Need to get caught up here
Jul. 8th, 2009 06:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
omorkaDidn't get any writing done tonight because I'm back to GB/RGB and I realized I hadn't watched the second movie recently enough to remember its precise sequence of events. I'm glad I rewatched it, because I would have gotten something wrong in a way that might well have had plot consequences.
There's not a thing wrong with it. It's a cute movie, and it has some great lines and lovely character bits - the scene in Ray's shop, for instance. It just doesn't measure up to the original by a long shot. *sigh*
Okay, so the start of the film says "Five Years Later." That shifts the date to the end of 1989, not the end of 1988, if we take it literally. The end of the film would take place just after midnight on on New Year's Day, 1990. (Canon source: the OMNI we see in the first movie is dated October 1984, which implies that the boys burst onto the scene somewhere around August of that year. A literal five years after the end of the film would be somewhere around late October/early November, 1989.)
Peter says, after putting on the pack during the courtroom scene, "We haven't used these in a couple of years. I hope they still work," to which Egon replies with the quip about the power cells having a half-life of 5000 years. (They run on Carbon-14?) Now, he might be speaking really casually, but where I come from, you might say "a couple" if you meant three, but you wouldn't if you meant five.
So that implies a scenario in which they're still running around with the packs until 1986 or '87, until they get shut down. Now, that could mean a couple of things. It could have taken the various lawsuits two or three years to move through the system, allowing the guys to continue the business at least long enough to clean up the spooks left behind by Peck's blowing up the containment system. Or it could mean that Ghostbusters, Inc. was shut down immediately after the Gozer Incident, but the boys continued to hire out as consultants until the city slapped them with a restraining order. I'm sure there are other plausible scenarios.
But any scenario in which they continued to do any busting past the Gozer Incident implies a re-built containment system somewhere. That implies that either one of them owns his own house (I suppose Ray could use his parents' house, although it's never implied that he lives there in any of the source materials, canonical or not) or other property, or that they kept the firehouse and rebuilt the grid in the basement. That they fix up the firehouse and move back in after the courtroom scene suggests the latter.
You see where this is going? If we compress the RGB timeline and assume that seasons 1-3 occur in the years 1985-1987, then they get shut down, two years pass undepicted, the Vigo Incident occurs and we pick back up in Season 4 just post Vigo Incident, the timelines might not be quite as irreconcilable as I've been assuming.
We still have the problem of Peter's apartment, since as long as Egon and Ray were both still living at the firehouse I don't think RGB Peter would have moved out, but one obstacle at a time. :-)
There's not a thing wrong with it. It's a cute movie, and it has some great lines and lovely character bits - the scene in Ray's shop, for instance. It just doesn't measure up to the original by a long shot. *sigh*
Okay, so the start of the film says "Five Years Later." That shifts the date to the end of 1989, not the end of 1988, if we take it literally. The end of the film would take place just after midnight on on New Year's Day, 1990. (Canon source: the OMNI we see in the first movie is dated October 1984, which implies that the boys burst onto the scene somewhere around August of that year. A literal five years after the end of the film would be somewhere around late October/early November, 1989.)
Peter says, after putting on the pack during the courtroom scene, "We haven't used these in a couple of years. I hope they still work," to which Egon replies with the quip about the power cells having a half-life of 5000 years. (They run on Carbon-14?) Now, he might be speaking really casually, but where I come from, you might say "a couple" if you meant three, but you wouldn't if you meant five.
So that implies a scenario in which they're still running around with the packs until 1986 or '87, until they get shut down. Now, that could mean a couple of things. It could have taken the various lawsuits two or three years to move through the system, allowing the guys to continue the business at least long enough to clean up the spooks left behind by Peck's blowing up the containment system. Or it could mean that Ghostbusters, Inc. was shut down immediately after the Gozer Incident, but the boys continued to hire out as consultants until the city slapped them with a restraining order. I'm sure there are other plausible scenarios.
But any scenario in which they continued to do any busting past the Gozer Incident implies a re-built containment system somewhere. That implies that either one of them owns his own house (I suppose Ray could use his parents' house, although it's never implied that he lives there in any of the source materials, canonical or not) or other property, or that they kept the firehouse and rebuilt the grid in the basement. That they fix up the firehouse and move back in after the courtroom scene suggests the latter.
You see where this is going? If we compress the RGB timeline and assume that seasons 1-3 occur in the years 1985-1987, then they get shut down, two years pass undepicted, the Vigo Incident occurs and we pick back up in Season 4 just post Vigo Incident, the timelines might not be quite as irreconcilable as I've been assuming.
We still have the problem of Peter's apartment, since as long as Egon and Ray were both still living at the firehouse I don't think RGB Peter would have moved out, but one obstacle at a time. :-)
