I don’t usually do this, but the problem can’t be ignored. Call the following a public service.
On Monday last I watched the pilot for a TV series called “Debris” on the Peacock Channel. I had watched the online trailers and got what information I could about the show, which seemed to be based on the very intriguing and imaginative 1972 Soviet sci-fi novel “Roadside Picnic” by the Strugatsky brothers. Imaginative, that is, until the obligatory New-Soviet-Man’s-Noble-Sacrifice-to-Save-Mankind ending. I was excited. Perhaps, finally, a different sort of alien encounter series.
Alas, it was not to be. In the Peacock version, we are dropped into what appears to be a tale ongoing for some six months since pieces of God-Knows-What began dropping out of the sky randomly. The backstory takes about 30 seconds of titles, which inform us that these nifty little bits, and some not so little, come from the wreckage of an alien vessel which has suffered a cataclysmic accident somewhere in the solar system. I mean, come ON. The whole business about discovering an alien ship which has exploded is worth at least an episode in itself. Maybe more. That way we could ease into the story naturally, picking up the narrative instead of being dropped into a Brownian Motion plot that doesn’t seem interested in directionality.
We quickly discover that there is a flourishing black market for whichever of these falling bits a group of BAD GUYS can lay their hands on. We know they’re BAD GUYS because they are lunkish, bearded, heavily armed, carry around suitcases of cash and buy aforesaid bits from nervous, sweaty schmoes in anonymous hotel rooms. And when challenged, shoot it out with GOOD GUYS and then disappear. Literally.
The GOOD GUYS, on the other hand, aren’t all guys. The main team of protagonists are a broody male with a checkered and possibly spooky background and a remarkably good-looking young woman who is working furtively at cross purposes, and a suggested agent of MI5, no less. It seems that in TV-land, Mulder and Scully have more lives than Dracula. Why invent when you can plagiarize??
The sought-after bits have strange properties. One, which looks like the beginning of an origami swan made of metal, has the power to pass effortlessly through 14 floors of the above-mentioned hotel, taking a curious maid and her cart on the ride. Little wonder one can’t find good domestic help in THAT dive… Another, which looks like a tarted-up alien version of the old “Telstar” satellites and lands in a family’s back 40, evidently has both telepathic and telekinetic properties, which it uses to zombify assorted humans in an effort to assuage a mother’s broken heart…
Speaking of tech, the GOOD GUYS flit about in what seems to be a souped-up EC-2 Hawkeye, complete with radome, God Knows Why. On the ground they prefer utterly black Chevy Suburbans – the bigger and blacker, the better. And they have both a technical language for what the artifacts are doing, or at least for the energy they’re doing it with, and nifty little devices that can neutralize at least some of the bad effects – like dropping the maid 14 floors through solid concrete. The BAD GUYS have evidently also harnessed some sort of alien tech that allows them to dematerialize and rematerialize elsewhere through the aid of a pill – which can be pretty bad if “elsewhere” happens to be the middle of a concrete highway support. Eeeewwww…
All of which seems a bit much. I mean, if the slow rain of alien wreckage has only been going on for less than a year, where did this tech – and lingo – some from? Was there some sort of super “Warp Speed” program to crank it out? Can one imagine the results of a physicist version of Anthony Fauci moseying into action? We’d be ten years in before anyone would even be allowed to look at one of the chunks of alien weirdness. And isn’t teleportation via a pill a bit of a stretch, even given such an effort?
The show is disjointed. It begins in the middle of the story, bereft of plot or character development. It seems written by a committee that doesn’t know what to do with it, or even if they want to be involved. To be invested in it means to abandon common sense, logic, all one knows about human behavior and most of what one knows of government, in addition to belief. But secretly, I have a hope. The final chapters of “Roadside Picnic,” revolve around the “Golden Sphere,” a mysterious device in the center of one of the worst and deadliest patches of alien debris. Although perilous to approach, it has the power to grant anyone who does one wish. Perhaps “Debris” will offer such a device, so that the redoubtable protagonists may, through many dangers, get near enough to it to loop back to the inception of this unremarkable feat of videographic flotsam to ensure that it never takes form. Now, THAT would truly be a service to all mankind.
