'Fringe' recap: 'The Ghost Network'

Episode Title: The Ghost Network
Season: 1
Episode: 3
Network: FOX
Airdate: Tuesday September 23, 2008

Ground Rules:
Rule #5: J.J. Abrams and public transportation do not mix – watch out when you take the bus.

Cruising at 30,000 feet (mini-synopsis):
Someone is able to see horrific and tragic events before those events occur. How is he doing it and why is it happening to him?

Ground level (the details):
Tonight’s episode opens in a church confessional. Probably not a bad place to begin given where J.J. Abrams has taken his audience over the past two weeks, especially with the rising body count he and his team of writers have been amassing.

The team is called to the scene of another attack – a public bus. It was a gaseous substance released that turned solid after a period of time. Everyone on board was dead, seemingly frozen in time.
The FBI soon receive a tip about a person of interest. The priest calls in a tip about Roy (Zak Orth), this week’s guinea pig, who sees future tragic events. He either ends up drawing pictures of them or he makes miniature models just to get them out of his head. The FBI conduct a search on his residence and find enough evidence to bring him in for questioning.

The team is present during the questioning and Dr. Bishop wishes to conduct tests on Roy because he believes that he is psychic or some sort of receiver of messages. When they begin to run tests, Roy nearly dies in the MRI machine. It seems that he has some sort of metal in his blood stream and the machine comes close to tearing him apart. After some brief research, Dr. Bishop remembers injecting young Roy with metal 20 years earlier. Somehow, the metal has multiplied and turned Roy into a walking receiver. Someone else is suspected in continuing his research and perfecting it.

Dr. Bishop proceeds to take another route. He attempts to evesdrop on the transmissions coming in to Roy’s brain. It will require minor brain surgery. Peter and Olivia go to the Bishop’s old house and, hidden away in one of the walls, they find Dr. Bishop’s equipment, a Magnetic Neural Stimulator (MNS) that he had originally created 17 years earlier.

Roy agrees to the experiment and Dr. Bishop begins drilling into Roy’s head after fitting the device on his head. They screw it down and begin to show him a series of pictures. The pictures fire off responses which tap into the transmissions coming in. Using the data, Agent’s Dunham and Francis (Kirk Acevedo) are able to stop another planned attack at the train station. Cornering the suspect, he lays down his gun and briefcase and then steps in front of a bus, committing suicide. Part of the transmission also points them to a fellow federal worker who was killed on the bus. They discover that something was surgically removed from the palm of her hand.

In the briefcase, they find a circular chip in a case. It’s the same chip that was removed from the dead woman’s palm. Broyles tells Dunham that he is going to have his friends at NSA to work on identifying the purpose of the chip. But instead, he takes it to Massive Dynamic and turns it over to Nina Sharp.

Parting shot:
Streaming data from the deceased Agent John Scott…what happened to only being able to communicate with the dead up to six hours after they had “joined the choir invisible?”
Roll credits.

Quotes of the night:
Agent Charlie Francis: “I wasn’t going to tell you this, but he said he loved me too.”

Dr. Walter Bishop: “Am I required to keep him alive?”

Peter Bishop: “You know, they say the psych profiles of criminals and law enforcement are nearly identical. Ever consider a life of crime?”
Agent Olivia Dunham: “No dental.”

Dr. Walter Bishop: “I believe with proper modulation you could receive satellite television for free.”

Parallel Universes?
I didn’t notice anything in tonight’s episode, but if you did, let me know.

Miss Anything?
If I missed something, then leave a comment and let me know.

If you missed something then pay closer attention.