He’s no Walter Bishop, but John Noble joined Debris Season 1 Episode 13 as an INFLUX member named Otto, who has some pretty amazing powers.
The episode also revealed that George is no Walter Bishop, either.
George isn’t a benevolent presence, but, as I initially thought long ago, the leader of INFLUX.
There is no INFLUX without George, who took his own life to be reborn. He never said exactly what being reborn did for him, but the assumption is that he’s preparing for the piece of debris recovered at the quarry.
That debris will help humanity ascend and find a higher plane of consciousness and thought.
Finola: Why would you say that you have called INFLUX?
George: I’m going to tell you something that, at first, you’re going to wish I hadn’t.
Finola: Dad.
George: I took my life to allow myself a rebirth, and I paid the price. I want you to know this, that not one day goes by that I don’t think of you and your sister. I want you to know this.
Finola: What are you talking about? A rebirth? That’s not what happened. THEY did this to you. You didn’t allow yourself anything.
George: Remember that first night in the hotel? I told you that this is bigger than you, me, your sister.
Finola: Yes.
George: And I told you that I needed the Legarie files to find this.
Finola: Yes! What does THIS have to do with INFLUX?
George: If we can’t help people, we do not deserve this debris.
In short, there’s a reason that George has a fondness for tinfoil capes. The man is nuts.
There’s little doubt that understanding the debris, no, the people that created the debris would benefit humanity. They appear to be lightyears ahead of us in many ways.
But to railroad your own world for your own end with a savior complex like George’s isn’t helpful to anyone.
George has turned on everyone except his own merry band of misfits who steal from the rich to give to the poor or the world’s leaders to give to the masses. How very Robin Hood of him.
George had everyone fooled, but he didn’t fool Bryan.
Bryan: Can I ask you a question?
Finola: Yeah.
Bryan: It might sting a bit.
Finola: Wow. That sounds ominous.
Bryan: We’re putting all of our faith into your father, and he was reanimated through his eye. They restarted his brain, and he can’t remember where he was six months ago. He can’t remember why Maddox wants him dead. He’s marchin’ around in this tinfoil cape. His memory is foggy at best. It just doesn’t feel right. He could be wrong about all of it. Maybe they told him something, and he just doesn’t remember it. That’s dangerous.
Finola: All I know is that they brought him back to find it, so it must be important.
George has been difficult to read all season long, but he’s always been an outlier. He hasn’t felt right. We hadn’t pegged it, but Bryan’s assessment was spot on — George was dangerous.
We just didn’t know how dangerous.
He certainly had regrets about how things unfolded. For instance, his suicide didn’t go as planned. Finola kind of mucked it up for him, and apparently, it affected his rebirth.
Has he really been struggling with his memory? That could have been a side effect of his interrupted rebirth, but now it seems like he was putting everyone on, including his daughter, so that the ends justified his means.
It’s unclear why everyone else has mastered the debris and seemingly ingested it while George spoke in theories in his tinfoil cape. Hell, Otto can manipulate humans into pretzels. What can George do other than motivating INFLUX?
A couple of episodes ago, I pointed out what the end credits had been revealing and how they seemed to point to a debris event that included Bryan and Garcia, and others.
Finola: What was that about?
Bryan: When it all started falling, I was injured in a debris event with Garcia and a Chinese agent named Ming. I’ve been taking injections for it as a precaution to stave off something.
Finola: What? Stave off what?
Bryan: They don’t know. This is the first time that something has happened because of it. I’ve never seen that man before in my life. We need to tell Maddox everything.
Now we know that Bryan’s medication has been a precaution to stave off debris effects. How would it know what to stave off if they didn’t know everything the debris was capable of doing? Looking back, it seemed to work sometimes and not others.
Finola was in the line of fire on Debris Season 1 Episode 1 when the debris boy took her hand. She was under its spell while Bryan was spared.
Bryan wasn’t spared when he was cloned, and he’s had other close calls. But when INFLUX removed the tether between the quarry people and the debris, their minds were wiped, and Bryan retained his memories.
But some of his memories have not been retained. Whatever he was trying to recall from Afghanistan, for instance, was out of his grasp.
And mentioning that, at the end of Debris Season 1 Episode 12, Bryan was pretty well under the spell of everything after he touched Mariel’s hand. He had dipped his cup into the alien Kool-Aid.
But by the time “Celestial Body” began, he was back to his old self, shaken out of his reverie. It was just another case of the week, but he was skeptical of George this time out.
Maybe whatever he saw that changed his opinion of the debris also revealed that George was not on its side. Something doesn’t feel right.
Throughout all of this, Finola has been clinging to having her father back, believing that he was on the side of good. Now she’s completely lost, but she knows the man she sees as her father isn’t the father she lost six months ago.
Her father would never allow her to be manhandled by INFLUX, but he had no issue at all with the way they grabbed her and jammed a magical bean down her throat.
No, nothing about George is OK.
Maddox, though, is apparently benign. His goal was, as we surmised, to free his family from their misery. He worked with the Russians to trade debris so that his son could communicate.
It’s hard to fault him for that. It would be better if he didn’t have to go through back channels to do it, but nothing about how this debris thing has been handled makes much sense.
From what we’ve seen so far, their only angle is to stop debris, control it, and weaponize it. How depressing to imagine that our great world leaders couldn’t see beyond that.
The indigenous person who was in the extraordinarily fake-looking desert was back, and the orb sought him out. His name is Dahkeya. Does it matter? What does matter is that he and Brill took the orb into a nearby cave that was housing… Finola?
Was that our Finola, or was that another Finola from the other dimension? She was in Virginia. Who was in the cave? I have no idea. And I’m worried that we’ll never find out.
I wish I had more to say about the finale, but other than the reveals mentioned above, there wasn’t much ground covered, and few seeds were planted for a second season, nothing concrete, anyway.
A dust monster called a telesphere is on the loose, but we don’t know why it matters. INFLUX has dastardly plans to raise human consciousness to another plane without bothering to ask the rest of us if we’re interested.
Finola and Bryan are solid, but what does it mean? What does any of it mean?
Debris is a massive bubble show, and it doesn’t matter how far out Joel Wyman has the story planned (to the series finale) if it doesn’t get another season.
What do you think? Were you wowed? Did I miss anything you want to discuss? Don’t forget that you can watch Debris online to see it all again.
Carissa Pavlica is the managing editor and a staff writer and critic for TV Fanatic. She’s a member of the Critic’s Choice Association, enjoys mentoring writers, conversing with cats, and passionately discussing the nuances of television and film with anyone who will listen. Follow her on Twitter and email her here at TV Fanatic.