This article contains Ghostbusters: Afterlife spoilers.

“Hey flattop!” It’s a line we haven’t heard Bill Murray utter for nearly 40 years. Nevertheless, you could physically sense the waves of nostalgia it triggered throughout the audience of the Ghostbusters: Afterlife premiere earlier this week when those words were shouted again. Moments before it looked like Gozer—the Destructor Herself (or Himself. Gozer is whatever Gozer wants to be!)—had won.

She’d returned from a parallel dimension and had totally defeated the plan of young Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) to capture her essence in the giant ghost trap that Old Man Egon Spengler built beneath his farm. Instead the trap failed to go off, and poor Lucky (Celeste O’Connor) got possessed by one of the Zuul spirits, turning into a dog. All hope thus seemed lost. But that’s when the three surviving Og Ghostbusters—Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd), Winston Zeddemore...