| "Look at you. What are you? A ghost trying to fit in with humans? Or some creepy little boy with creepy little powers?" |
| — Penelope Spectra to Danny Phantom[1] |
Penelope Spectra is a recurring antagonist in Danny Phantom serving as the main antagonist of the episodes "My Brother's Keeper" and "Doctor's Disorders." She is a shadow-like ghost who has the ability of disguising herself as a human.
She keeps her human form young and beautiful by feeding on people's misery, especially on the depression of teenagers.
History
Season 1
Spectra made her first appearance in "My Brother's Keeper," posing as a teen therapist/counselor and motivational speaker at Casper High School. She was there in part to build up spirit for the students in time for the Casper High Spirit pep rally.
Despite her incredibly chipper attitude and use of meaningless inspirational catchphrases, she has a seductive tendency to tell her patients things that leave them incredibly depressed, Danny being her favorite victim.
Danny, Sam and Tucker later figure out that she’s a ghost, hiding it by always having the air conditioner turned up so that Danny's ghost sense was lost among normal breaths from the cold.
They also learn about her plans to up the ante of depression by killing Jazz during the school pep rally so that she can suck up the ensuing severe depression of the other students and forever remain youthful.
Danny, however, manages to save Jazz in time, trapping her assistant Bertrand in the thermos as well as Spectra herself - the latter with help from Jazz using the Fenton Ghost Peeler.
Season 2
Spectra returned again in "Doctor's Disorders." Her ultimate goal was to create the perfect human body for herself to inhabit. She tried to achieve this by gathering DNA samples from the various students in Casper High through the means of ghost-bugs overshadowing them, and sending them to a fake hospital resembling the old, disturbing ones found in the days before safe medicinal practices.
Knowing that she needed Danny's DNA to grant full power to her "body" as well as stabilize it, she tried to capture him and extract it from him personally.
Danny later finds out Spectra's plans, but when Danny's DNA is about to be taken, Danny instead lets his father's handkerchief he blew on earlier get sucked up instead, so by the time, Spectra's perfect body fully activates, she gains Jack's giant figure and later turns into a living pile of mucus.
Danny defeats her afterwards and traps her in the Fenton Thermos.
In "Reign Storm," Spectra can be seen among other ghosts fleeing the Ghost Zone after Pariah Dark started destroying all their homes. She was also one of the many ghosts to help Danny save Christmas in "The Fright Before Christmas."
Season 3
In "Girls' Night Out," Spectra allies herself with Kitty and Ember McLain in a joint attempt to get rid of every man in Amity Park. They are later defeated by Sam, Jazz and Maddie.
Spectra's final appearance is in the series finale, "Phantom Planet." She’s first seen terrorizing Paulina and Star in the halls of Casper High, appears later with the many ghosts who fought Danny in the Ghost Zone, and finally is one of the many ghosts who helps Danny and Skulker turn the entire planet intangible, so that the Disasteroid can safely pass through it.
Spectra is seen in all three of her main forms: her "My Brother's Keeper"/"Girls' Night Out" body, her shadow form, and her powered-up body from "Doctor's Disorders."
Appearance
In her true form, Spectra is a wispy black ghost with cyan-blue (purple in her debut episode) outlines, essentially a humanoid shadow with an advanced mind of her own. She has glowing red eyes, sharp teeth, claws and wears purple lipstick. She has flaming spiky black "hair" and a ghostly tail. She lacks a distinct identity to her disguised human form.
In her human disguise, Spectra takes the appearance of a tall, beautiful, slender and fair-skinned woman with green almond-shaped eyes and red hair with bright orange highlights, kept in a hairstyle that resemble devil horns. Her makeup consists of eyeshadow and lipstick, being two shades of purple.
Spectra's original attire is that of a business suit which consists of a red suit-jacket and mini pencil skirt, with the jacket having four gray buttons and being worn over a white long-sleeved collared shirt with a black necktie. She also wore matching high-heels, and accessorizes with round, light purple earrings and black shades over her eyes.
In "Doctor's Disorders," Spectra creates her ideal "perfect body" for her ghost form to inhabit. This body is similar to her main human disguise, as it has the same hair, eyes and makeup, but instead sports paler skin and sharp teeth.
Her new attire consists of a V-shaped green necklace, a black V-neck crop-top with green trimming on the short sleeves, pants with a similar color scheme alongside a V-shaped waistline, and green thigh-high, high-heeled boots with flame designs on the top. She also accessorizes with triangular dark purple dangle earrings, and green arm-length gloves.
Personality
Spectra is monstrously narcissistic, displaying a very strong need of being young and beautiful, going through unscrupulous means in order to keep her youthful appearance, and freaking out if she becomes old and/or ugly.
She might be one of the most sadistic ghosts ever encountered, along with her assistant Bertrand, as they happily feed on the misery of others and attempt to murder people (first Jazz, then all of the Casper High students) in order to accomplish their plans.
She’s smart and dissimulative, as she persuades many people to think that she’s really a counselor, and she presumably has remained much time in the human world feeding on the misery of students.
This also indicates her deep knowledge on psychology, as shown when she uses her falsely kind words to expose the teenagers to their deepest fears, leaving them in a state of depression that gradually worsens whenever they interact with her further. This suggests that in her lifetime, she either majored in psychology or had a doctorate in psychology.
Relationships
Bertrand
They are never seen in an episode without each other, but they seem to gradually grow distant from one another along the series. In "My Brother's Keeper," they seem to have a friendly relationship, even planning in the hallway to have a cappuccino together.
In "Doctor's Disorders," they seem to have little to no relationship, but are still partners. In "Girls' Night Out," their relationship has a completely different perspective: Spectra sees Bertrand as nothing to her, to the point that if he vanished forever, it wouldn't phase her one bit.
Danny Phantom
Spectra mainly sees Danny as an excellent source of whatever she's seeking in that episode, whether it be his misery that she can feed off of in "My Brother's Keeper" or his unique half-ghost DNA in "Doctor's Disorders." However, he becomes her enemy once he starts to fight back and defeats her.
Ember and Kitty
Ember and Kitty are two of Spectra's acquaintances that she follows in "Girls' Night Out," sharing their infuriation with men at the time.
Powers and Abilities
Powers
- Invisibility, Intangibility, and Flight: Standard ghost powers.
- Supernatural Strength: She is roughly as strong as Danny.
- Supernatural Durability: She is able to withstand physical or energy attacks.
- Ghost Ray: She can fire explosive discs of blue ecto-energy. Spectra is able to create a large hand out of purple ecto-energy that slammed Danny into the walls.
- Ghost Stinger: She can send a purple electric shock to briefly knock out Danny. Unlike other users, Spectra is able to manifest this power by combining it with ecto-energy and shooting small bolts of electricity from her hands.
- Telekinesis: She can hold people and objects in the air without using her own hands. Spectra used this to restrain Danny before electrocuting him with bolts.
- Shapeshifting: She can change her appearance to that of a human.
- Immortality: After gaining a new body through genetic manipulation, Spectra is now eternally young.
- Emotion Absorption (formerly): She can absorb the misery of high school students in order to retain her youth.
- Power Augmentation (formerly): With the misery of teenagers drained, she can use their sadness to increase her powers.
Abilities
- High Intelligence: With or without her powers, Spectra has experience in psychology and genetics. This allows Spectra to invoke misery out of teenagers so she can absorb them, as well as siphon their traits for the construction of her new body.
Sightings
Season 1
- 109. "My Brother's Keeper"
Season 2
- 202. "Doctor's Disorders"
- 204. "Reign Storm" (no lines)
- 210. "The Fright Before Christmas"
Season 3
- 303. "Girls' Night Out"
- 312. "Phantom Planet" (no lines)
Quotes
"My Brother's Keeper"
- "Very good. But I fear you've missed a few details!"
- (Danny: "Let go of me!")
Spectra: "Why would I do that? Your doubt, your misery, it's delicious. And the best part is, as soon as that silly speech is over, and that last domino falls and the sparklers vaporize the speaker, we'll leave you here to take the blame. And by the time I'm done with you, you'll be sure it was all your fault!" - "You're a freak! Not a ghost, not a boy! Who cares for a thing like you?"
"Doctor's Disorder"
- "Allow me, you know how we therapists love to talk it all out."
- (Danny: "You'll never get away with this, Spectra.")
Spectra: "Ooh, but I already have and, you Danny, you're the grand prize, I need your genes to lock this perfect body together and stabilize it so my ghost form never burns out and never grows old. How helpful are you?" - (Tucker: "I am in a modeling agency.")
Spectra: "It's nice right? Smart, beautiful, deadly!" - "What? What happened? Why do I suddenly feel like blathering on about ghost? And why do I feel like eating fudge? Lots and Lots of fudge."
- "Okay, that's it. Let's boogie!"
"Girls' Night Out"
- "Well, I love what you've done with the neighborhood."
Trivia
- Her need to feed on people's misery appear to be based from a "psychic vampires" that feeds exactly on it, instead of blood like a normal vampires. This goes along with the fact that her hairstyle seems to greatly resemble popular depiction of Count Dracula.
- If that's the case, she's the second ghost in the series that has vampire-like characteristics, after Vlad.
- In "The Fright Before Christmas," one can see two Spectras grabbing Christmas trees, one in her human appearance and one in her ghost form.
- Spectra reveals that Danny's main insecurity is his lack of confidence in his abilities as a superhero and as a person.
Gallery
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