Aahana Swrup
Disney+/Hulu’s anthology teen horror show ‘Goosebumps’ follows a brand new story in season 2 that centers around a pair of twin siblings and their adventurous summer in Brooklyn. Anthony Brewer is looking forward to spending the summer with Cece and Devin, his otherwise distant teenage kids who live with their mother. However, the summer takes an uncanny turn after the botanist’s kids and their friends stumble into the same mystery that led to the inexplicable death of their uncle, Matty, forty years ago. Consequently, with the introduction of a peculiar creature into their lives, the Brewer twins and their friends find their lives overrun with a series of dangerous encounters with off-beat monsters. Soon enough, it becomes clear that an eccentric threat is lurking in Gravesend, Brooklyn, originating from the mysteries that lie underneath Fort Jerome. SPOILERS AHEAD!
Goosebumps: The Vanishing Recap
Cece and Devin are used to spending their summer with their Aunt. Therefore, neither is very pleased with the prospect of visiting Gravesend, a boring Brooklyn neighborhood where their botanist father lives. On the other hand, Anthony Brewer couldn’t be more excited to spend time with his kids. He only has one big rule for the summer: no one goes down to the basement. The twins soon realize their father is only harboring an army of rare plants and such in his sacred basement botany room. Furthermore, both Cece and Devin have their own complications for the summer to care much about their father’s quirks.
Cece—an overachiever with straight A’s, has to maintain her lie about getting selected for a prestigious debate camp program in Brooklyn. Meanwhile, Devin is hoping to form a connection with his childhood crush, Frankie, who unfortunately now has a boyfriend, Trey. In an attempt to impress her, the teenager ends up accepting a dare to trespass into Fort Jerome, a.k.a. Camp Nightmare, the same place where a few kids went missing in 1994—including Matty Brewer, Anthony’s older brother. As a result, the teenagers go on an ill-advised trip to the Fort, where Trey’s malicious interference lands Devin in a pickle.
Devin, who ventures out to the transformer room alone, finds himself faced with an underground vault in the wake of the energy blackout that Trey initiates. Unbeknownst to the teenager, his current predicament resembles his uncle Matty’s demise 30 years ago. However, instead of catching his death, Devin only catches a cloud of spores—and a glimpse of his dead uncle’s apparition. Fortunately, he and the other teenagers manage to evacuate the place before anything more drastic happens. Simultaneously, Anthony manages to finally get his hands on the clothes Matty died in after the latter’s ex-girlfriend, now a cop, processes them for him.
Since Anthony has always been suspicious of the way his brother died, he examines the clothes and finds some spores on them. As he further experiments on these spores, a wild plant comes to life that infects the botanist’s arms. Worse yet, a parasitic, carnivore creature grows under Anthony’s skin, and he eventually manages to pull out of his arm. Initially, he tries to keep the creature contained by storing it in his basement’s freezer. Yet, an unwise breaking-and-entering scenario enacted by vengeful Trey results in the creature’s escape. Worse yet, the beast inhabits Trey as his monstrous host.
The same night, Frankie and Devin manage to stop monster Trey by dropping a car on him. However, this sets into motion a series of unbelievable events. From a car haunting to a wicked Kombucha monster—the tarry spore-sludge continues wreaking havoc on the lives of the Brewer twins and their friends. Meanwhile, Anthony investigates Fort Jerome to figure out the origins of his monster. However, he ends up getting infected himself. As a result, under the influence of the spores, he tries to infect CJ, the friendly neighborhood delivery driver, until his friends arrive in the nick of time to rescue him. Even so, while a freshly resurrected Trey manages to save CJ, he has to behead Devin’s father in the process.
Goosebumps Season 2 Ending: Does Anthony Die?
While all the central characters come close to a fatal demise, Anthony finds himself in the mouth of inescapable danger more than once. After he gets infected at Fort Jerome, the spores take up part of his mind, forcing him to do things he otherwise wouldn’t have. Consequently, he holds CJ hostage to turn him into an infectee just like himself. However, this only gets him beheaded in Trey’s efforts to save his friend. Yet, even after the beheading, the spores keep Anthony alive. This sufficiently freaks out Devin and his friends, who have now come to accept the fact that their lives are inevitably entangled with the weird underbelly of Gravesend.
Fortunately, the teenagers find something that might just hold a crucial piece of the puzzle. Earlier, Jen brought a VHS tape to Anthony that had the recording of Matty and his friends’ ultimate venture to Camp Nightmare. If Cece and the others can decode the event from that night, they have a better chance of understanding what they’re up against. Therefore, they decide to watch the tape at Grandma Brewer’s nursing home. However, Devin decides to take a detour to meet Hannah, a strange girl met at the part who has put him under a hypnosis of some kind. Consequently, while she lures the teenager out to Camp Nightmare, his friends learn about the Fort’s secret through Matty’s tape.
On the day of Matty’s death, he and his friends planned on spending the night at Fort Jerome as a part of their senior year dares. His younger brother, Anthony, was scared for Matty’s safety and followed after him. Nonetheless, he caught the botany enthusiast in the center room and convinced him to leave. Shortly afterward, a short circuit led to the opening of the underground vault, which released deadly spores. As soon as the older Brewer brother and his friends made contact with the spores, black oil spilled down their eyes before they poofed out of existence.
Yet, Matty and the others hadn’t died that night. One of them, Hannah, was dragged into the vault, and she managed to record the horrors underneath the fort. In a control room, everyone who got infected by the spores was now frozen and trapped in a pod that connected them to the mothership. For the same reason, Hannah’s ghost has been haunting Devin—who was only semi-infected that first night—in an effort to get help for her and her friends. Once Cece and the others realize the same, they rush to Devin’s aide to stop him from risking his life.
Afterward, they try to return to help their beheaded dad, only to realize that a strange woman has kidnapped him from his basement. Unbeknownst to the kid, the woman—Dr. Ramona Pamani, caretaker of the Fort—has melted Anthony into a goo. However, the infectee survives even that but gets podded as a part of the alien ship under Camp Nightmare. Fortunately for him, his kids manage to track down Ramona’s lair after a bout of sleuthing and tailing. Thus, they discover the real secret of the Camp Nightmare. Rather than hauntings and monster sightings, Fort Jerome is actually plagued by an alien presence.
In 1984, an alien ship crashed near the water Fort and invited top secret scientific research by Ramona, her father, Avi, and their small group. During this time, Avi formulated a serum that could kill the alien ship in a misguided effort at self-preservation. However, that only resulted in the research group getting trapped in pods, with the exception of Ramona. For the same reason, she now works tirelessly to contain the Fort’s deadly secrets.
Once the teenagers learn about the same, they manage to convince Ramona to help them save their dad. Even though Ramona arms them with some serum that can undo the spore’s infection and gets them under the vault, she doesn’t plan on letting them out. Therefore, even though the kids manage to inject Anthony’s pod with the antidote and bring him back to life, they still get stuck underneath the Fort with the mummified pods of everyone else—including young Matty and his friends.
Does Anthony Save Matty and His Friends? What Happens to Them?
Once Cece and the others rescue Anthony from the pod, they rush to get out of the center room, where the alien ship is stored. The place only has one exit hatch through the same room that can only be open from the outside. However, Ramona has condemned them to their demise. The doctor has been adamant about containing the threat underneath Fort Jerome. However, she knows that the Brewers won’t stop trying to save their family from doom. For the same reason, she has decided burying them with the alien ship’s secrets is the best course of action.
Nonetheless, Anthony and the teenagers attempt to come up with a solution. They realize that a power shortage will trigger the hatch’s opening just as it previously did when Trey blew up a transformer. Therefore, they come up with a plan to initiate a power outage from the inside to secure an exit from the underground. Still, after de-podding Anthon, the alien ship had “awakened,” creating an indomitable hurdle in their path to the exit hatch. However, the botanist comes up with the solution of using Avi’s serum to put the ship to sleep. In order to do this, he has to don a hazmat suit and enter the belly of the beast himself.
Even though it isn’t an easy task, Anthony manages to sedate the ship, allowing the kids to sneak away from the exit hatch. In the end, he only has a few minutes to make a run for it himself before the hatch closes again. Yet, instead of putting his own safety first, Anthony decides to go out on a limb and attempt to save Matty and his friends. Anthony has been plagued with regret over his inability to save his brother for years. For the same reason, he can’t give up on it now despite its risks. Even though he doesn’t have an antidote serum, he decides to inject Matty and the others with Avi’s initial serum, which fortunately works in a similar way.
Thus, Anthony manages to save his brother and his friends, exiting the control room moments before it shuts close. This paves the way for a number of sentimental reunions. Still, the danger hasn’t been evaded yet. Anthony wants to get to the bottom of the real Nightmare beneath the Fort. Therefore, he instructs the teenagers—which now includes his older brother and his friends—to stay at the house while he and Jen confront Ramona.
During the confrontation, Anthony realizes Ramona has actually revived her father, Avi, from the pod in a moment of weakness. Yet, Avi reveals a troubling secret as he turns into a lethal monster minutes after his resurrection. As it turns out, the time spent inside the pod has a number of side effects, including eventual monsterization. Devin, Cece, and the others also discover the same soon enough when Matty and his friends turn into clawed creatures before their eyes.
Do Devin and the Other Teenagers Survive?
Shortly after the transformations of Matty and the others, they corner Devin and his friends. Even though the latter group tries to fight off the monsters, they fail and end up getting infected by the pores. As a result, they are transported to the Fort Jerome underground, trapped inside pods. Thus, it’s now solely up to Anthony and Jen to save the kids. The two adults quickly realize that Ramona’s serum is an efficient way to kill the monsters—or at least get rid of them for the time being. From there, Anthony comes up with a risky theory and decides to put it to the test.
During his time in the pod, Anthony had felt a connection to the main alien ship. For the same reason, he believes the extraterrestrial creature doesn’t wish to harm earthlings. Instead, it just wants to return home but hasn’t been able to due to the Pamanis’ Project Orion. Consequently, he comes up with a plan to open up the exit route from the fort, allowing the alien ship to escape. Once he completes this task, the mother ship floats out of the Fort and sucks in all of its constituents, including the monsters. Since Devin and the others have only been podded for a short period of time, they don’t form as severe of a connection with the mother ship.
For the same reason, the teenagers are able to survive the incident by simply escaping their pods during the ship’s exit. This is the same reason Anthony doesn’t turn into a monster after his de-podding. However, Matty and the others—including the Project Orion scientists have been integrated into the alien ship for years. As a result, when the ship calls its parts to submerge into it, the former pod prisoners are compelled to follow. Yet, as Matty tells Anthony in a dream, he and the others have accepted their fate. The mental link formed after the podding process may allow Matty to bestow this message on his brother before taking his final leave.
How Did Trey Return to Life? What’s Wrong With Him?
In the aftermath, things promise to return to their old normalcy. The twins continue to have a regular summer at their dad’s place, where they don’t fight alien/monstrous forces with their friends. Instead, Devin and Cece have the opportunity to grow their friendships and respective relationships with Frankie and Alex. Eventually, summer comes to an end. While Cece decides to try a long-distance relationship with her girlfriend, whom she can visit during her debate team trips, her brother decides to move to Gravesend to stay with his father. As such, things come to a perfect end—with one crucial exception.
As Trey is returning home, he feels some queasiness and ends up throwing up a concerning amount of black tarry goo. The tar resembles the same slimy substance that the spore-infected monsters tend to leave behind. As such, a vital detail comes into focus. Trey has had a unique experience with the spores that remain distinct from anyone else. After he was infected, Trey momentarily died, haunted a car and a bottle of kombucha before finally returning to Fort Jerome, where Anthony found him. Therefore, he remains infected for days before Ramona sneakes him an antidote shot.
Consequently, it’s plausible that he must have formed some sort of connection with the alien ship. In fact, his drastic change in character—from a hot-headed bully to an understanding and helpful guy might have been a side effect of the same. Therefore, even though Anthony manages to find a way to get the alien ship to leave, a part of the alien substance may have stayed behind in Trey. This, of course, only spells out more trouble for Gravesend. Still, considering the show ended its season 1 with an unsolved cliffhanger, it seems safe to assume that this storyline will also remain unresolved.
