GHOST WARS – Episode Three – SPOILERS ⁓

Episode Three is a flashback, and features a remarkable performance by Kandyse McClure as Dr. Landis Barker. Six hours before the earthquake Dr. Barker stops for coffee on her way to work. The barista (Arielle Tuliao) must be new because she is unfamiliar with how to make Landis’ usual drink, a flat white. Dr. Barker is a proponent of supersymmetry, a school of thought based on the presumption that every particle has a mate somewhere. It’s a bit like the idea that every person has a soulmate, but for sub-atomic stuff. She once co-published an overly-ambitious paper on the subject when she was at MIT that purported to be much more than it actually was, and because of this she is working in a remote corner of Alaska.

Roman Mercer (Avan Jogia) bumps into her, spilling coffee all over her shirt. Arriving at work, she is caught in a stalled elevator with two co-workers, Chloe Reed (Camille Atebe) and Ryan Jameson (Nathan Kay). She has a panic attack, and Jameson makes fun of her, intensifying her reaction, but he is stopped from doing too much of that by Reed. When power is restored and the elevator is working again, Dr. Barker quickly recovers. Shortly after that, the collider has a catastrophic event. Radiation is released; three people die; and people begin to see things that shouldn’t be there. Chloe Reed is one of those who dies, though Dr. Barker makes an intense effort to save her.

Paolo Kowalski-Jones (Andrew Moxham) works closely with Dr. Barker. He and his wife Karla (Sonja Bennett) are having difficulty getting pregnant (a difficulty that predates the ghost invasion) and apparently the couple is trying all sorts of folk remedies to solve the problem, while avoiding seeing a doctor about it because they are uncertain which of them might be infertile.

Karla is very insecure about her marriage, likely because she is a bartender and her husband is a research physicist. Paolo tells Landis about a strange nightmare he had in which Karla was impregnated by a plant monster, and this could indicate that paranormal events were happening in the town before the collider event.

Sensing that the observed, unexplained phenomena might lend support to her theories of supersymmetry, Dr. Landis arranges experiments with herself as the test subject. Results are indeterminate, but it is accidentally discovered that live electrical wires repel the apparitions. Dr. Barker allows the building where she works to be wired for such protection, but decides that the townsfolk should not be informed of this, because they might overtax the energy supply. Her assistant Paolo objects to this, but after her boss, Burke (Alex Carter), has a fatal hallucination, Dr. Landis is next in command. (Burke drowned in a closed office after he imagined an ocean wave coming out of a TV monitor.)

Ryan also dies after he imagines Calyptra Moths crawling on him, (one of them comes out of his ear and into his eye). He jumps to his death from an upper balcony as Landis watches. A woman in red (Veena Sood) walks by while this is going on but does not react in any way to what’s happening. Later, Landis sees the same woman waiting for an elevator and demands she explain her refusal to help, but the woman simply walks through the closed elevator doors.

When the entomophobic Ryan first tells Landis he is seeing vampire moths in large numbers, she suggests they must have escaped from the biology department, making one wonder what Lambda’s biology department does. Earlier, Ryan suggested that the collider might have been built on an electron diffusion point (X-point). The problem with that assertion is that such diffusion points are not found at fixed locations.

Burke died after refusing to take responsibility for the collider incident. Ryan died after bullying Dr. Barker in the elevator. Roman Mercer nearly died in a bus accident not long after soaking Dr. Barker’s shirt with hot coffee.

At the end of the day, Dr. Barker visits Billy on his boat.

BILLY: “Had I known you were coming Didn’t think you’d still be here. I’m not stallin’, darlin’, waitin’ for you if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m trying to leave but whatever’s happening here just won’t let me.”
LANDIS: “Do me a favour, Billy.”
BILLY: “What?”
LANDIS: “Make me forget.”

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All 13 episodes of GHOST WARS can be steamed on PLEX.

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**– Revised. Originally published in October 2017