Review of Debris

Debris (2021)
8/10
good at the weirdness, bad at the people
3 April 2021
Just finished the season, and Debris is a series that started as an okay-but-problematic series and becomes, by mid-season, a gripping one with a fascinating story arc.

Here's my review from a few seasons in, when it was just beginning to right itself:

Debris is an X-Files/Fringe type of series in which a couple of agents investigate a series of strange events caused by the remnants of an extraterrestrial ship.

The stories are all effectively intriguing and spooky, involving reanimated corpses, people trapped in other planes of existence, and DNA-rewriting rain storms. (So far every episode has had an agent say something like "I've never seen *this* before," which would be a great thing to do in a parody of shows like this.)

The series has a surprisingly strong interest in emotion - the debris seems to actually react to things like love and memory and the agents talk a lot more about their feelings than something like the X-Files.

What makes this extra weird is the series is emotionally distanced. The agents are uninteresting people with no chemistry and it's really hard to care about them as people. Also, the delving into emotions is often tediously maudlin; episode 4 had long, sincere chunks that were unwatchable.

Around episode 5 or 6 the series starting picking up as it moved into a grander story arc and lowered the emotional temperature. So it's worth sticking with.
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