Debris Review: Supernova (Season 1 Episode 6)
Debris Season 1 Episode 6, “Supernova,” finally succeeds at something that the show has struggled to nail down so far: have an effective emotional core.
There have been moments of this the first few episodes of Debris — Episode 3, “Solar Winds,” comes to mind most prominently — but it hasn’t ever necessarily landed it fully. A part of this is that while the case in any given episode might be effective and moving, it’s the larger plot machinations that generally end up bringing the episode down.
That’s not so much the case here as what Finola and Bryan are doing on the case and off of it are equally, although for different reasons. The overall goal of this is to bridge the divide that has started to settle between the two agents. The biggest challenge the episode has to face is making feel in character for Bryan to confide in Finola.
The episode needs that to make sense for his character. As such, it needs to walk a fine line. On the one hand, it can’t ignore that Bryan is, at his core, a soldier. He is someone who follows orders. He’s also someone whose behavior indicates that he views Finola as someone in his little makeshift unit.
That’s another part where him being a soldier comes into play heavily for this turn to work. Finola is, in a proverbial sense, his comrade-in-arms. She is one of his people and with that comes a certain kind of loyalty, but in a militaristic form. He can swallow not telling her things due to chain-of-command but only to a point, which is nicely demonstrated.
His decision to finally tell Finola makes sense then, if only because his decision to not would violate his sense of loyalty to her. He can hold things back if he thinks it holds a purpose but, in his book, this has gone a step beyond that. His partner is being disrespected and that’s something he won’t stand for.
There’s every reason to think that this shouldn’t work but it does because it has a really good sense of its characters. It has a good sense of Bryan and what he would do in any given situation now. It also doesn’t hurt that Jonathan Tucker, who plays Bryan, gives an excellent performance leading up to this during the episode.
Where it leaves the pair of them is also a good direction to take their characters. They’re now operating on their own as far as the plot with Finola’s dad is concerned and that isolates them in ways that could pay off really good dividends.
This is all juxtaposed really nicely by the case with the “teenagers” and the wonderful subversion that happens regarding what their actual goals are. It’s all grounded in death and the inevitability of it but it goes about it in a wildly different way than we’d expect.
The episode leads you to believe that they are seeking out lonely elderly people to prey upon and feed their energy back to themselves, but what happens is more interesting than that. Instead, it becomes more about recapturing youth and that reveal is actually very nicely done.
This is all connected back to FInola’s dad and whether or not he has been cloned or reanimated. They’re these two, separate plots solidifying and backing each other up and you hardly even realize that you’re being primed for a theme by both of those sides until you’re already in it.
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.