ghost protocol

What is the significance of headlining this post all in lower case?

Not much! It just turns out that some capital letters in this font, wellll, they look a little odd. The capital G looks too much like a capital C, and who wanted “Chost protocol” to mess with our heads?

Ghosts are on our minds here at AGENT STOKER as we plan Season Five. From the beginning, the show has had a broad mandate to look into everything paranormal — starting with a crazed conscious AI in our first two episodes, and moving quickly to a ghost, an elder god, and an intelligent fungus. So ghosts were baked into the Stokerverse recipe nearly from inception.

(One thing that we don’t do — you may or may not have noticed — is alien stories. Sure, we bill ourselves as “THE X-FILES with a drinking problem,” but when it comes to extraterrestrial intelligence, that’s one big difference between Stoker and Mulder. There’s enough on this planet to preoccupy the Night Brigade, and bringing in aliens feels not quite right for this current moment? Maybe they’re a little like atomic weapons, about which it used to be said “Once you bring the Bomb into your story, it becomes a story about the Bomb.” That said, we have focused somewhat on outer space, both with Ronit’s focus on Dark Energy and EnGAGE’s plan to destroy the Moon. But back to ghosts …)

The first ghost we introduced was Ethan Bright in Episode 103, played by the recent deceased veteran character actor Peter Jason — may he rest in peace. We quickly learned thereafter that Agent Caliban was still part of the world as a ghost. And then we observed that the longer you’re a ghost or the more shocking your death was to you, the more you fade away. We all know that many ghosts are reduced to long moaning wails while other ghosts seem positively chatty. So the “fading away” problem explained the difference, and also gave us a problem that Agent Caliban would need to solve — by anchoring her to a hard drive that connected her to the internet. She was then able to roam the web as a “ghost in the machine.”

We’ve also had the ghost of real-life “Mafia banker” Roberto Calvi possessing one of our characters in Episode 208, and the ghost of real-life actor George Raft warning Stoker and Dianne about coming threats in our award-winning Episode 304. The afterlife is no afterthought in the Stokerverse.

In Season Five, we’ll expand our taxonomy of ghosts a bit more. What’s it like to be a ghost? Do ghosts socialize? Do they have their own version of Tinder? (We might or might not be joking about that one.)

At this writing, Season Five is in process — so feel free to chime in with your own thoughts about posthumous partying!