St. Anne’s Cathedral.  A man comes into confession and tells the priest he thinks the Devil is talking to him – he sees things.  During the conversation we’re taken to a the interior of a bus.  A man in a suit gets on, opens a briefcase, puts on a gas mask and opens a gas container.  He grabs a woman’s backpack and gets off the bus and rides off in a waiting car.  The man in the church leaves, dropping a piece of paper with a drawing of the  tormented people on the bus.  A cop sees the bus full of people frozen inside.

Opening credits.

At a cemetery, agents and family are putting Agent Scott to rest.  Scott’s mom gives Dunham the stink eye, she walks off and chats with Agent Charlie Francis.  Broyles pulls Olivia away.  In a diner across town Peter and Walter are having lunch.  After a conversation about Walter self medicating with home made psychotics, Peter goes across the restaurant to accost a photographer taking pictures of him.  The man says, “You were supposed to check in before you came home.”  Ominous, but that’s all we’re going to get this episode.  They all meet in the tunnel where the bus has come to a stop.  The people inside are all trapped in a clear solid compound.  Somewhere else two men are rifling the the backpack, they can’t find what they need and one of them makes a call and talks in what sounds like Latin.  The man from the church, Roy, is at his desk in an office and he starts having visions.  He grabs nearby art supplies and makes a fairly heinous drawing of a woman with bleeding wrists.  The Bishops examine the solid compound, Walter asks for some piano music played by Peter, reintroduces Walter to Astrid.  Peter lies to Walter about the man in the restaurant.

In a warehouse the FBI agents have “excavated” the bus passengers and thanks to a video camera they figure out the backpack is missing.  They ID the lady with the pack as a DEA agent.  They bring in her “handler” for questioning.  Her case involved infiltrating a Nicaraguan drug cartel and she wanted out, but mentioned drug ring discussions included The Pattern.  He goes to ID the body, holds her hand for a moment which makes Dunham sad, as though this mirrored her and Agent Scott’s relationship.  Walter is playing the piano.  They work out that the compound could have only been created by Massive Dynamic.  Charlie calls, they’re at Roy’s place which is filled with drawings and models of major events before they took place – including the Hamburg flight from episode one.

Broyles doesn’t think Roy’s involved in the events but no one knows where he got the info, most of which was classified.  Dunham gets a list of labs from Nina Sharp, she says this has happened once before.  Roy offers his explanation, he HAS to draw or build these visions to get rid of them.  They coincide with when the FBI became aware of The Pattern.  Peter says he’s not bluffing, Walter says he’s psychic – that he’s linked to the people carrying out these crimes.  Dunham corners Broyles and says she needs more information, he says she’ll get it when she’s ready.  Roy is put into an fMRI and as the magnet starts pulsing, his veins start bulging out and he starts screaming.  They shut it off, pull him out and figure out he’s got metal in his blood.

Walter talks about The Ghost Network, a spectrum of waves no one was using for communication.  (Here comes the spooky science.)  The idea was to take it a step further, person to person, iridium compounds in the blood to receive signals.  Guess who was their test subject?  A college student named Roy.  Over time, the compound has multiplied allowing him to “eavesdrop” on whoever is now using this Ghost Network.  Doctor Bishop uses some optical illusions to illustrate that Roy’s brain is doing what it can to fill in sensory information by converting these signals into visual images.  With proper rewiring, they could remap that to the auditory cortex.  They hunt down a piece of equipment Walter built in the Bishops’ old house, no one’s home so Peter breaks in.  There’s a few minutes of fluff between Astrid and Roy and then back to Peter and Olivia.  Roy says Walter looks really familiar as they screw a magnetic imager onto his head.  They start “remapping” his brain by showing Roy images and his senses change from visual to taste and when it seems to stop working, Roy starts speaking Latin.  Astrid knows Latin and so translates.  There’s going to be an exchange at South Station, and another phrase “it was on her from the start.”  Dunham finds Roy’s picture of the girl with the bleeding wrists and goes to the morgue where the DEA agent has slices in her hands and we flash back to her handler taking a small disk out during his “IDing” of the body.

South Station, Dunham gets Charlie on the phone to help find the switch.  Roy continues to pick up the phone conversations which Peter relays to Olivia.  They coordinate enough to see the switch, but when Olivia catches up to the Handler DEA agent, he stumbles over dead from a gunshot wound.  They run after the other man and corner him.  As he puts his gun and case down, he purposefully backs into an oncoming bus.

Broyles doesn’t know what the disk is, but the bad guy was involved in two other Pattern cases.  Broyles gives her three incidents from Roy’s apartment to investigate, possible Pattern related.  Roy’s all better, Peter plays “Someone to Watch Over Me” on the piano.  Broyles meets with Nina and gives her the disk, and they talk about Dunham.  Nina takes the disk to a lab where they say, “…another one.”  Lab tech then shows the data being dumped in from Agent Scott.  Woooo!

I feel a bit of a kinship with this episode as they did some cortical remapping, something I’ve been reading a lot of lately.  Yes, using a human as a receiver for clandestine transmissions over a previously unknown spectrum by infusing their blood with an iridium compound sounds dubious, yet it’s not altogether a wild theory.  Adjusting someone’s brain to interpret stimuli differently using magnetic resonance is a little more, oh I’ll say it, fringe.  Neuroplasticity would technically allow the brain to remap given the right circumstances (behavior therapy, trauma) but I’ve not found much that suggests using an electromagnetic resonance tool would be of any use in making that kind of change that fast.  If it did, anyone going through an fMRI would start telling you they see chocolate, hear red and taste quietness.  (Which does happen in some patients of strokes or those with cortical lesions or other conditions.)

I don’t mean to dwell on the science, but that’s what I like about this show.  I like that it makes me look things up or be able to argue the theories.  That makes it harder to focus on the writing or the acting, yes but so far I enjoy it enough to keep watching.  I’m not invested enough in the characters to reach a wow moment yet, but it’s still too early for that.  Keep it simple, keep it moving and I think it’ll succeed.

The high point of this show was Roy.  The actor played him remarkably.  He was just an ordinary guy with something extraordinary going on in his brain and the lines he was given to deliver as well as his delivery made it all very sympathetic.  There were a few moments of over talking (bits of dialog that seem to be thrown in to make sure EVERYONE can follow along) and they’ll get knocked down for that.  Plus there were enough teases to Peter’s past and more about Nina vs. Broyles that will make me want to watch it next week.

To that end I give “The Ghost Network” (another) three and a half randomly chosen glyphs.  It’s at the very least, consistent.