Plot
Peter finishes a shower and reaches for a towel, only to wipe his face with Slimer instead. Janine Melnitz interrupts the fallout to tell him his father is on the phone. Jim Venkman is calling from Alaska. He has stopped selling refrigerators to people in the far north because he found something buried in the ice, and he wants the Ghostbusters and their equipment to fly up. Jim tells Peter to ask Egon about "Hob Anagarak." Egon is astonished, calling the legend the rarest of the rare, and judges it too dangerous to ignore even though he would not normally trust Jim.
On the flight north, Ray gets airsick in the small plane while Egon explains the legend. The Inuit believed the gods made the Earth before humans and placed the great demon Hob Anagarak to rule the barren land. When humans arrived, Hob attacked them; they defeated him, sealed him in a block of black ice, and sank him to the sea bottom. With the fire demon gone, the heat went out of the land and the north turned cold. Ray suggests this was the start of the Ice Age, and Egon agrees. Winston questions how anyone could sink a block of ice, and Egon answers that magic was involved.
The Ghostbusters land and meet Jim, then take dog sleds toward the find and are caught in an avalanche. Winston and Egon dig the others out by melting the snow with a proton pack set to low frequency and wide dispersion. In the village of Laganuki, Ray admires the black ice's durability, but Egon warns him not to touch it. Egon's P.K.E. Meter overloads and burns his hand; he reads Hob as at least a Class 7 and doubts the block can be destroyed. Jim reveals his real plan: he wants the team to pull Hob out of the ice, trap it, and put it on exhibit in the lower 48. Peter refuses.
That night the team agrees they have to stop Jim from sneaking off with the block. As they talk, strong paranormal activity throws objects around the hotel dining room, and Peter declares they will fry the ice block in the morning. The next day the Ghostbusters set their throwers to full stream and neutronize the block while the villagers watch. They leave satisfied, but as their plane heads back to New York, another plane is loaded with an ice-block-sized piece of cargo.
Back in the city, the Ghostbusters finish an unrelated call, emerging from a hair styling salon carrying four filled traps. Janine arrives with a newspaper: Jim Venkman is about to unveil a mysterious find at Madison Square Garden, and Dr. Bassingame, the scoundrel who once caused trouble for Ray's Aunt Lois, has designed a special Containment Fence to hold the creature. Egon and Peter rush to the Garden with Janine but arrive too late. Bassingame releases Hob with an ancient book of spells, the demon grows to thirty feet tall, burns through the fence, and escapes. The Ghostbusters confront Hob in Central Park, but even at full stream and maximum drain he resists confinement. Egon concludes they must bind Hob before they can trap him.
At the firehouse, Egon learns Hob was not just the top demon but a recruiter who enslaved other spirits and was building an army when he was first imprisoned. Ray realizes Hob would eventually target the Containment Unit. Egon finds an Inuit binding ritual that requires six men and a woman, plus the sorcerer who released Hob and a trickster, roles filled by Bassingame and Jim. Janine refuses at first but agrees after Peter promises a raise, more time off, and some private information about Egon. Winston and Ray lure Hob to the others, Bassingame casts the binding spell, and the team re-imprisons Hob in a block of black ice.
Afterward, Peter pays his father's fine at a Trailways bus depot. Jim promises to repay him once he sells the movie rights to the fiasco, and Peter makes him promise to go back to the farm in Iowa and live an honest life. Jim agrees, but as the others go for coffee he boards a bus headed straight for Hollywood.
Cast and characters
The episode is built around the friction between Peter and his father. Jim Venkman is a lifelong con artist, and the plot turns on Peter's certainty that his father cannot resist one more scheme. Lorenzo Music, the regular voice of Peter, also voices Jim.
Janine's romantic interest in Egon is a running thread here. She demands "privileged information" about Egon as her price for joining the binding ritual, telling the others she thinks he is cute, and she treats the cab ride to Madison Square Garden as a date.
Dialogue from the episode also fixes a small piece of character geography: Peter tells Jim to go back to Iowa and later says he sent his father back to the farm, which places the Venkman family farm in Iowa and implies Peter, like Egon, came from the Midwest.
Hob Anagarak
Hob Anagarak (also referred to as "The Hob" and "The First Demon") is the main antagonist of this episode and one of the most powerful entities the Ghostbusters face in the series. Egon rates him at least a Class 7, and P.K.E. readings go off the scale entirely. In appearance, he is a large saber-toothed, yeti-like demon with brown fur and grey skin, standing around thirty feet tall once fully released from his black-ice prison.
His abilities include fire breath, control over fire, immense physical strength, and the power to teleport away from danger. Even while still sealed in the ice, Hob can induce strong plasmoetheric activity across a wide radius, causing objects to animate and be hurled around a room. Egon calculates that if fully unleashed, Hob could reduce entire cities to charcoal. Beyond raw power, he possesses the unique ability to enslave other demons and spirits to his will, which is why he was building an army at the time of his original imprisonment.
The Inuit legend recorded that Hob's defeat caused the end of a warm primordial era and the onset of cold in the north, a story Ray interprets as the origin of the Ice Age. Some Inuit accounts also hold that a minority within the tribe revered Hob's fire as holy and purifying, while the majority feared its total destructive capacity.
After this episode, Hob Anagarak was added to the Insight Editions Tobin's Spirit Guide book (Section IV: Gods and Major Demons, pages 63 and 72-73), where he is classified as a Class 7 fire deity.
Equipment and locations
The Ghostbusters bring their standard kit: proton packs and particle throwers, a ghost trap, a P.K.E. Meter, and Ecto-1. The episode shows the throwers used at a low frequency with wide dispersion to melt avalanche snow without harming anyone, and later at full stream with maximum drain against Hob. Bassingame's purpose-built Containment Fence is meant to hold the demon but fails almost immediately.
Locations include the firehouse, the Arctic village of Laganuki, Madison Square Garden, Central Park, and the final scene at a Trailways bus depot.
Production and trivia
According to the episode's call sheet and SAG report, the voice track was recorded on August 21, 1986.2 A book-and-tape read-along set was later released based on the episode.
In broadcast order the episode aired between "The Long, Long, Long, etc. Goodbye" and "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Ghost?"; on the DVD box set it falls between "Hard Knight's Day" and "The Scaring of the Green." Although it aired before "Venkman's Ghost Repellers" and "The Spirit of Aunt Lois," in story continuity it takes place after both: Jim's presence in Alaska follows the postcard he sends at the end of "Venkman's Ghost Repellers," and Bassingame's grudge dates back to his earlier run-in with Aunt Lois.1
The premise borrows openly from "King Kong," with a fabled creature hauled to New York for a show only to break loose and rampage. Jim even bills Hob as the "Eighth Wonder of the World," the same phrase Kong's captors used. Jim's plan to sell the movie rights to the whole affair is later echoed in the Extreme Ghostbusters two-parter "Back in the Saddle," where it is revealed Peter did something similar after the Ghostbusters shut down.
Other small touches: Ray states outright that he hates small planes, and ties Hob's original defeat to the start of the Ice Age. During the final battle a billboard advertises a drink called "Heart of the Samurai" with Japanese text reading "Nanjaro Hoi," roughly "What do you want?" At one point Egon refers to the firehouse as "the Firehall," a small vocal slip in the recording.
Legacy
The episode's title and characters have received multiple nods in IDW Publishing's Ghostbusters comics. On page 10 of Ghostbusters Issue #3, Hob Anagarak is referenced in an advertisement and the black ice block is visible. On page 12 of Ghostbusters Issue #5, the episode title appears on a flier outside Ray's Occult Books. Issue #14 contains a non-canon cameo of Hob, and the demon appears again as one of Gozer's forms in Ghostbusters Volume 2 Issue #19. Hob also appears on the convention cover of Ghostbusters: Get Real Issue #1.
The winter gear the team wears in this episode is reused on the cover and in the first part of Ghostbusters International #10.
References
