Debris S01E05: Earthshine

© NBC

Finola isn't sure who she can trust anymore.
by Chuck Duncan

Guest Cast: Sebastian Roché

After several episodes of Bryan and Finola jetting across the country to investigate new debris phenomena, we finally get a story that's a bit more focused on those bad guys who have been dealing in pieces of debris, revealing just a bit of what they are doing with their acquired pieces.

The episode opened with a spectacular bus crash as a transit bus from New Jersey made an unexpected detour to Boston through a debris-made wormhole. Except there is no debris in the area where the bus vanished. The passengers of the bus experienced a sound vacuum right before they crash landed, and people outside the bus heard a high pitched sound of unknown origin. What Bryan and Finola do have is video of a man watching the event from the steps of a post office so he is the prime suspect, but the question still lingers as to how the wormhole was created.

While they try to figure all that out, Bryan is trying to figure out Finola's attitude. He can definitely sense that she's being a bit stand-offish with him, but he thinks it's just because they disagreed on how to handle things in Nebraska (see the previous episode). She tells him that she's fine and moving past that, but the truth of the matter is she has lost all trust in him after her boss revealed that he knows her father is still alive. How can you work with a partner you know is keeping secrets from you? To be fair, she's keeping secrets from him to, that's the nature of the game when you work for spy agencies. She had to realize that he's under orders not to give her any information about her father because it could jeopardize their mission. But seems to be one to not let go of a grudge easily.

Things also look more suspicious when a video from a similar wormhole incident in China goes missing from the server. Neither Bryan nor Finola know why it was removed but it may be important to the case they are currently working. Bryan contacts Maddox -- and I'm not sure where his personal home drama is going within the context of the story -- who denies knowledge of why the video was removed but he promises to look in to it. Finola's boss also has no access or knowledge why it's missing but she does retrieve a copy and has a courier deliver it personally as it's said to be too sensitive to deliver over a network.

Finola meets a mysterious man in a van (guest Sebastian Roché who must certainly play a larger part in things moving forward because you don't hire him to drive a van and deliver one pivotal piece of dialogue) who hands over a flash drive and tells her that her own boss knows more than she's telling Finola, and that her father is not a clone. Great, so she can't trust Bryan or the CIA, and now she can't trust MI6? But she still has her sister, who calls out of the blue asking for the name of some Spanish song they used to dance to as children. Finola doesn't have time for that right now, girl.

© NBC

What everyone does figure out is that to create a wormhole that a bus can fit through takes a lot of power, and the video from China doesn't seem to have any sensitive information but it does seem to confirm that to charge the debris it requires two large metallic objects of virtually identical mass. In the video it's two bulldozers. In New Jersey, the entry point of the wormhole was between two large metallic poles. Looking at the layout of New York City, finding the two points seems virtually impossible since it could be almost any two skyscrapers across the street from each other. But there is a specific structure built into some skyscrapers, a type of damper to allow the building to withstand high winds. And there just happens to be three buildings in just the right position, so they need to figure out which two buildings are being used with Finola, Bryan and Maddox taking a building.

Bryan finds nothing, but Finola does find the piece of debris so the other must be in Maddox's building. But it isn't, so Bryan goes back to check and finds what he's looking for. They also find the man from the video in New Jersey and chase him down, surrounding him but after warning them all that nothing will stop whatever is in motion, he blows his own brains out. Bryan then has to get a team to his building to deactivate the debris because a sudden high pitched sound has started squealing in the city, with no point of origin and stretching for at least six blocks. The area is massive and they are terrified that six blocks of Manhattan are about to vanish. But Bryan's team is fired upon by Anson Ash's team (he's the bearded guy we've seen buying and selling debris), but Bryan can't go after them as he is now the only person who can deactivate the debris before it opens the wormhole. Luckily the one scientist is alive and able to walk him through it.

Finola does follow Ash through the city for blocks and blocks. It's dark at this point and she's almost given up hope, but as she turns around he's right behind her. Trying to ask what happened to her father -- Ash says she has his eyes -- they experience the sound vacuum that the bus passengers experienced, as does Bryan who kind of needs to hear the frequencies of the devices he's using to turn off the debris. Ash is thrilled he is about to succeed, but Bryan manages to use the video scope to figure out the right moment to flip the switch and he succeeds, restoring the sounds of the city. Ash is stunned that he can hear Finola breathing and is even more stunned when he's tackled by one of her team members. Now he's in the custody of the CIA with Maddox promising Finola he'll give her more information as soon as he's able.

Not knowing where to turn at this point, Finola gets a message from her sister with a video of them as children, dancing to the song 'Porqué Te Vas?' (a real song by Jeanette from 1974). As she smiles at the memory, Ash is sitting in the transport van ... singing the same song.