Cast
Regular voices: Tara Charendoff, Maurice LaMarche, Jason Marsden, Alfonso Ribeiro, Rino Romano, and Billy West.
Guest voices: Edward Albert, Jennifer Darling, and Willie Lane.
Plot
A thunderstorm splits a lone tree, exposing a large cocoon. Something Grundel-shaped emerges and runs off. That night it knocks on a boy's window asking him to come out and play. By the time Ecto-1 arrives, the boy's mother can only tell the team her son screamed and the creature fled into the woods, repeating "come out and play." The phrase stops Kylie cold; she recognizes it from a memory she keeps to herself, brushing off Roland's concern with a claim of dizziness. Garrett Miller finds a slime trail, and Eduardo Rivera talks past the skeptical police by declaring the team are scientists.
In the woods the Ghostbusters reach the split tree, where Roland glove up and takes a sample of ooze from the cocoon. They chase the Grundel to a cliff, where it ambushes them and throws Roland over the edge. Kylie freezes mid-rescue as another fragment of memory surfaces, then drags Roland to safety. Grateful, he tells her he owes her one. The creature is gone.
Back at the firehouse, Roland's young brother Casey has tagged along and slips loose during a tour. He locks Slimer in the refrigerator, sabotages Egon Spengler's lab work by smearing ear wax on a microscope slide, and torments Garrett with a spit wad and a broom jammed in his wheelchair. Egon eventually reports that the ooze carries traces he calls "Grundelesque." He explains the Grundel as a supernatural parasite that preys on children with a hidden capacity for wrongdoing, luring them with the promise of fun and games and trying to turn them into Grundels. Kylie ties the case to the mother's report and argues it must be the Grundel. Egon corrects her: there is only one, and the original Ghostbusters trapped it ten years ago. All of its victims, he says, returned to normal once it was captured.
To prove the point, Egon takes the team down to the Containment Unit and pulls a readout from a monitor, explaining that every ectoplasmic entity has a unique frequency pattern, the way every person has a genetic code. The Grundel is still locked inside. Kylie remains unconvinced and floats the idea of questioning it. Egon shuts that down with the standing rule never to open the Containment Unit. After Casey is handed off to his mother, Kylie talks Roland into helping her anyway. Calling in the favor he owes her, Roland rigs a projection device to the unit's trap slot so the captured ghost can be projected into a containment field.
The projected Grundel knows Kylie by name and admits he used to watch her sleep. When she proved too strong, he turned to her only friend, a seven-year-old boy named Jack. In flashback, Jack opens his bedroom window despite Kylie's pleading and turns to reveal a partial Grundel transformation. Jack vanished, no one believed Kylie's account, and she buried the memory. Egon nearly catches them mid-session, forcing Roland to kill the projector and hide. Roland reminds Kylie that Egon said every victim reverted, but she is shaken.
A second Grundel surfaces, calling to other children. One girl is saved only by her dog. Responding to the new call, Kylie recognizes the creature as Jack and chases it, but it leaps off a bridge into the river. She lies to Eduardo that it was not the Grundel. Determined to know the truth, Kylie returns to the basement, and Roland joins her again. This time the projected Grundel admits Jack resisted like Kylie, so it sealed him in the cocoon to transform him slowly; Jack stayed in the tree until the storm. While Casey, having stowed away to follow Roland, sneaks around the firehouse, the Grundel hypnotizes him and forces him to release it from containment. Roland cuts the projector and finds Casey dazed, with no memory of what he has done. Two Grundels are now loose.
The original Grundel recruits the second to help it steal "a very special child." A team meeting quickly lands on the answer: the Grundel will go after a child it already entranced, Casey. The Grundels lure Casey out of his bedroom, and the Ghostbusters give chase. Garrett finds Casey already partly transformed and gets payback on the second Grundel with a fence plank. The original Grundel seizes Kylie, taunting that it only wants to hurt her, but Roland blasts it from behind and Kylie traps it. Casey returns to normal, and Garrett brings out a restored Jack, who reunites tearfully with Kylie as Eduardo grumbles in envy. Back at the firehouse, Egon tells Kylie he is glad she disobeyed him, since Jack would otherwise have been lost forever. He admits his analysis was thrown off because the slime sample was saturated with Casey's ear wax.
Continuity
The episode is the only return of a ghost from The Real Ghostbusters besides Slimer, tying directly back to the earlier-series episode "The Grundel". Egon places the events of that episode ten years before this one. With Extreme Ghostbusters set in 1997, that fixes the original Grundel case in 1987. Egon names Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz, and Winston Zeddemore as the team that trapped the Grundel; it is the first time Ray and Winston are mentioned by name in the series.
Kylie's childhood haunting by the Grundel mirrors Egon's own childhood, in which he was tormented by the Boogieman. Two of the children the second Grundel approaches were also seen playing in Central Park in the opening of the earlier episode "Slimer's Sacrifice." Casey nicknames his brother "Rollie."
Production
Martin Olson wrote the script while on hiatus from "Penn & Teller." An early draft of his differs in many ways from the aired episode, including a longer cold open and a darker climax. According to Olson, the show's producers initially considered the script too intense for children, with several settings (one set in a meat locker) judged too extreme, so it was revised to fit the series.1
References
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Martin Olson, draft script for "Grundelesque" (an episode of Extreme Ghostbusters), as posted by the author.
