janine, Alfonso Ribeiro as Roland, Rino Romano as Eduardo, and Billy West as Slimer. The returning original-team members are voiced by guest cast Dave Coulier as Peter, Buster Jones as Winston, and Frank Welker as Ray.1
References
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Episode credits, "Back in the Saddle, Part 1," Extreme Ghostbusters, Season 1 (first aired December 3, 1997).
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Ghostbusters HQ, "Back in the Saddle, Part 1" episode page (archived).
