There will be some spoilers in this series review, but just as there are certain ‘items’ you can’t polish, the same items are pretty hard to spoil too.

 Two agents pursue space debris that’s fallen to Earth…

Where on earth to start? I suppose it’ll have to be thirteen long, if perversely enjoyable, weeks ago. I started out full of hope. I liked the premise. Bits of alien flotsam and/or jetsam – the eponymous ‘debris’ – are falling to Earth and causing all sorts of mayhem which our two central characters are sent to investigate and neutralize. Meanwhile there’s a good deal of covert shenanigans as a Secret Government Agency called ‘Orbital’ and a Secret Criminal Syndicate called ‘Influx’ fight to collect and harness the special powers hidden in the alien tech.

So, what about our two alien trash trouble shooters? Ok, you remember The X-Files? Mulder and Scully? Of course you do! Fox Mulder: the handsome, charming, funny ‘believer’, jumping at conspiratorial shadows, but with a sharp wit and a cunning befitting his vulpine name. Dana Scully: the beautiful, brave, super smart sceptic, armed with a quick wry humour, making her the perfectly matched foil for her alien-chasing oppo. Mulder and Scully – one of the great pairings in the history of TV – with a screen chemistry that would make your telly fizz – so iconic that 90s indie band Catatonia got to Number 3 in the UK charts with a song in honour of their relationship.  I don’t know about you but I’ve got a little warm feeling inside at the memory.

This pairing is clearly at the back of Debris creator, J H Wyman’s mind, and thus it is I invite you to meet Bryan Beneventi (Jonathan Tucker) and Finola Jones (Riann Steele). Bryan is CIA – a haunted ex-army Afghan vet. He’s haunted because, according to a flashback late in the series, he was once made to wear the most ridiculous stick-on beard ever to grace a TV screen. Finola is… English. And really quite dull. She’s got a dodgy MI6 handler, a moany sister in the UK, and a dead father… or is he?!?! Trust me, if that’s a spoiler then clearly you have never watched a TV show before in your life.

The main thing that distinguishes Bryan and Finola is their complete lack of any sense of humour whatsoever. I watched every second of this series so I nearly dropped my tea when they made their first joke – in episode 11. There was another vaguely jolly exchange about smelly clothes in the season finale, so, with two whole gags in 13 episodes, no one could claim that this is a show that takes itself too seriously. B & F aren’t particularly bright, although they are good at looking worried, which they do… a lot… especially when they have to recite dialogue such as: ‘The implant is […] using micro-vibration, making her atoms move so fast she becomes invisible!’

As Harrison Ford famously said on the set of Star Wars: ‘You can type this shit, George…’

Fox and Dana – so cool you want to meet them in real life, you want them to be your mates! But Bryan and Finola? Aren’t they that couple you met on holiday? They invited you to dinner and you told them your nan had died to get out of it. Debris isn’t X-Files Lite, it’s X-Files – The Supermarket Own-Brand Version. You know what it’s supposed to be, but it doesn’t taste of anything in particular.

Although, forget Cigarette Smoking Man, here we have an Evil British Northern Beardy Bloke played by the brilliantly named Scroobius Pip, so that’s a plus, of sorts.

The first few eps follow a pretty easy-to-digest format. The Debris tips up in a small town and makes people disappear, or lose their memory, or start breathing chlorine, and Bryan and Finola are sent in to sort it out. Each bit of alien space junk has a different power – teleportation, time travel, dimension hopping, cloning, mind control – which is impressively varied, although it must make sorting the recycling pretty hard on their planet. It also means that as Bry and Fin search for a story arc, the series descends into narrative mush.

When they finally find Finola’s Dad, George (Tyrone Benskin), a sort of scatty professor who you can phone up every time you need an unintelligible info-dump, the series tips over into incomprehensible conspiracy guff, pausing only for two whole episodes of the worst multi-dimensional time-loop story ever committed to screen. Half way through the second part of this story, there are four characters going around in different dimensional circles and they keep having to explain the plot to each other. To be fair, if J H Wyman wants the audience to experience the tedium of being caught in a seemingly inescapable time paradox, then this is a masterwork. It’s as if they watched Groundhog Day and thought: ‘Let’s do that, but without jokes, or character development.’

But all this dimensional looping is fracturing the space-time continuum, leading to my favourite line of dialogue in the whole series: ‘We’ve got to do something or we’re going to do damage to the universe. This is dire!’

As we head into the penultimate episode this prediction proves to be prophetic. The Debris is getting stronger, and their little steel anti-debris gizmos stop working due to an excess of ‘Ligari Harmonics’ whatever they are. Would any Whovians out there like to guess how they get the gizmos to work again? Yes! That’s right! They REVERSE THE POLARITY! I mean, fair’s fair. It’s a tried and tested technique. In any other show I would have taken this to be a meta wink to the savvy sci-fi fan, but as they twiddle their knobs authoritatively it’s clear they mean every word.

And here we are in the season finale… in what looks incredibly like the Doctor Who quarry, with some possessed extras who wail or laugh in unison, a phenomenon we are told is called ‘emotional convergence’ but looks more like an extremely embarrassing drama workshop I once attended in 1982. Beardy Northern Baddy, Scroobius Pip, and lots of other dodgy looking henchmen turn up (we know they’re dodgy because they’re all wearing leather and black denim) and there is much unlocking of flight cases. There’s a bit where they eat some magic beans (seriously, I’m not making this up), and pass a sort of digital Yeti walking along the road. There’s a gas station full of people doing a kind of freaky terminal yoga; there are a couple of double crosses, or not; a thing does a thing which nearly does a thing; and Finola’s Dad, George keeps telling her that that he KNOWS stuff. There’s so much he has to tell her….!!

But, of course, he won’t get the chance because, sadly, and unsurprisingly, the series got cancelled.

Now we’ll never know why the Native American chap started talking to the little glowing ball or why he had the ‘surprising thing’ in his cave. I won’t say any more. That would be a spoiler.

Verdict: Okay, hands up, I’m being a bit mean, but it’s fair game. There’s a good idea buried in the alien landfill of this series, even with its crude similarities to The X Files. Believe it or not, I really wanted to like it – and I gave it the benefit of the doubt for longer than it deserved – but the brutal reality is that I stuck with it because in the dying days of lockdown, with little else to watch, Debris was so bad, and so lacking in self-awareness, it was funny, almost the highlight of my week. Four episodes in I would have been happy to offer up a broadly enjoyable 6/10, but there’s no escaping quite how badly this series fell apart. 3/10

Martin Jameson