Summary
“You Can Call Her Caroline” gets unusually dark, with mind control, forced suicide, and torture all on the agenda, but the show is really starting to pick up pace.
This recap of Debris season 1, episode 7, “You Can Call Her Caroline”, contains spoilers.
The irony of the specific piece of debris in “You Can Call Her Caroline” is that it’s the least showy we’ve seen thus far but also probably the most dangerous. It doesn’t cause teleporting vehicles or open trans-dimensional portals, but it does take control of peoples’ minds and allow them to influence the behavior of others. The cold open makes this pretty clear, with a man – later named as Liam Packard (Kynan Foster) – trying to get rid of a bag of debris shards that a woman, Linda (Emma Yi), forces him to hand over before also instructing him to put a bullet in his brain. Yikes.
This is a dark turn, and things only get darker back with the ostensible heroes, as Maddox gives Bryan the lowdown on Anson Ash – ex-SAS, decorated, went AWOL, and formed Influx – before spending most of the episode torturing him for information. There’s an awful lot of debate to be had about the validity of torture as an interrogation strategy – the most common argument being, putting aside the morality of it all, that it rarely yields actionable intelligence – but Maddox isn’t interested in any of that. In fact, he’s quite smug about his facility for extracting information and seems to rather enjoy it.
Ash’s phone is also still receiving calls from Maine, despite a complex and strange encryption, so Maddox sends Bryan and Finola there to figure out what’s up. Bryan also fesses up that Finola and MI6 know about George Jones being alive, but he keeps quiet about the fact he told her as much. He also lets Finola know that he spilled the beans to Maddox, justifying it on the grounds that he refuses to believe his superior is crooked until there’s concrete proof. Fair enough.
When Bryan and Finola get to Maine in Debris episode 7, they’re given a rundown by Agent Tom Gordon (Thomas Cadrot) of the events we saw in the cold open, with particular focus on the witnesses being in a trance-like state and Linda herself being found wandering later, with neither the bag she took from Packard nor any memory of what happened. Luckily, though, Liam has a brother, Luke (Benjamin Hollingsworth), a veteran who explains that Liam found the debris and tried to flog it on the dark web. He describes the effects of the debris on Liam as being like the shellshock he saw in Afghanistan, where we learn Bryan also served. Luke also has a daughter – you can call her Caroline (Evelyn Burke). See what I did there?
It becomes apparent quickly that the marsh where Liam found the debris is radiating enough extra-terrestrial energy to send Finola into a right tizzy – “It doesn’t want us here!” she wails – and is also messing with everyone’s memories and minds. Sending the Packards to a motel, Bryan and Finola visit Gloria Hernandez (Kate Dion-Richard), Caroline’s mother, and her new husband Sam (Andy Canete), and learn that technically she has full custody of Caroline. She’s living with Luke, though, because that’s “where she belongs”, or so they insist in a rather vacant, monotone way.
It’s becoming obvious, then, that Caroline is integral to Debris episode 7, which is confirmed both by the title and the fact that we see her sit on the edge of the marsh where the debris was found and summon the shards towards her. They have some kind of connection to her, which explains why she has such a high reading on Finola’s magic scale and why Luke has been having her retrieve pieces for him. She’s been hiding some, though, to prevent him from getting stronger, which he needs to in order to seek revenge against some Air Force big-wigs for the treatment of his unit overseas. After confessing this to Bryan he forces him and Finola away using his new, obviously substantial mind control abilities.
Finola and Bryan, though, arrive at the Air Force base that Luke is targeting without even realizing how they got there. He promptly arrives with a bag full of debris, which he forced Caroline into revealing the location of, and using his powers he forces a pilot to crash his plane into the runway. With thick smoke pluming up in the background, he manipulates one soldier into shooting another and then forces Finola to turn her back while Bryan, echoing the cold open, fights against the gun he’s bringing to his own head. Just as all seems bleak, Luke dumps the bag of debris out onto the hood of a nearby car and fatally smashes his own head into the pile, lodging a shard deep into his brain. Behind him is Caroline, who finally used her own powers to set him straight.
After returning Caroline to her mother, Finola gets a strange call from Dee Dee in which she insists to her sister that she’s close to relapsing and needs her to come home. She suggests they visit “Michelle’s country house”, which turns out to be a code word from their childhood alerting the other to their parents listening. As we see after the call, Dee Dee was forced into it by Ferris, but luckily it seems like Finola got the message that something was up.
Debris season 1, episode 7 ends with a further cliffhanger, though, as Maddox calls Bryan to let him know they’re planning a raid using the intel extracted from Ash. They know where George Jones is.
