After the vine attack in the premiere episode, both Anthony and Devin are trying to come to grips with what happened to them... in unique ways.
Anthony has done his best to clean and bandage his arm where a rash had started forming, dozing off in his basement lab when he's finished. He comes to later to a tiny pink tendril slithering out of his arm, and when he removes the bandages sees a bunch of them wriggling around like worms. Ew.
To make matters worse, Anthony notices a huge bulge in his arm and is forced to cut into his skin, yanking out a sizable bulging plant bulb that he traps inside a bell jar.
He sends some of the plant's DNA to his fellow scientists and they give him some concerning information. This "plant" is actually an animal. A carnivorous one. Anthony puts that to the test with some dead lab mice. The plant opens its bulb and devours it, slowly growing in size as it feasts. Anthony shoves the whole thing into his freezer and then goes into town to get some more meat to feed the thing. His working theory now is that this plant might be responsible for what happened to his brother and friends in 1994.
While Anthony is researching this plant-not-plant thing, Devin has convinced himself he has dementia. Due to his weird run-in with the vines and the spores at Fort Jerome, he's experiencing short-term memory loss and other disconcerting signs. Like the kids in 1994, Devin can also hear that mysterious high-pitched frequency that seems to come from the vines.
The one thing Devin does remember is going down into the sewer, so he convinces CJ to come with him down below. It's as disgusting as one might expect and CJ is pissed to be part of it, vowing to never help Devin again. All Devin finds in the sewer is a long tendril from the plants that covered him the night before. CJ advises him to ask his dad about it; he is the plant man, after all.
One of the other main storylines in the second episode revolves around the love triangle forming between Frankie, Devin, and Trey. Frankie finally breaks things off with Trey, and so, of course, the next time he sees her, it's with Devin, making him think Devin is "stealing his girl" or whatever. Devin has more significant things to worry about than that right now, but Trey is bitter. To make matters worse, he further antagonizes Anthony by parking in their driveway again, leading Anthony to do something drastic. He takes a shovel to one of Trey's car windows.
Fuming and out for revenge, Trey creeps into his neighbor's yard and breaks into the basement. Frankie shows up, seemingly out of nowhere, and tries to dissuade him from breaking and entering. Trey is determined. Well, as you might expect, Trey happens to stumble upon the freezer and the man-eating plant-animal hybrid inside of it. It uses its tendril-like vines to yank him inside, seemingly killing him.
When Trey doesn't return from the basement, Frankie follows him inside and she encounters his new form. Trey has turned into some kind of freaky Swamp Thing-looking entity and he kidnaps Frankie, taking her back to his dad's car shop. There, he frantically looks for a tool to help scrape the black goo clinging to him. Frankie tries to help, but it's clear whatever is wrong with him won't be fixed so easily.
To make matters worse, Devin shows up at the shop and he and Trey get into again. But Trey is much more formidable now in his new monsterous form. He comes close to killing Devin until Frankie intervenes by dropping a car on him. Together, they escape and it looks like Trey is dead. Except he's not.
The puddle of black goo that is now Trey reabsorbs itself into the dropped car, somehow fixing a shattered window and taking control of the radio. There is a Goosebumps book with a haunted car, so it looks like that might be the direction the next episode is headed!
Odds & Ends
- We learn that Jen, the detective played by Ana Ortiz, is Alex's mother and personally put her own daughter into juvie. Alex is out now, but she's still working off community service hours. I also get the sense that something romantic might be brewing between Alex and Cece.
All eight episodes of Goosebumps: The Vanishing are now streaming on Disney+.