#brinola

SIREN CALL IV

Fandom: Debris (TV)

Notes: I had this idea that the men of Orbital should do a calendar photo shoot, and then I had to contrive why. (In which Bryan and Finola are two oblivious idiots agents partners in love.)

“I’m never playing cards with you again,” Bryan vowed to Mallory.

“That’s what you said last time,” the younger agent said with a smirk.

They stood talking in the shelter of a makeshift tent that Orbital had set up as a temporary work site. Last night, in the very same tent, out of boredom for her and insomnia for him, the two colleagues had decided to play poker to pass the time. During their game, Mallory had brought up the subject of a charity calendar, and now she was collecting on the promise she had extracted from Bryan as the wager they had made on their final hand.

My first vid about Bryan and Finola from the TV show Debris (NBC)

gotta love that bryan finds himself in an alternate reality in which alt-bryan clearly doesn’t know finola and was even likely involved in killing her dad (as mentioned by this new reality’s “partner”) and his first moves are to a) immediately track down finola and b) be completely honest with her—about her dad, about being from another reality, even about her importance to him. never mind that he has no clear status of the conspiracy in this reality or that by doing so he is putting himself in danger from his new partner.

This show truly had its potential if played right, but it felt like the cards were stacked against it. The lack of promotion also wasn’t a good thing, and the fact that they never got an Instagram account kind of confirmed for me that NBC was never serious about it (that’s how I usually tell if a show is gonna get axed or not lol).

Syfy Wire ( Apr 27, 2021):

What has been satisfying about playing out who your characters are as people and figuring out that you both would rather be aligned with each other than the organizations you work for?

[Creator] Joel [Wyman], Riann, and I had a very strong sense of what the arc and those beats were going to be upfront. It was about attempting to maintain the courage to stick to that overarching commitment to the unwinding, versus getting sucked into the false, surface-level ways in which sometimes writers put characters together. And [Bryan and Finola] are seen as not romantic, so that is an additional challenge. It's always easier when they're romantic.

But, the mission becomes more and more clear for these two characters. And the way in which to succeed in the mission is ultimately in taking on different parts of one another. Particularly for Bryan, it's taking a page from Finola's book of vulnerability, and understanding that vulnerability can be a powerful tool. We're starting to see clearly that what Influx is willing to do to win, and it becomes evident that the only way to get ahead of them is to do this together.

TV Insider (Apr 26, 2021):

When he says to Finola that the person that he’s desperate to get back to is her, that she is very important to him, that didn’t read as a romantic confession at all. I read it as almost like she is an emotional anchor back to that home.

Exactly. It’s the embrace of mother or father or friend. It is the anchor that makes us feel like home. She equals going home.

And all along, she is literally the only person who has made him feel comfortable in this world.

Yep. That’s absolutely dead-on. And to the credit of not just Joel but also the network, they have allowed us to reveal and unravel the characters over the course of now 10 episodes, not forcing our hand to make all of that so clear within the pilot and the next two episodes.

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