The Ghost Network

Plot

A man named Roy McComb confesses to his priest that he sees visions of bad things, including a bus where everyone will die. Simultaneously, a man enters a bus, releases a canister of gaseous fumes, steals a backpack, and exits. The Fringe team arrives to find the fumes have hardened into an amber-like substance, trapping and killing those inside. Walter studies the substance and concludes it started as a gas and solidified, suffocating the passengers.

Reviewing victim video footage, Olivia discovers a missing backpack and traces it to a Federal employee with undercover connections to a drug cartel. The team learns of Roy and searches his apartment, finding drawings of events dated before they occurred, including some never made public. During interrogation, Roy tells Charlie he has received visions for nine months, roughly when Pattern-related attacks began. The substance is traced to Massive Dynamic; Olivia interviews Nina Sharp, who says it has been seen in an attack before.

Walter suspects Roy is psychic and runs tests, finding a magnetic compound in his blood. Walter recalls he and William Bell researched a "Ghost Network" to secretly communicate messages in an undetectable frequency range, and Roy was a past test subject. Walter theorizes someone else perfected the research and Roy is overhearing secret messages from the terrorists. Olivia and Peter go to Walter's old house to find equipment to tap into Roy's mind.

Production

For "The Ghost Network," executive producer Jeff Pinkner brought in fellow executive producer David H. Goodman and supervising producer J. R. Orci to split the writing duties. Goodman handled the first half, and Orci finished the episode; the pair would collaborate on only one other script, "The Equation." Frederick E. O. Toye, who had worked with the writers on Alias, directed. The concept came from a weeks-old idea: Olivia walks into an apartment and finds walls covered in drawings of events "no man could possibly have known about."

The writers wanted to take urban legends and strange events and give them a fringe science twist, which led to Roy, a man with apparent psychic abilities. They then grounded his story in a real scientific explanation drawn from Walter's past research. During early development, the producers were uncertain about how to handle Joshua Jackson's character, Peter. In this episode, they debated whether Peter would break into his childhood home, eventually deciding to "stall and just let him do it."

Orci came up with Peter's line to Olivia: he used to live there, so it wasn't really breaking in. Zak Orth played Roy McComb, whose name was inspired by Richard Dreyfuss's character Roy Neary in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The writers noted Roy was the first guest character the audience could emotionally invest in. They wanted Orth to shave his head for the lab experimentation scene, but he successfully begged them not to.

For the role of Grant, the writers sought an actor who resembled Mark Valley's John Scott, to play into Olivia's unresolved feelings about his betrayal. Peter Hermann got the part.

Reception

"The Ghost Network" first aired in the United States on September 23, 2008, and was watched by an estimated 9.42 million viewers. The episode received mixed reviews. Noel Murray of The A.V. Club graded it a B, finding it "much more fun" than the previous week's episode and enjoying Peter's expanded presence, though he was growing weary of the hint-dropping about Peter's past. Murray thought the climax was so exciting he was willing to forgive that this was the third week in a row that Walter's big idea involved communication with the unconscious.

IGN's Travis Fickett rated it 7.5/10, calling it a solid episode with characters coming together nicely and a better story than the previous week, but expressing worry that Fringe would become too formulaic like the first season of Smallville; he concluded it was "a solid show, but [not] exceptional yet". Stephen Lackey of Mania.com thought the show had finally hit its stride, with a mix of humor and darker storytelling starting to come together nicely; he expressed excitement at watching Fringe improve and thought it could become the best new series of the year.

Alex Zalben of UGO compared the episode to The X-Files: I Want to Believe, writing "Man, that X-Files movie was just no good. Fringe wins."