Debris Review: Solar Winds (Season 1 Episode 3)

There’s something incredibly enjoyable, even cathartic, about a show that is so unapologetically episodic. Debris Season 1 Episode 3, “Solar Winds,” doesn’t shy away from that or pretend that it’s not fully that. Perhaps this is just where we are now but, especially with mystery box shows like this, television is so rarely allowed to be just that: television. 

Serialized shows often have to feel like they are one part of a larger story, like The 100 or The Event, where each episode is more like its own chapter rather than a singular experience that viewers can come back for week-after-week. Some shows fall into the fallacy that they have to be a movie stretched out into many hours but Debris thankfully doesn’t operate that way. 

Outside of the scenes where we check in on Maddox and whatever machinations he has in the works — of which there are a plentiful amount so it can’t get too much credit— “Solar Winds” is overall an episode that is very centered and focused on the case at hand. It’s just taking a concept that is simple yet weird and executing it to the best of the show’s ability. 

In a lot of ways, this feels some of Fringe‘s less grandiose episodes where there’s just a fixed thing and the team working to solve whatever that is. From a production standpoint, it’s kind of a genius move. It’s working along the same logic as a bottle episode: they have a fixed set that they don’t need to veer off.

It’s the kind of episode that’s born out of saving money for perhaps a more costly episode down the road and it works out pretty well. It’s a pretty nondescript area that could conceivably be anywhere and the biggest thing would be the debris itself and creating the effect itself, which didn’t look too expensive in and of itself, but still looked rather good. 

The square is just vague enough to be intriguing and the human element of Nicole being trapped inside of it is more enough to make up for any loose ground. 

One of the best things about the episode, and something that feels explicitly like The X-Files, is how it’s never explained by the end of it how so many different people were able to be trapped inside of it. The way to solve it falls within something they know how to do but the inciting event is never known. It lends an ineffability to it that serves the show well. 

We mentioned Maddox earlier so let’s touch on that briefly. We haven’t talked about him during the previous reviews but it should be known that his section of the show is by far the worst. It forces the show to engage in perhaps the worst tv trope, which is characters holding back information when it would be far easier to just tell them. 

However, in this particular case, that’s a bit of a double-edged sword because the episode is able to make good work of some subtextual themes, particularly during the scenes when talking to Nicole’s father. He didn’t know what happened to his daughter for years and that’s a thing that haunts him. 

Similarly, Finola also doesn’t truly know what happened to her father, except the audience and Bryan are the only ones who know that. It functions well enough that we have information that Finola herself doesn’t have but it would be even more successful if she were made aware of that, too. 

What did you think of this episode of Debris? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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Debris airs Mondays at 10/9c on NBC.

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