In Universe
Episode 4 of Debris begins with rain pounding outside. This isn’t just any rain though, this is caused by a new piece of debris. And it’s about to cause a lot of problems. Throwing on his rain coat, a man walks through the cornfield and begins coughing, uncontrollably choking and collapsing to the ground. As the camera pans out, this patch of land is actually sunny. With the rain confined to a half mile radius, Finola and Bryan head up to the farm to investigate. There, they find John doing his autopsy. The farmer and several others died of asphyxiation but this doesn’t really make sense given the circumstances. Anyway, Finola and Bryan don full body suits and head into the cornfield. At the warehouse, the workers claim to have heard a sound in the middle of the night. On top of that, there’s an 8 year old child missing too. After telling the workers to stay put for now, Finola and Bryan split up. The latter finds his piece of the debris and the young boy too. Unfortunately he also finds several dead bodies. A man who claims to live on the farm, Ephraim, shows up and wants to try and find a way in to see his family. Finola refuses to let him though, promising to keep him updated on what’s going on. This includes taking a blood sample to compare it to those inside the farm. Finola also examines the flower she found and notices a few damning facts. First, the flower seems to hint toward a change in atmospheric composition. In layman’s terms, it seems like this debris piece may well be terraforming the planet. To be honest, if the aliens wanted somewhere wet, cold and miserable, they should have landed in England. Anyway, Finola believes they can use Debris 489 to place the people inside the farm into suspended animation, placing them into a facility until they can figure out what to do. In the middle of this operation, Finola receives a call from MI6 confirming that her Father may still be alive. Her boss confirms that the Americans – and Bryan in particular – know already. On the back of this, Finola decides to tell Ephraim exactly what they plan to do with the debris piece. With this information, he makes a bold decision and decides to be there with his family. With a blue veil surrounding them all, Bryan heads in and sees all the men and women frozen in animation. Just like that though, the weather clears up (hinting that the debris piece has been moved) and Finola takes off. Just before she goes, she trades some frosty words to Bryan about telling the truth.
The Episode Review
With the truth now revealed and another stand-alone debris piece uncovered, Debris doubles down on its human drama instead, with the sci-fi elements relatively subdued. While there’s nothing wrong with that per-se, the show is starting to sink into a more predictable melodrama with the sci-fi elements coming secondary overall. The rain incident is quickly resolved by removing the debris piece at the end while placing the farmers in suspended animation seems like an easy fix. We’ll have to wait and see though if this is brought up again during the season though or if it’s quietly abandoned. Despite that, the idea of aliens terraforming the planet through debris pieces and changing the atmosphere is a good one but as we’ve seen from the 489+ different pieces, they all seem to have different powers. Quite how that ties into the bigger picture remains to be seen as at the moment it all seems very random with no rhyme or reason. Next week’s episode looks like an interesting one judging by that preview, but we’ll have to wait and see how that plays out. For now, Debris delivers a pretty good episode.
