Plot
A tour bus driving through Greenwich Village is attacked by a swarm of ghosts. The tourists flee, but one stays to photograph the ghosts and is struck by them; his dropped photo shows a close-up of one. At the Firehouse, Roland Jackson practices the violin badly enough that Slimer flees and hides in a closet, mimicking the playing, while Garrett Miller, Eduardo Rivera, and Kylie Griffin suffer through it in the rec room. Eduardo, playing a handheld game console with a Tetris-like game, stuffs tissue in his ears. Egon Spengler reads on his P.K.E. Meter that the harmonic frequencies from Roland's playing are disturbing Slimer's ecto-metabolism. Janine Melnitz takes a call downstairs and the team rolls out in Ecto-1.
At a gala dedicating the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new east wing, Curator William welcomes the guest of honor, Mayor McShane, who poses as an art lover and mispronounces Manet before his assistant Jensen corrects him. The same swarm of ghosts attacks. The Ghostbusters open fire, but their proton streams have no effect. Roland tries overriding the flux arrestors and reversing polarity; nothing works, and the packs short out before the ghosts leave on their own. McShane berates the team and storms off, with Jensen warning they will hear from the Mayor soon.
Back at the Firehouse, the team is stuck with a bill for $5,623 in museum damages. Roland blames his own equipment maintenance, sure his violin obsession let the gear slip, but Egon confirms the throwers and proton cores were in perfect working order. Kylie suggests the ghosts may be building a resistance to their technology, like flu germs growing immune to a treatment. The ghosts go on to terrorize Times Square and Rockefeller Plaza, hauling the Prometheus statue across the ice rink and sabotaging a window washer's scaffolding.
In his City Hall office, McShane refuses to admit the sightings are ghosts, labeling them mass hysteria, and orders Jensen to bury the story. A man rises from an armchair and introduces himself as the Piper, offering to clear the ghosts with his music for a price. McShane has Jensen draw up a contract. The Ghostbusters, now armed with Proton-Diffusion Boosters, still cannot dent the swarm, but the Piper appears, plays his flute, and the ghosts fall into a line and follow him to the harbor. Kylie notes it looks more like obedience than control, and reads far higher P.K.E. levels off the Piper than off the ghosts themselves. The ghosts then mass together, attack the team, and wreck the pier before flying back into a mouth on the Piper's stomach. The team barely escapes the collapsing pier on a thrown rope.
McShane pays the Piper but wants him to stay quiet about the deal. The Piper then claims the job was harder than expected and demands a renegotiation: a statue of himself in the middle of Fifth Avenue and his own office in City Hall. McShane rips up the check and calls security. Meanwhile, Egon radios his analysis: the "ghosts" are not separate entities at all but component parts of one massive psychokinetic core, which is why the equipment failed against them, and the high P.K.E. reading points to the Piper as that core. The whole infestation was a scam. As the Piper begins luring the city's children into a trance, the team confronts McShane, who only relents and asks for their help once Jensen confirms children are following the Piper. Eduardo presents the museum bill, and McShane tears it up.
At a landfill, the Piper prepares to march the children into the bay. The Ghostbusters arrive and reveal they know his secret. He takes his true form and uses his flute to whip up tornadoes and a torrent of garbage. Garrett taunts him for hiding behind the children, and the Piper releases them, then traps Garrett in a vortex. Roland realizes that his violin playing disrupts the Piper the same way it bothered Slimer, and his playing staggers the creature. Garrett blasts the flute before the Piper can recover it. With his emanations released and himself vulnerable, the team opens fire and traps him. Garrett deliberately rolls over Roland's violin, claiming it was an accident, to the team's quiet approval.
The Piper
The Piper is an ectoplasmic entity that operates as a confidence artist: he conjures or releases a swarm of apparently independent ghosts, then presents himself to a mark as the only one capable of controlling them, collects payment, and then escalates his demands. In the episode he first appears disguised as a human in McShane's office.
The "ghosts" the Piper unleashes are not real ghosts but Component Parts Emanations: fragments of his own massive psychokinetic core, analogous to spark plugs in an engine. Because they are extensions of the Piper rather than independent entities, they are completely immune to Proton Streams, which explains the team's repeated failures. The Piper stores these emanations inside a mouth-like cavity in his stomach; releasing them makes him temporarily vulnerable.
His enchanted flute can hypnotize children, manipulate weather to generate tornadoes, and psychokinetically move large quantities of garbage. The same harmonic frequencies that give the flute its power are disrupted by sufficiently dissonant acoustic vibrations, which is how Roland's poor violin playing, after disrupting Slimer's ecto-metabolism earlier in the episode, ultimately proves decisive against the Piper.
The Piper later received non-canon appearances in IDW Publishing comics: a cameo on Cover B of Ghostbusters Issue 12, and a reference as "Piper's Music" on an elevator directory in Ghostbusters Volume 2 Issue 5. He also appears in his true form on the IDW Convention Variant Cover of Ghostbusters 35th Anniversary: Extreme Ghostbusters.
Voice cast
The regular cast is credited as Tara Strong (as Tara Charendoff), Maurice LaMarche, Jason Marsden, Pat Musick, Alfonso Ribeiro, Rino Romano, and Billy West. Roger Rees guest stars as the Piper.
Notes
Some releases retitle the episode "The Ghostpiper of Manhattan." That title appears on the Extreme Ghostbusters: Season One Volume One DVD set's disc menu and on the Hulu streaming service.1
The curator who first appeared in "The Unseen" has his first name given here as William. During the gala, Garrett references a story that Mayor McShane once vomited on royalty, echoing the real-world incident in which then-President George H. W. Bush became ill at a state dinner in Japan. Eduardo compares the Piper's speech to a bad Robin Hood movie; Roger Rees, who voices the Piper, played the Sheriff of Rottingham in Mel Brooks's Robin Hood: Men in Tights. Roland is needled with the nicknames "Yo-Yo Ma" and "Itzhak Perlman," after the cellist and violinist. Eduardo also jokes that the Piper's emanations must have been wearing flak jacket body armor, accounting for their invulnerability to proton fire.
In the broadcast order, "The Pied Piper of Manhattan" follows "The Crawler" and precedes "Be Careful What You Wish For."
References
-
Extreme Ghostbusters on Hulu, series listing (extreme-ghostbusters), Hulu.com.
