Debris Review: Earthshine (Season 1 Episode 5)
Debris Season 1 Episode 5, “Earthshine,” is starting to push out into its larger mythology as Finola begins questioning how much she trusts any of the people in her life.
One thing that is crystalizing about Debris is the ways in which that its trajectory doesn’t feel dissimilar to creator J.H. Wyman’s previous series, Fringe. We start out simultaneously big and small with the first episode. The mystery is somewhat contained but it promises connections to larger, world-building elements.
From there, we stay in a fairly episodic mode until the other forces begin to show their head. On Fringe, it was ZFT and their ambitions to prepare our world from invasion from the alternate reality (or something like that). Similarly, Debris has INFLUX, which seems to be going for that same general vibe.
That this sci-fi adjacent series feels similar to another doesn’t say a whole lot but it does color this particular episode, which is that it’s really fine — to an almost aggressive extent. Not bad, so to speak, but certainly uninteresting. Bringing up Fringe is also a bad thing here because this mystery feels explicitly like something we would have seen on that show.
The similarity does this series no favors, particularly as it attempts to really differentiate itself from the predecessor. Instead, it feels like a severe lack of any kind of originality or flair. This has been a vague enough problem over the last few episodes but each case has felt distinct enough that it has been able to get away with any comparisons.
The other part of this is the same problem that The X-Files — another obvious inspiration for Debris — often ran into, which is that the mythology-heavy episodes are almost always the least interesting ones. They’re the vegetables of serialized storytelling: it’s probably necessary but isn’t all that satisfying or enjoyable.
Even Fringe, as great as it is, had trouble at times making those kinds of episodes all that compelling. It’s just difficult to make that transition, even if that mythology building has been running through the show the whole time. They’re two different gears and it’s hard to make that track very well.
Debris is doing the best it can with that but there’s only so much you can do as a series.
In that same vein, the show’s trying really hard to make the plot with Finola work but even that is hard going. Mostly this has to do with it being fruit of the poisonous tree and, again, there’s so much you can do with the trope of characters keeping secrets for no good reason. It’s trying to squeeze something good out of that but it was rotten to begin with.
The concept at the core of it, however, is a good one. It’s this idea that Finola is beginning to not be able to trust any of the people that are in her support system. Bryan has proven himself to be unreliable to her on an idealogical standpoint; she never seemed to have trusted Maddox all that much; and Ferris is shaping up to be more of the same to that.
There’s just not enough there to drive a section of an episode and that might serve to be a larger problem for the series as we go forward.
What did you think of this episode of Debris? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
Critic Rating:
User Rating:
Debris airs Mondays at 10/9c on NBC.
Follow us on Twitter and on 
Instagram!
Want more from Tell-Tale TV? Subscribe to our newsletter here!
Drew Koenig
Drew has an ongoing, borderline unhealthy obsession with pop culture, but with television in particular. When he's not aggressively trying to get out of a perpetual state of catching up, he can be found passionately defending the ending of Lost. More of his online work can be found at The Lost Cause and he also co-hosts The Lost Cause Pod.