Debris Review: I Am Icarus (Season 1 Episode 10)
Debris Season 1 Episode 10, “I Am Icarus,” picks up the thread from the previous episode’s cliffhanger and carries forward with a switch in perspective.
For those that don’t recall from Episode 9, “Do You Know Icarus?,” Bryan and Finola encounter Shelby, a man who found a piece of debris in the ocean off the side of his house that sent him back in time two days and accidentally erased his sister, Grace, from the timeline.
“I Am Icarus” continues with Bryan also trying to find his way back to Finola, who is no longer partnered with Bryan in these new alternate realities. From there, we get a change from Bryan and Shelby’s point-of-view and switch over to the universes where Finola and Grace are the ones attempting to push everything forward.
Overall, this episode runs into the same problem that a lot of two-parters end up running across, which is that the second part is almost always less interesting and successful than the first. Doctor Who has this problem constantly and there’s any number of examples you could draw from.
To paraphrase Chuck from Supernatural: “Endings are hard. Anyone with a keyboard can poop out a beginning but endings are impossible.” That’s just the way of things. It’s easier to set up a mystery than it is to resolve it.
As a result, the writing for “I Am Icaurus” is a lot messier than it is for the preceding episode with characters having conversations that we’ve already seen them have or smart people like Finola coming to conclusions and eureka moments far longer than we’ve previously been shown that they should.
Moreover, it’s an episode where long stretches of it just feel really forgettable. It doesn’t stick in our brain the way that the first part does and that’s mostly due to a lot of this being a rehash to what we’ve already seen during the first-parter, just with Finola and Grace, instead of Bryan and Shelby.
That also goes back to our earlier point that the setup is easier than the resolution. There are only so many places the episode can take this without it being repetitive and it’s really hitting that wall multiple times on “I Am Icarus.”
It’s also an incredibly off-putting decision for the show to not allow Bryan and Finola to remember the events of these last two episodes and bring them back down to zero. The whole point of doing a time loop or alternate reality episode is that characters can see the different versions of their lives and draw lessons from that.
You can’t really do that when someone is just imparting knowledge to characters and not being able to rest upon their lived in experiences. It’s far more interesting if Bryan and Finola are allowed to remember what’s happened to them and really grasp something powerful or profound from that.
What you think of this episode of Debris? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Debris airs Mondays at 19/9c 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.
2 comments
The last episode of Fringe has a major reset where Peter and Olivia don’t remember the 20 years of hell they lived through. It was still a good ending. Let’s see where showrunners go now that it’s in the beginning.
Has anyone paid attention to the voice-over credits at the end? There is always what it seems to be like a radio broadcast at the end of each episode. Which up to now I thought it was recounting how they had found the first debris. But right at the very end, someone asks: “Have you found Beneventi?”. I mean, there is something there more that I thought at least. Has anyone picked up on that too?
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