With last week’s episode heralding a slight shift in direction, Debris has taken that and continued in an interesting way, with episode 9, ‘Do You Know Icarus?’. *Warning! Some Spoilers Ahead!*
After quite an episodic start to this season, Debris has definitely made things much more serialised in the past few episodes, especially these last two. It has been a very welcome change and is making the overall story arc much more compelling. In the early few episodes there was a danger that it could have become ‘debris of the week’, but it has slowly moved away from that and now looks like it can sustain a more complex narrative.
Continuing from ‘Spaceman’ last week, ‘Do You Know Icarus?’ sees Bryan (Jonathan Tucker) and Finola (Riann Steele) hide her father George (Tyrone Benskin) away with an old colleague of his, Garcia (Zak Santiago). Garcia appears to have been injured during some of the early Orbital experiments and has a connection to both George and Bryan, although the full extent of this is unknown. Garcia knows about Bryan’s injections though, so clearly has more knowledge of his career than Finola does.
Once they deposit him here, they then have to go off to their next assignment, which seems to be some changed weather patterns, but soon becomes a much more critical problem to solve. Arriving at a house to start their investigation, they are met by Shelby (Keenan Tracey), who happens to know a lot about them. He and his sister found some debris which transported them both, and he can no longer find her in this current reality. Despite numerous trips using the debris he has failed to locate her, and the ‘looping’ is apparently damaging the universe.
At this point they do fall back on contacting George for help, which makes logical sense in the story, but the writers do need to be careful that he doesn’t become a ‘scientific panacea’ at the end of the phone every week. Here it works and his role is cleverly limited by him being dead in some of the realities, or at least out of reach.
It’s an interesting twist on a familiar time travel/alternate reality trope and is played out quite well in ‘Do You Know Icarus?’. Obviously, we get the classic montage of the beginning of their investigation in multiple iterations, with Bryan getting a variety of different partners. It’s understandable that they’d want to play with the characters like that, and you can imagine it was too tempting not to do. Ultimately, Bryan gets close to stopping him using the debris during one of the loops and ends up also being sent into a new iteration.
As you’d expect, Bryan is totally thrown by this and begins to freak out somewhat, especially as he has a different partner who just thinks he’s lost the plot. What follows is a neat crossover where he contacts the Finola of this world in London, to help him decipher something George said in a previous iteration. From a character development point of view, they even employ the trick of having Bryan admit to Finola that he cares for her, even though we know that she will be unaware when he gets back to the correct reality. It’s a bit of cheat ‘reset’, but worth doing nonetheless.
What bodes well for the series is that despite this story not being concluded in ‘Do You Know Icarus?’, it doesn’t feel that incomplete. There are some storylines from previous weeks they’ve not touched, and there are elements left hanging, but somehow it didn’t end in a frustrating way. This is probably because we have come to know these characters quite well, and everything is being logically and authentically worked through, so it’s a solid mystery.
Clearly, the upward trend we’ve seen over the past few episodes continues, and with a few episodes left Debris could end this first season on a real high. It has definitely made some strides to move away from the initial concerns that it was too similar in tone to ‘Fringe’ and is finding its own voice now. We look forward to where it goes next.
