Review of Debris

Debris 1.1: Some Probability of Gems Among the Pieces

Debris debuted on good old NBC -- a fast-paced, surprisingly deep piece of science fiction, that had real potential.

The set-up: in an alternate-present or near-future reality, an extraterrestrial ship, wrecked, shows up in our solar system. Debris rain down on our planet. And they have a bizarre series of unnatural effects, including allowing someone holding a piece to "phase" through matter, having the effect on others of bringing the dead back to life in a way that (of course) has profound consequences on the survivors, etc.

Jonathan Tucker played CIA agent Brian Beneventi, Riann Steele played MI6 agent Finola Jones, and they were cooperating, for the most part (also of course), in an effort to find out what's going on, how to get on top of the extraterrestrial tech, etc.

So there were a lot of pieces in motion at the beginning of this narrative, some of them obvious, but all together the pieces could have made for a compelling piece of television, and almost did. The story picked up speed very quickly, which is always a good thing. The various powers that came from pieces of the wrecked ship had no apparent connection, and also a good thing, because that left lots of room for development.

I think it's become tough for a network to put out a good science fiction story, given the advantages that streaming services have in making original leaps. But anything is possible.

Debris 1.2: Clones

Well, I liked Debris 1.2 on NBC considerably more than 1.1 the week before, and that's always a good sign. The story hung together a little better, and maybe that was because its main theme was clones.

One -- or, at least two -- were clones of Bryan. He kills one of them, which gave Craig the opportunity of getting off a good sarcastic line, something to the effect that it hurts to kill what you love most in this world. The other was a clone of Bryan with two heads, which harkened back to some movie from in the 1970s, I think, about a guy with two heads (ok, here it is, The Thing With Two Heads, starring Rosey Grier, 1972).

I should have mentioned that the creator of Debris is J. H. Wyman who did a lot of work on the late, lamented Fringe. That show had a deliberate B-movie 1950s feel to it, which Debris almost happily picked up on. I don't mean this as an insult. I've been a fan since I was eight or nine years old.

The other clone of interest in this episode was Eric, who is wounded by a piece of alien debris that fell on his house, which then did him the favor of creating some of clones of him, while it moved pieces of cars and other non-alien wreckage around his home. To mark the spot? Who knows, or why.

And actually, contrary what I said about episode one, in this episode the pace of Debris was amazingly slow in terms of telling us what was really going. It held its cards very close to its chest. So far, in the first two episodes, all we learned about the grand scheme of things in this narrative is that an alien shipwreck left debris on Planet Earth which is causing all kinds of strange effects.

As in Fringe, these effects are a blend of horror and science fiction, and that's ok by me.

Debris 1.3: Trapped out of Time

An excellent episode of Debris -- 1.3 -- that connected in a bunch of ways and opened up some intriguing possibilities.

The main agenda were people who disappear and are trapped in another dimension barely perceivable to us, as a result of the Debris. We hear clearly for the first time that the extra-terrestrial ship was both intergalactic and extra-dimensional. In the case of the trapped people, they disappeared from Earth ranging from very recently to at least as long ago as 1976. Since the intergalactic extra-dimensional ship arrived in our solar system -- at least as far as we know -- just six months ago, this means that among the effects of the Debris are some wild extra-temporal consequences, too, i.e, a type of time travel. For the people who are trapped, it seems that just a very short time has passed. And judging by their apparent lack of aging, it has. But by our tracking of time, in which the weirdest thing is setting the clock backward or forward twice a year, the time passed can be as long as half a century.

So there's that. And another good thing is that all the temporally trapped people in this episode were actually rescued, giving us the first passably happy ending in the first three outings of Debris.

Meanwhile, the overlay of spy story is gradually getting more appealing, too. There's the CIA and MI6, cooperating, at least most of the time. There are the Russians. And there's the mysterious group called Influx. Again, as far as we now know, the first three groups are human. But what about Influx?

And then there's the question which will likely be looming for a long time. Actually, two questions. Why did the ship come here? Why did it blow up or become a wreck and spew debris down on Planet Earth?

More than enough science fiction in all of that to keep us occupied for a long time, unless we get pulled into another dimension.

Debris 1.4: Suspentia Belief

Well, I know I keep saying this, and that's because it's true. Debris kept getting better and better.

I especially liked the use of extra-terrestrial tech episode 1.4 -- "suspentia" -- to cure a different Debris effect, the extra-terrestrial terraforming of our atmosphere into one in which chlorine, deadly to life on Earth, replaces oxygen. This (again, like many an episode of Fringe) is an old and still intriguing science fiction chestnut of terraforming other planets to make them suitable to human life, and vice versa.

Finola played a major role in applying suspentia to save a group of people who will die on Planet Earth, having been transformed into chlorine-breathing beings: put them into suspended animation, until we humans develop the means to bring them back to life in our oxygenated world. It's a big risk, of course, but far better than the alternative.

Meanwhile, Finola also learns that Bryan knows her father is alive, and didn't tell her. This will put a sizeable schism in their relationship, and in doing so will further separate the CIA and MI6. Missing in action this week, except in one short sentence, was "Influx" -- we needed to learn more about them already.

But there's something about Debris that increasingly had classic --- as in destined to become a classic -- written all over it.

Debris 1.5: Fine Tuning

Make that two weeks in a row with strong episodes of Debris -- in fact, episode 1.5 was even better than 1.4, on all kinds of levels.

The destruction was averted, and it would have been a major piece of devastation indeed: sending a piece of Manhattan to who knows where. This evokes not only the song "I'll Take Manhattan," but John Stith's novel Manhattan Transfer. It requires not one but two pieces of interstellar debris, posted in just the right places, fine tuned in appropriately near-distanced skyscrapers.

And the beings doing this come not from the stars -- at least as far as we know -- but are apparently the human beings in Influx, that mysterious organization trying to marshall the powers of the debris for its own benefit. They take pills which enable them to teleport through short, maybe longer, spaces, and the guy with the beard who is in command can join in a song playing blocks away.

Again, all of this feels like an update of Fringe, and that's just fine. Debris has the addition of the CIA/MI6 complex relationship of incomplete allies, and this was well developed as well, in the interactions of Finola and Bryan, both with one another and with their higher-ups in the agencies.

Here's an idea for Debris: how about a joint mission out into space to see exactly where the interstellar ship first appeared? If there were no such thing as discrete networks and streaming services down here on Earth in our reality, there could be a crossover event between Debris and For All Mankind.

Debris 1.6: Fountain of Youth and Its Complications

Debris 1.6 re-visited the ancient Fountain of Youth myth, in which you drink from some magical source of water and regain your youth. Later on in the New World, Ponce de Leon was allegedly searching for a fountain of youth when he discovered Florida. More recently, in 1985, Ron Howard directed Cocoon, in which alien cocoons found in a pool restore the youthful energy of elderly swimmers. And Debris in this episode gave us a story in which interstellar debris literally makes very old people young again.

Of course, in the legends and the science fiction, there's always a problem with the fountain, a price to pay, assuming the fountain is even found. In Debris, the price is that everyone who gets young again has to stay in proximity to the other rejuvenated oldsters. If they don't, they'll get old again, and die.

You know what? This doesn't seem like all that steep a price to me. And this undermined Bryan and Finola's motive in the narrative for getting the rejuvenated back to their original old age. What would be the problem in setting up a community of young-again people? Perhaps that was explained and I missed it, but as it is, it seems that the main motive of Bryan and Finola is to counteract any effects of the interstellar debris on Earth, even if they are beneficial.

And this in turn brings to the fore a larger question which gets at the very heart of this series. If all the effects of the debris were bad, or could be used for bad purposes, it would make perfect sense to track down all the debris and keep them out of reach. But if some of the debris are beneficial, what then? Are Bryan and Finola on the side of the angels, or just another pair of warriors in a very new kind of war?

Back in 2010, in an interview on Ancient Aliens on the History Channel, I questioned why governments rather than citizens should be the presumptive interface between humans and extra-terrestrials who come to Earth. See 1 min 24 secs into this video.

Debris 1.7: Ferry Cross The Moebius

An interesting Debris 1.7, that served up another example of what the debris can do, mixing horror and humanity in the now signature way that Debris does this, but not moving the ball of understanding very much forward.

Speaking of signatures, the story had a lot of nice mythological touches, beginning with the mention of the ferry, and moving on to the sweet little girl with supernatural i.e. debris-endowed powers. These interludes have a scrapbook-like quality. If only Bryan and Finola could see the whole scrapbook, rather than just these weekly pages. I felt the same way as a member of the audience.

In my review of last week's episode (1.6), I objected to the assumption of Bryan, Finola, and their superiors that says governments are the proper custodians and regulators of the debris and all their effects. No one in any country ran on a platform in which they asked the voters to give them sole or any power to represent humanity and human interests in the event that we are visited by extraterrestrials and their debris.

Someone on Twitter (maybe Scroobius Pip under a pseudonym) commented that that's what Anson Ash is saying and working against (he's played by an actor with a perfect name for a narrative like this, Scroobius Pip -- a combination, in my head at least, of Ebenezer Scrooge and moebius strip). In episode 1.7, he's unceremoniously tortured by Maddox for information. And that of course brings home the point, doesn't it? What is our government doing torturing this guy?

Back in the days of 24, Jack Bauer would regularly torture anyone who had valuable information about a terrorist plot and didn't want to share it. But Ash is not quite a terrorist. He's fighting for something which might take innocent lives, for sure, but the philosophy of his cause has a positive element.

Debris 1.8: Resurrection and Its Hazards

Well, Debris finally cashed in -- ok, this was only the 8th episode, so maybe "finally" is a bit harsh, but it's seemed like a long time -- on the promise (or threat) of Finola's deceased father George being resurrected or reanimated is the more au currant word.

Now, you know if that happened, that George wouldn't, couldn't, possibly be exactly the same. First, there's what I years ago called "the paradox of duplication" -- you can never make a perfect or complete copy of a unique entity, such as any human being, because that duplication will unavoidably rob the original of a crucial characteristic, its uniqueness (see my Mind at Large: Knowing in the Technological Age, 1988, pp. 149-150; and/or my review of Charles Platt's Silicon Man). And worse than that, as was explored so well in Frank Herbert's Dune Messiah, chances are the people or beings who brought a departed loved one back to life will endow that reanimated entity with something not to your liking.

Since Debris like Fringe is deeply obligated to great science fiction of the past, of course there has to be something sinister about the alive-again George that will break Finola's heart. We got just a glimpse confirmation of this in the very last scene, when "George" seems to disintegrate, or I don't know, something under a blanket.

One good thing about George back to life, though, at least as far as the viewing audience is concerned, was that he provided about the best explanation I've heard so far about why the interstellar debris are so valuable to Earth and humanity: we're way of track, falling apart, irrevocably declining, and the debris can help right our course. In a phrase, that technology can save us.

Debris 1.9: Resets 1

Whoah -- a brilliant game-shaking episode 1.9 of Debris, in which the piece of said Debris shifts those who come into its presence into alternate realities. That is, what clearly is not one but what seems to be an unlimited series of alternate realities. That would have been a cool centerpiece of this narrative. But the story that plays out for our characters was an ingenious piece of work in itself for just an episode of a television series.

The hour started off conventionally enough (that is, conventionally enough for Debris). A diver comes into contact with a piece of Debris off the coast, and finds he's in an alternate reality minus his sister. And the narrative stays conventional enough (again, that is, for Debris) throughout most of the rest of the hour. Bryan and Finola investigate what's going on, now with the help of Finola's sage father. But the diver, desperate to find his sister, keeps jumping in the ocean and swimming towards the Debris to enter yet another new reality. We see everything from the diver's perspective, including Bryan having different partners in some of the realities. Finola's father says colors are important in understanding what's going on, especially the color orange. In an especially nice touch, it even looks like one of the Bryans has orange reddish hair. (Did they dye Jonathan Tucker's hair, or just changed the lightning, or maybe my mind was playing tricks on me.)

But all of that is just prelude to what happens near the end. Bryan tries to stop the diver from swimming towards the Debris -- the repeated resets of reality could "damage the universe" -- and Bryan gets sucked into an alternate reality himself, where, among other things, Finola is not his partner.

And this turned out to be just Part 1 of a two-part story about alternate-reality resets. I've seen some good alternate-reality episodes on various science fiction series over the years -- those on Star Trek: TOS and Star Trek: TNG are especially memorable -- but this episode of Debris was something new, very different, and right up there with the best

Debris 1.10: Excellent Until the End

That's all I'll say about Debris 1.10, the second part of a two-episode story about Debris triggering alternate realities, with Bryan caught in one, desperate to get out. It was an excellent episode, until the end, in which Bryan does get out. Not that I wanted to see him stuck there. But I thought he got out way too easily.

Debris 1.11: Connections

Episode 1.11 didn't make things easy for Bryan at all. A woman near some Debris knows about Bryan's past -- about events only he would have known, from when he was serving in Afghanistan. Finola figures out that when Bryan was cloned in Pennsylvania a few episodes back, the Debris kept a part of him, at very least some or all of his memories. And this woman who knows things that only Bryan knew had some into contact with some Debris, and picked up Bryan's memories from that piece of Debris.

It was a nice, original premise for an episode. And it made me realize even more vividly that Debris is actually an anthology series, a compilation of all kinds of science fiction tropes, common and rare, all injected into Earth and humanity via the Debris. The only problem with this, at least so far, is that all the episodes are pretty much equidistant from the Debris, in the sense that none of them are telling us what the story behind the Debris and their interstellar artifacts really are. Isn't anyone on Earth devoted to investigating that? Or are they just running from one report of Debris to another?

Debris 1.12: Happy?

Well, the next-to-last episode of Debris was surprising for a penultimate episode of any season of any series that's not a sitcom: it had an apparently happy ending.

This 12th episode of Debris actually saw Bryan seeing the light -- as in understanding something about the Debris he wasn't getting before -- and consequently letting the Debris do their thing, and fulfill a destiny as a bright light in the sky on its way, presumably, to the cosmos.

Or maybe the mother ship. None of that was still not even the slightest bit clear at that point. But it had to be significant that Bryan was enabbling not opposing or riding herd on the Debris, and he seemed to be pretty much in his right mind. And there's also the fact that many fewer humans than usual got killed in Bryan's part of the episode -- in fact, I'm pretty sure it was just one.

But what this all means for the future of us down on Earth is uncertain. Anson Ash is free, and that's likely not good for our side, whatever exactly our side is. Maddox is getting slightly less trustworthy in each episode, and that can't be good, either. Finola's father George gave a rant against the government, which makes him closer to Ash than Maddox, but did that mean Ash was the hero and Maddox the anti-hero after all?

Debris Finale: Fringe with a Vengeance

Well, I and many others had been saying how reminiscent Debris was of Fringe, and sure enough, in the Debris finale, John Noble shows up as maybe the head of Influx, certainly at least a little higher than Anson and Finola's father. In any case, Noble's Otto is a lot meaner than Walter Bishop, and very likely doesn't have a cow that gives milk in his lab. (Just dawned on me that maybe Devin Nunes had some connection to all of this?)

There were lots of other promising developments in the finale. Finola's father is totally in with Influx. Bryan had some very early encounter with Debris, and he'd been taking injections to ward off possible ill effects, which is exactly what happened in the final episode.

I'm still very partial not only to the show, but the Influx credo which Finola's father again eloquently intoned: let the people not their governments decide what to do with the interstellar tech that has fallen to Earth. As I mentioned in a review of an earlier episode, I made essentially the same point at 1 min 24 secs to 1 min 47 secs in this 2010 interview on the History Channel

But I do think Debris was too diffuse its one season, too slow to get to the punchline, though all of this took a sharp turn for the better with the two-part alternate reality episode. I would have liked to give Debris another season to find its pace. Extraterrestrial technology is a hugely suggestive tableau.