Debris Review: Spaceman (Season 1 Episode 8)
It wouldn’t be fair to call Debris Season 1 Episode 8, “Spaceman,” a bad episode, but it is a deeply uninteresting one. It makes sense on paper why a show would have to do an episode like this one but that doesn’t do much to make it too compelling. This is an “eat your vegetables” episode and while fine, doesn’t leave us with a lot of meat.
If anything, this feels like a penultimate episode where big pieces are getting set up on the board so they can be moved into place for some big showdown during the season finale. That’s not what this is, though. There are still five episodes left for this season, which is nothing short of confounding.
This is the episode where it feels like everything is coming to a head and Finola and Bryan are off to rescue her father from Influx, all the while side-stepping their respective bosses and whatever their individual goals are. The problem here is that a lot of this episode is messy in ways that don’t serve the show too well.
A good encapsulation of this is Brill and his wearing of faces, something that feels aggressively pulled from Fringe, and seems like a complication only for the sake of having one. This is something that Lost would run into now and again. They’d throw something out there just to see if it would stick and use it again in the future — or not, as the case might be.
It’s the show unnecessarily layering itself, not that this is necessarily the first time that it has been guilty of that so far. The fact is that Debris doesn’t need this plot involving Maddox and Ferris. It feels completely extraneous and out of the bounds of what it is shown itself to be good at.
It’s so much more proficient at the case-of-the-week stuff and incredibly not at the mythology aspects that it is like a basketball player throwing a football all of a sudden. That’s not what they’re good at and it should stick to its strengths.
This is how an otherwise good show begins to go off the rails. It forgets what it’s actually good at or why people tune in to watch and starts focusing on things that lead them to failure. Ideally, this would be a show that could just be an episodic procedural but that’s not where tv is right now. As a result, it feels like it has to devote attention to some mystery box.
On the topic of mysteries, we should touch on the resolution of how George is still alive. It’s a worrying development for this show to introduce its version of a Lazarus Pit. This is exactly how shows go wrong. Granted, it makes sense. The writers needed a quick and easy reason why he would still be alive and resurrection is tried and true.
This is such a Pandora’s Box, though. There’s an automatic loss of stakes if you can just revive a character who’s died. This is the same struggle that Arrow had. Where’s an audience’s investment supposed to come from if deaths have no meaning and permanency.
Again, this is Debris complicating matters when it doesn’t have to. It could rest upon its laurels but it’s pushing forward with an ambition that it hasn’t earned and we can only hope that it doesn’t come back to bite them and us.
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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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.