Stay Out of The Basement
For children, there probably isn’t a creepier place in the house than the basement; of course, if your parents freely keep their sex swing out in the open in their bedroom, the basement is assuredly a close second. Anyway, basements are usually damp, dusty, and have all kind of creepy crawlies that you’d rather not acknowledge having to share a house with. For Margaret and Casey Brewer, the basement has a little more than the usually scares. It contains… their dad! (Dun dun dun!)
Dr. Brewer is a botanist, another parent in the Goosebumps series that is some sort of scientist and he’s kind of a dick. He spends all his time in the basement working on his crazy plant experiments and can’t be bothered with either of his shitty kids. Okay, maybe they aren’t particularly shitty, but Margaret bitches about not being called “Princess” anymore, so on behalf of the man that winds up marrying her, thanks for putting that sort of mentality into her head.
As his experiments continue, Dr. Brewer’s actions become more and more peculiar, and Margaret’s curiosity gets the best of her and she heads into the basement with her brother to see just what her dad has been up to. If you didn’t figure out from the title, the basement is a place left alone, but Margaret trudges on and finds the basement filled with plants; plants that are a little handsy.
Dr. Brewer, of course, catches Margaret and Casey and explains that he’s simply trying to combine animal cells with plant cells, for reasons. However, upon further investigations of the basement, Margaret and Casey find their dad… another one! That’s right, Dr. Brewer has bypassed the idea of stem cells in order to create another one of himself, probably so he could be doubly-dickish to his kids; which is fine, especially when they can’t stay out of the goddamn basement. It leads to the all-important decision in movies about clones: which one is the real one? Margaret figures it out, though, because her dad is the only one that feeds her unattainable ideals about being a princess. Nowadays, this isn’t relatable, because women are fed this by Us Weekly and the constant coverage of everything Kate Middleton does.
This is actually quite a fun story. More often than not, Goosebumps episodes are always “Hey, there’s something crazy going on and no one believes me” sort of arc, but this is slightly different as no time is spent on trying to convince anyone. It’s an interesting conflict between the kids and their increasingly odd father. To me, it’s funny to see the dad act like a dick to the kids and the weird ways he covers his ass (wearing a baseball cap to breakfast) just makes me laugh.
The Main Damie 