I never liked Tucker and Sam's first big fight on the show. I thought that it was clever that Sam led a campaign for vegan food to be served on campus, therefore establishing her character really well, but rather than give Tucker a personality, they just made him fight her tooth and nail under the guise that he was a "meat lover."
Plus, he totally sold her out to be killed by a lunch lady ghost during episode one, and no one really gets mad at him for it (teachable moment, anyone?).
I really wanted Tucker's character to be less of a constant joke and give him room to be funny, caring, and considerate of other people. So, in case you were wondering, no, there is no ultra-recyclo-vegetarian sub-plot in this version. However, we will still see Sam as the social justice and eco-friendly goth that she's always been.
Never had anyone ever felt more ridiculous than Danny, Tucker, and Sam did that night as they quietly stole their way through the dark and deserted halls of Casper High.
"Your parents would be so proud if they knew," Tucker joked.
They looked like the Scooby gang, or maybe the Ghostbusters, and were outfitted with dark clothes, backpacks, flashlights, and various gadgets for both ghost hunting and to get them into the building. All of the gadgets had been pilfered from the Fenton lab in the basement, and Danny hoped that nothing would be broken - or he'd have some explaining to do.
Danny had been practicing how to phase through walls, but sadly for Tucker and Sam's sake, they'd had to unlock the doors. Tucker hacked the security system at the front, and they thankfully slipped inside undetected.
"Whoa," Danny had said upon entering the dark school.
"What?" Sam asked.
"If I focus on it, I can seriously see in the dark."
"You can!?" Tucker cried. "That's super cool, dude!"
"I know, right?" He turned to them and they both almost jumped at the way his eyes glowed outward.
"Oh," Tucker blinked. "That's terrifying."
"Wait, really?" Danny asked, his eyes going wide with worry. "I'm sorry, I'll try to turn them off."
"No, don't, dude! It's just like… spooky is all. Maybe go full ghost? It's weirder when you look like you but also… not you?"
Danny agreed and focused. With a bright camera flash, Danny Fenton was gone, and their mysterious "Phantom" (as he was named in the Gothica) was there instead.
"You know, somehow that's way better," Sam agreed.
"Much more badass."
"Thanks, guys," Danny said, a sheepish grin pulling at his mouth. They were telling him not to feel ashamed or self-conscious about his powers - in their own way.
The three friends made their way through the school and various classrooms without interruption. The night janitors were gone by now - it was nearing midnight - and so the only sound in the whole building was Tucker and Sam's footsteps as they walked.
Danny, in true half-ghost fashion, floated along beside them.
"You're getting better at that," Tucker said with a grin.
"Not totally," Danny reminded him. "I still fall back down to the floor if I'm not careful, and even worse, I float way too high and worry I won't come down."
"Well, just don't phase through the ceiling and you'll be fine."
"Okay, come on, let's check the auditorium next."
Sam led them through a pair of thick double doors and into the school theatre where mediocre performances of Hamlet, Oklahoma, or Into the Woods were held in the spring and fall each year. They combed the area with flashlights and Danny's ghostly night vision.
Sam was walking through each aisle of theatre seats with a scanner in her hand. It was one of Danny's father's inventions.
"Do you think this Fenton Ghost-Finder will really work?" she called.
Danny was floating around the rafters and spotlights. "That's a great question, Sam, but I seriously don't know. From what I understand, Dad's kind of a zero-for-ten kind of guy."
Bolstered by that unhelpful information, Sam continued scanning the room.
"Hey, Danny, come look," Tucker called from backstage. Danny floated over to meet him.
"What did you find?"
"Only the next piece of your superhero outfit," Tucker joked and pulled out a Phantom of the Opera mask. "Get it?"
Sam pity-laughed from the aisles. "A little on the nose, Tuck."
"Aw, come on, I thought it was hilarious."
Danny reached out and took the mask. He placed it over his ghostly face and walked center stage.
"Boooo, beware me! I am the Danny Phantom of the Opera!"
"That's not at all accurate," Sam laughed again. Her little goth heart was appreciating the sight, though. How often did a real phantom come out on stage playing a terrible performance of the Phantom himself? "Although you could use a few extracurriculars under your belt. Why not try out?"
Danny lowered the mask. "I doubt NASA is interested in theater kids, Sam."
"Are you saying the arts aren't as important as the sciences?" she snapped back.
"I'm... saying the sciences haven't fully appreciated the arts yet," he backpedaled. Sam side-eyed him and continued scanning.
"You know we should be looking in the cafeteria for a lunch lady ghost, right?" Tucker asked as he came from backstage holding a fake sword. "En guard!"
Danny closed his eyes as Tucker swung and became intangible, his body now smoky and blue. The sword passed gently through him (Tucker hadn't brought it down very hard anyway) and a weird 'whoosh' sound came from the contact it had made.
"Whoa," Tucker said, dropping the sword as if it had burned him. "That was seriously cool. Kind of gross, but cool."
Danny beamed. "I've been practicing! I can't believe it worked! Other than floating away it's the only thing I know how to do. Well, that and now see in the dark."
"Dude, you looked like a weird CGI-blue ghost thing!"
They talked excitedly about it while Sam sighed and sank into a red theater seat.
"Tucker's right you guys," she called to them, breaking up their excitement. "We should check the cafeteria."
To be honest, they had been avoiding it all night. They'd checked the music room, almost every classroom, and even the gym, but not the kitchen or cafeteria. Danny had been the only one to see a real ghost before, and Tucker and Sam weren't sure they were ready.
"Okay," Danny agreed while Tucker jotted down notes about Danny's blueish-smoky intangibility in his phone. "We can go there next."
"What happens if…" Sam asked, standing up from the seat, "you know…?"
"We try to talk to her. Hope she's friendly." Danny said. Tucker nodded.
"Yeah, we try to tell her to get her butt to the 'other side' and leave our school alone."
"But so far she isn't hurting anything," Sam pointed out. She was still feeling a little ache in her chest about how the woman had died. Maybe the woman was sad and alone?
"Yeah, but what if she did. Besides, who wants to muddle around this plane of existence forever? I mean… it's a high school."
The three of them left the theatre after returning the props to their proper place and headed for the cafeteria which was close by. They emerged into a large room with long tables and attached benches that sat clean and empty of student food residue. The massive barrel trash cans in the corners were empty and clean, too, and the lunch line which usually held hot and cold foods was sparkling.
"I guess the night janitors really earn their money," Tucker joked quietly.
But the room felt sterile and too quiet - without the loud students, the ketchup streaks on the tables, or the soft steam coming off a pan of tater-tots, it felt more like a very clean, very quiet morgue.
Maybe that was just because of why they were here.
"Okay," Sam whispered. "I'll check the kitchen and Danny should check the freezers. I'm assuming they're locked and he's the only one who can walk through walls."
"And not feel cold," Tucker said.
"I feel cold when a ghost is around," Danny reminded him.
"Oh, right, good, keep that in mind," Sam said. "If you feel anything weird or cold, let us know immediately."
"I'll check out the pantry and dry food storage," Tucker chimed in. "I bet there are leftover brownie bites in Tupperware somewhere."
Sam was about to scold him that that wasn't why they were here, but the two boys already disappeared on their assignments. She sighed and headed for the kitchen.
It was less clean than the cafeteria. The countertops were covered in cutting boards and knives that seemed to have been stopped mid-creation of whatever meal they had been used for; yellow onions were flayed into pieces. A pot of soup was simmering over an open flame. Sam scrunched her eyebrows in confusion.
Someone was cooking.
"Guys-" she began but was cut off by the sound of a cabinet closing loudly behind her. Sam jumped and turned, expecting to see one of the boys behind her.
It wasn't Danny or Tucker.
"Excuse me," came a soft, high voice. "Do you know where the ground beef is?"
Sam collapsed to the ground and scooted on her butt away as fast as she could from the rotund, ghostly older woman that was floating just in front of her. This was absolutely the lunch lady from the photos. There was no doubt about it. From her apron to her hairnet, this woman was the spitting image of Patty Heath, the woman who'd invented the Sloppy Joe recipe that Casper High still used to this day.
A recipe as outdated as the rest of this school, apparently.
"Did you hear me, sweetheart?" the woman asked. "Where is the ground beef? It's supposed to be Sloppy Joe day, but I can't find it anywhere."
Sam's breathing caught in her throat and she felt faint. This was a ghost. A literal ghost.
"Uh-um," she stammered just as Danny burst through the kitchen wall yelling: "Sam! I just got real cold-"
He stopped fast when he found himself floating just in front of the lunch lady ghost before him.
"Oh. Right."
"Oh no," the lunch lady's expression softened. "You poor thing."
Danny frowned in confusion. What was a 'poor thing' about him?
"You died so young," the ghost said, reaching out a large gloved hand toward Danny's hair. She touched his snow-white locks and then lowered her hand again. "Poor, poor thing."
Then the lunch lady, almost forgetting the two of them were there, began chopping onions at the cutting boards.
Danny saw that Sam was frozen on the ground. He jerked his head to the side to suggest that she get out of the room, but she shook her head and instead slowly got to her feet and retreated into a corner, her hand digging into the pack they'd brought full of Fenton ghost hunting gear.
"Ma'am," Danny began. The ghost lifted her head and raised her brows at him. "Are you… do you know where you are?"
The lunch lady chuckled. "Casper High, silly thing. Do you know where you are? I don't recognize you. Were you one of my students?'
Danny shook his head.
"Hm. Well, then you probably don't know where the ground beef is, either."
Almost in defeat, she kept chopping onions.
This ghost wasn't like the Box Ghost from before. She wasn't demanding a relic from her time as a living person. She was also not trying to scare them or threaten them in any way. In fact, she seemed confused, locked into a state of remembrance of her time working as a lunch lady at Casper High. For all she knew, this was the 50s, and Sam was just a very weirdly dressed student.
"Are you looking for meat to put in the Sloppy Joe's?" Danny tried again.
The ghost stopped chopping.
"Yes! That's it. Where can I find it? I have to prepare Monday's menu before I leave for the weekend." She looked so hopeful.
"Well," Danny hesitated, thinking back to when he was combing through the cooler, "maybe it isn't here yet. They moved Sloppy Joe's from Monday to Wednesday."
The knife was still held tight in the grip of the lunch lady ghost when she turned slowly to face Danny. He took in her gaze, which turned dark, and he shivered violently.
"They did what?"
"W-well, I just meant that they probably get a fresh meat shipment in on Tuesday-"
The kitchen began to shake. Metal countertops groaned and buckled. Chopping knives rattled on their cutting boards and the doors on cupboards trembled and flew open. Sam ducked just in time to avoid being hit in the head by a metal soup ladle and several serving pans. As she did, the Fenton Thermos - an item supposedly meant to capture ghosts - flew out of her hands and clattered away across the floor.
"Stop!" Danny cried, but the ghost didn't hear him.
"They changed the MENU!?" she screamed. Her voice changed from high and sweet to deep and demonic. "The menu hasn't been changed for fifty years!"
The knife in the lunch lady's hand bent and twisted like a spoon in the hands of a psychic. A horrible, metallic scream came from the knife, and Danny put both arms out to shield himself in instinct.
At that moment, Tucker burst forth from the dry storage pantry, and the door that he emerged from knocked the thermos even further out of Sam's reach. It clattered and rolled underneath one of the metal counters.
"Guys!" Tucker cried, "What's happening-?"
With a blood-curdling scream the lunch lady ghost flipped the knife upside down and stabbed it into the cutting board, cleaving the thick plastic in half. The kitchen now erupted, every utensil imaginable flying out of every shelf and cupboard. The cooler and freezer unlocked and crashed open, cold and frozen food flying everywhere. Tucker dodged an entire watermelon which slammed into the opposite wall and exploded all over Sam. Danny, with an instinct he didn't even know he had, turned intangible, just like in the theater, and narrowly missed being sliced open with a butcher's knife which embedded itself into the floor where he'd been standing.
"Run!" he cried, unable to do or say anything else.
Tucker ran to Sam and reached down for her, and she raised a slippery, sticky hand to grasp his. He pulled her to her feet and the two of them vaulted over the kitchen counter and through the passing window into the cafeteria. Just as they ducked down behind one of the bigger lunch tables, Danny turned to see the lunch lady, Patty Heath, raise a massive fist covered in frozen turkey and burger patties. He only had a second to register that she was about to strike him when he felt the enormity of her strength crash into his gut. He flew backward into the opposite wall of the kitchen and spat out green ectoplasm with a horrible hacking sound. He heard Sam cry out his name as he slid down to the floor, dazed and in a state of shock.
"Nobody changes MY menu without my permission!" Patty was screaming. "NO ONE!"
Hundreds of pounds of food were encircling the room like UFOs circumnavigating a gravitational pull. Layers of lettuce and Bosco sticks and mixed fruits, frozen french fries and chicken nuggets, day-old brownies that Tucker had been looking for, all wound about the lunch lady's body and created an impenetrable food shield that completely engulfed her. Now, all the ghost did was roar. Her words were lost in the layers of lunch food, and Danny stared up at her, shaking, unable to breathe, unable to move.
The ghost raised both massive fists over her head. This time, Danny knew she would crush him. She might even kill him.
He heard his name being screamed by Tucker and Sam both, as well as pleas for him to "Get out! Run!" but Danny could barely breathe. His stomach felt caved in from the first blow. How was he supposed to recover from that? He was frozen in fear.
Yet, somehow, he realized again that there was no heartbeat thrumming in his ears. There was no overwhelming pulse of blood sending him into panic mode. Instead, there was a cool, even stream of ectoplasm snaking its way through his body, and the colder he felt, the more in control he became. The more he focused on his ghostly power, the more he realized the pain wasn't completely there. It was an echo of his humanity - a reminder that he should feel pain, not that he actually did. With this realization his breathing came easier, his legs no longer felt like jelly, and he raised his head to face his foe.
The massive fists of food came careening down but Danny was fast. He turned himself intangible, then ran to the countertop and reached beneath it for the thermos. After half a second he realized he was still intangible and he couldn't grasp it. The ghost rounded on him, screeching and roaring just as Danny became solid again, caught the thermos, and turned.
"I hope this works!"
He ripped off the lid of the thermos and pressed the green button. A piercing bright and blue light shot out of the thermos and shone like a laser at the ghost before him. It sliced through the food monster and instead pulled at her ghostly body which lay at the heart of it. She screamed, in her own terrified voice this time, and Danny struggled to hold onto the thermos as it pulled at the ghost-like a supernatural magnet. He imagined this was what it felt like to hold the rope that was trying to fight an elephant and stop it from rampaging. It was almost impossible, but he held on.
The ghost's eyes were no longer dark and foreboding, but confused and afraid.
"No! Please! I've never left-!" she cried before she was swallowed whole by the Fenton Thermos.