Review: Debris

I waited until the first season of Debris finished before writing about the series. In part because I wanted to get a better sense of what they had set up. The first episode drops us into the world of the show, throwing around terminology and making references to events that are only later explained. (Or not, but when they start talking about Laghari reading, and other terms, there’s a reason the term “technobabble” was coined, but honestly, it works better here than in most shows. Particularly after a few episodes, the best way to deal with it is simply like being in a foreign country, and not being fluent, but you can follow the conversation and understand the context, but the nuance is sometimes lacking).

Of course quickly after the final episode aired, the show was canceled.

But I’m going to write about it anyway, because I really liked the show. Among other reasons, Debris was a great example of how to dramatize what’s happening, but not necessarily explain what’s happening. (For one excellent breakdown of this difference, refer to David Mamet’s famous - among many writers, at least - memo to the staff of the TV show The Unit where he lays out how the goal is not to convey information but to depict drama).

J.H. Wyman who created the show also created the short lived show Almost Human (which lasted one season in 2013-14) and was the show runner for Fringe, which was a show I loved. I still remember that first season finale of Fringe, which was shocking but also really helped to explain the world in fundamental ways. It was a reveal. Almost Human lasted one season and there were lots of things happening on the edges of the show. References to the wall are one that sticks in my mind to this day, and I remember it was deeply unsatisfying to finish the first season and get few answers or explanation of the show or its world. For all the show did well, I wanted answers. 

Maybe that comes from years of watching The X-Files and other shows, where the mysteries were excited, where we as fans wanted more, but there was no answer, and it was ultimately disappointing. As fans we want to know that there is a plan, that there are answers, that there is a logic to answering questions. As opposed to simply dragging things out indefinitely.

After one season, I can’t say that Debris answered many questions, but I definitely want more.

The first episode opens with text on the screen explaining that three years ago an alien spaceship was discovered drifting through the solar system and six months ago, debris from the ship started falling to earth. Which besides explaining the title, it also sets things up as we meet the Orbital team, or one of them anyway, a joint US-UK task force, with MI6 agent Fiona Jones and CIA agent Bryan Beneventi overseeing a team of scientists and technicians flying around tracking debris, recovering it, and coming up with a cover story for what’s happening.

I don’t know Riann Steele’s work, but Jonathan Tucker is to my mind one of the best actors of our generation. That’s a career that stretches from Sleepers and The Virgin Suicides, to The Deep End to more recent work like the shows Kingdom and City on a Hill. Debris is one of his least showy roles that he’s had in recent years, but it’s the kind of role that requires an immensely talented, disciplined actor who can slowly peel back the layers to who he is through how he works.

In the final scene of the first episode we also follow Bryan’s boss Maddox, played by two time Tony winner Norbert Leo Butz. As the government is collecting the debris, they’re trying to reassemble the ship. Of course having Butz in the opening credits is odd as he seems peripheral to the action at best. Even stranger is Scroobius Pip in the credits, who plays a recurring character Anson Ash, working for Influx, which may be a terrorist group, and is collecting debris as well. 

Now there are a few aspects of the show which stuck in my craw. Bryan’s time in Afghanistan bothered me as it falls into cliches about the American war in Afghanistan, which is a larger issue for a larger essay. Another is the enlightened Native American with a special relationship to all this and hopefully the show will find a way to make the character more than a cliche. The reveal that Sebastian Roche’s character is more central to this plot than we even thought (even if that plot is…in some ways less clear than ever before). The reveal of the final seconds, which I won’t spoil and I’m still unsure what to make of it.

And all of this was so much that one of the episode’s other reveals - that George is being stalked by a smoke figure. And that it’s coming for him - is easy to be lost in the mix. I kept thinking of Bombie the Zombie from Carl Barks’ Uncle Scrooge comics. A figure that stalks Scrooge for decades. In Don Rosa’s The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, it’s explained the character is stalking Scrooge as revenge for his destruction and cheating, a cost that he never quite escape. I have a feeling based on George’s expression that this might be something similar.

If there is a theme or an idea unlaying the show, I keep thinking that it’s about wonder. In the opening episodes, each character is traumatized and exhausted in their own way. Fiona is still recovering from her father’s death and is numb, anhedonic, but she sees this ship and its debris, and the possibilities of it as something that helps to pull her out of that state, at least temporarily. She sees possibility in this wreckage. That it is something that can change us and offer new possibilities. And even the trauma of finding her father alive, having to disobey orders, she still finds wonder and is overwhelmed by the appearance of the ball of light along with everyone else in the penultimate episode. It is her refusal to accept people’s deaths, to see sacrifice as inevitable, and to see those decisions as choices and taking the easy way out that are some of the show’s great moments. This passion is the heart of the show. And it affects Bryan, as we see, but I think it affects more people than just him. Her father’s betrayal in the final episode, though, suggests that she is left in a more broken and traumatized place than at the beginning of the season. And I’m interested in how the show would have shown that, because one of the great things that the show has been interested in doing is not telling us who the characters are, but in showing us who they are, even as they are in difficult moments of their lives as they try to do their job, and I wanted to see Fiona as she deals with this and tries to work her way through it all. Fiona is the heart of the show, and what happens when she is wounded and adrift. Has she changed more people than just Bryan and how will they be there to pull her out of her despair?

Bryan on the other hand initially seems like a cynical wiseass American and over the course of the season we see that he’s dealing with not just PTSD from his time in Afghanistan, but he was seriously injured in an early incident involving the debris. In the early episodes as he reaches out to Fiona in small ways, like the episode where he teaches her about peeps, he’s doing it in a jokey manner, in a way that makes it clear that he’s trying to make her smile and he sees she’s struggling, but he never lets her in, the way that she lets him in and is open about her feelings. As the season continues, we see him opening up to Fiona, disobeying orders to tell her about her father, which is clearly so difficult for him to do. When Fiona commandeers pieces of debris to try to save people, he pushes against it, but then is clearly in awe of not just of how she could think of it, but of the feeling that was required to do it. And so at the end of "Do You Know Icarus?” when he says that he’s trying to get back to her, all that work has been laid down, but it took an extreme moment to make him say it aloud. I think ti took an extreme moment like that to get him to admit it to himself. And as traumatic as it was having to relive events in Afghanistan, when he and Fiona talk at the end about how the debris is studying them just as they are studying the debris, that’s not a conversation he could have had with her or with anyone before. He is in so many ways the soldier in that story that George referenced, and over the season, we see him in small ways open up. Which requires a lot from Tucker, who is more than up to the challenge. He doesn’t show his hand early on, and keeps his cards hidden, tightly wound and very controlled. He remains a soldier, firmly in a chain of command, and even if just with Fiona and George, he begins to open up. George’s betrayal means less to him, but what it will mean for him and Fiona, for their relationship, and how his experiences with the debris have changed him, will be key going forward. What will he do as he opens up, as he allows himself to feel more. As we begin to see who Bryan really is.

Maddox on the hand is simply the CIA head of this project, an operator, but the show also follows him home, to show his difficult relationship with his wife, and his son, who was injured in a car accident caused by his wife. And in the final episode we see that one of the threads happening throughout the season, as he’s trading with a Russian agent, and trying to get his hands on one piece of debris, isn’t about work. It’s about his son. And it’s startling.

It’s strange to say (in part because he’s a CIA official, and when was the last time anyone could say anything nice about them, fictional or otherwise) but Maddow has a line which is the key to the show. He mentioned offering Bryan a hand in Afghanistan, which he took (though not in one of the parallel worlds), and Bryan said something similar when asked about their relationship, which is clearly much closer than the one that Fiona has with her boss. 

There are a lot of things to explore in a new season. I want to see more about what Influx has planned and how and what they know about the debris, because George makes it clear that he knows much more Fiona. What and how will governments respond to Influx, which positions itself as a group designed to give the technology to people instead of hoarding it. Related to that the ways that they use the technology. Think about the governments storing the debris and trying to reassemble the ship when they’re not trying to reverse engineer it and build weapons to the ways that Influx utilizes the technology, how that relates to trans humanism.

And I want them to explore that. But that central notion, of offering a hand. Which the characters do for each other. Which is how they’re able to grow. The ways how after trauma it’s easier to shut down, from other people, from wonder, from possibility. Bryan clearly has a complicated relationship with his father figure, Maddox. Fiona’s complicated relationship with her biological father has become even more. 

The show is about technology and aliens reawakening possibility and hope. But it’s also about something much simpler. How as people we can save each other.

The final words of the final episode - spoken by a minor recurring character thus far - are “let’s begin” and in some ways it does feel as though what we’ve seen in this season is the prologue setting things up. Especially as they’ve now introduced Otto, played by the great John Noble, who is the show’s big bad. Or one of them, at least.

There are a lot of questions that remain to be answered. How the debris has reshaped geopolitics, there must be groups besides Influx trying to collect debris, exactly what universe re we in, which seems a vital question after the two parter. How much of this is public and how do they sell this to the public as things are getting really crazy? I could go on, but the season has left a lot of threads and stories to explore.

The truth is that I’ve been exhausted and anhedonic since before the pandemic. And watching this in the final months of the pandemic, as I daily tracked vaccination numbers as opposed to the death toll, was in some ways just what I needed. I am the sort of person who would honestly watch a weird science fiction procedural, but Debris was more than I had hoped for. I have no idea what Season 2 of Debris would bring or where it would have gone, but I feel a great loss that we’ll never be able to see it.