Seriously, the one up there on the thumbnail is just straight-up a demonic entity using some sort of reality-bending spell to go undetected by the other characters. We’re guessing the next season will start with the Goldbergs thanking the Ghostbusters for vanishing it back to the demon realm.
Garlin himself probably isn’t too broken up about being killed off, considering that he spent his stand-up shows trashing The Goldberg right before “mutually agreeing” to depart. While the exact details of Garlin’s alleged misconduct aren’t known, based on his own stand-up, his fondness for randomly spouting the names of certain body parts on the set was a factor. In his 2019 Netflix special, Garlin said that one of his favorite on-set jokes was that every time he got up from his reclining chair, he’d say, “Ah, my vagina. Ah, achy vagina. Ah, my vagina’s killing me.” Elsewhere, he talked about how he likes to “put two words together that don’t belong together like ‘grandma’ and ‘c*ck.'” This made other cast members so uncomfortable that Garlin was called into HR over the vagina situation, which he says led to this exchange:
“I get called in, and they go, ‘Look, you can’t do this.’ And I go, ‘Oh yes, I can.’ They go, ‘You might get fired.’ I go, ‘I’d love to be fired and have it hit the papers: Cover of TMZ: ‘Jeff Garlin Fired Because His Vagina Hurts.'”
But, in a way, Garlin’s inappropriateness is oddly appropriate. The Goldbergs was always pitched as an old-school-type sitcom, and what’s more old school than a TV dad being played by someone who sucks behind the scenes? That’s a tradition that stretches at least as far back as The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952-1966), starring Ozzie Nelson as the laid-back and loving dad who was a raging tyrant to his sons/co-stars behind the scenes. Or The Cosby Show, starring “America’s dad,” who turned out to be more like “America’s perverted uncle we don’t talk about anymore.”