Plot
A few days after the Ecto-Clone affair, Peter Venkman drags Garrett Miller out on a rented boat to fish. A strange fog rolls in, chases down and engulfs a nearby boat with a couple aboard, then vanishes under the sea. At about the same time, Janine Melnitz, Eduardo Rivera, and Kylie Griffin see off Ray Stantz and Winston Zeddemore at the airport. Winston is flying south to spend the holiday with his sister and Ray is booked to run a workshop at a paranormal expo in Miami, but a sudden fog cancels all departures.
Back at the firehouse, Egon Spengler studies the residual readings from Peter and Garrett's encounter and finds them unlike anything he has measured before. A call comes in from the mayor of Barkley Bluffs, New Jersey, whose developed waterfront has been wiped out in seconds by a fog. Egon confirms the same P.K.E. resonance, and Ray triangulates the entity's position to exactly where Peter's boat had been.
Out on the water, Kylie, Eduardo, Peter, and Winston ride into the fog bank and open fire, but the entity is unaffected and devours the boat. A tendril grabs Kylie; Eduardo pulls her clear, and the group is forced overboard, ditching their packs before the Coast Guard rescues them. Plotting past disappearances on a map, Egon traces a pattern of vanished ships and planes going back decades, all in a confined area, which Kylie recognizes as the Bermuda Triangle. Egon concludes the culprit is an ingestive ectoplasmic entity called S.I.D.N.E.E. that shrouds itself in fog, and that a new run of disappearances over the past six months shows it migrating north toward New York. Ray compares it to a demon the original team once faced, except this one is in a semi-nascent state, in effect a "baby Bermuda Triangle" growing toward maturity.
When the fog approaches the harbor, the teams arm their throwers with Fusion Blast Adapters and confront S.I.D.N.E.E. from a rented helicopter as it creeps up the Statue of Liberty. Their fire does nothing; the statue is lost, and Egon realizes the entity has only retreated to regroup before attacking Manhattan. The Ghostbusters head to Honest Irv's Wrecking Yard and convert a fire truck and a garbage truck into makeshift weapons: a Proton Cannon mounted on the fire truck, said to deliver a blast a hundred times stronger than their existing gear, and the garbage truck rigged as a giant mobile trap. Egon warns that once the entity's mass and density reach critical levels it will go quasi-gravitational, becoming something like a black hole and endangering the whole planet.
As the fog absorbs the Washington Square Arch, the Empire State Building, Times Square, and the Twin Towers, the teams make their stand in Central Park. The cannon's power relay shorts out, but Garrett patches in an alternate power source from a nearby control box, the cannon fires again, and a balky activation of the garbage-truck trap finally captures S.I.D.N.E.E. Everything it had swallowed is returned to the physical plane: the Statue of Liberty reappears on Liberty Island, Manhattan is restored, and a flood of long-lost ships, boats, and aircraft materialize, including a Fokker Dr.I biplane (a World War I-era German fighter) and the long-missing Captain Tidwell. The teams sit down together for Thanksgiving dinner, where Slimer eats both the main turkey and Janine's backup.
Cast
The regular voice cast included Tara Charendoff as Kylie Griffin, Maurice LaMarche as Egon Spengler, Jason Marsden as Garrett Miller, Pat Musick, Alfonso Ribeiro as Roland Jackson, Rino Romano as Eduardo Rivera, and Billy West. Guest voices included Cheri Caffaro, Dave Coulier, Pat Fraley, Buster Jones, and Frank Welker.
Production
"Back in the Saddle" was conceived as a two-part return for the original Ghostbusters to close out the season, and it served as the actual finale of the series when Extreme Ghostbusters was not renewed for a second season. The producers had always planned to end the first season by bringing the original team back into the story.1 Animation for the episode was produced by Koko Enterprise Company, Ltd.
A notable casting detail: Pat Fraley, listed among the guest voices, stood in for Frank Welker across two recording sessions when Welker was unavailable, providing the voice of Ray Stantz for those scenes.
The episode reaches back to earlier Ghostbuster history. The original team's reunion with the Statue of Liberty echoes their use of the statue at the climax of Ghostbusters II. The Proton Cannon mounted on the fire truck is reminiscent of the heavy weapon assembled by freedom fighters in The Real Ghostbusters episode "Ghost Apocalyptic Future." Converting a garbage truck into a mobile trap also recalls The Real Ghostbusters episode "Bustman's Holiday," in which Ray turns a fleet of garbage trucks into makeshift containment units.
