Debris Review: You Can Call Her Caroline (Season 1 Episode 7)
Debris Season 1 Episode 7, “You Can Call Her Caroline,” delivers one of the most overtly creepy episodes of the season, which is incidentally also one of its best-to-date.
It should always be kept in mind that while there are many overtones to Fringe to be found within Debris, the thing that it wants to be the most is The X-Files. It wants to be the show that has the two competent, charismatic investigators that go out to solve a supposedly unsolvable mystery all the while not knowing if they can trust those around them.
To be fair, that could also be used to describe Fringe, but it is most strongly the latter rather than the former.
This has been true over the course of this first season, but it is especially true with “You Can Call Her Caroline” where it is deeply unsettling. However, there is a kind of economy and ease to the rules that makes it easy to wrap your head around. Eventually, you can slot the pieces together where it makes sense and that does nothing to make this less perturbing.
That comes through really nicely during one scene where Bryan and Finola go to interview Caroline’s mom, and she explains why she doesn’t go get her daughter. It’s a sudden and jarring turn that sends chills down your spine, and it’s very effective in that regard.
It’s such a marked shift from everything that has come before it and really crystalizes the mechanics around this specific debris. That’s what makes it so good: it is this abrupt escalation that makes everything more complicated and also simpler.
Overall, the case itself is a particularly solid one, even if the military-based motivation feels like it comes a bit out of left field. Everything else is fairly well done — even tracing it back to Bryan’s loyalty to Maddox, something that’s necessarily thematically — but making it all about taking out the military higher-ups is a bit too broad to be totally satisfying.
Luke’s reasoning, while possibly accurate for the kind of shell-shock that someone returning from the military might be going through, is a bit too rote and well-trodden path than it needs to make this work. This episode is also the appropriate amount of Influx that we can really tolerate in an episode.
It ends up not being about them at all but rather using them as a propelling point to get Bryan and Finola onto a case, which is the best use for now. It’s simply difficult to care too much about Influx at this stage when their mission statement and motivations still feel really amorphous and poorly defined.
We’ll likely be moving into the third act of the season after this point, going after Finola’s father and determining his involvement in everything, where a lot of that is likely to get better fleshed out, and we’ll be able to get a better sense of that organization, for good or ill.
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.