The Orville Review: Season 1 – Episode by episodeBy Matthew Martin| July 14, 2020 TV Blogs Previous Page S01E07 – Majority Rule If it feels like a Black Mirror episode, it should. This is The Orville doing their take on a social-media upvote/downvote driven culture much the way “Nosedive” did for Black Mirror. Nosedive is a top-six episode of the show and one of the best sci-fi shorts you’ll see on the subject of social media-overreliance. The Orville’s take is nowhere near as engrossing or as tightly put-together. It is harmless, which should never be said about a Black Mirror episode. Harmless is good for The Orville, though, and there’s enough to enjoy here that you won’t feel like you wasted your time. There’s just not much more than that. 8/10 – The Orville’s first LaMarr-focused episode doesn’t really shed as much light on him as “Command Performance” and “About a Girl” did for Alara and Bortus respectively. It’s a fine episode, but that’s about it. S01E08 – Into the Fold Here’s an episode that I appreciate more in hindsight than I did at the time I first watched it. Maybe I should say that the best thing this episode did was plant seeds that were watered and sprouted in better episodes than this. First off, the writers here are Brannon Braga and André Bormanis. If you don’t know, the former is known for many classic high concept TNG and Voyager episodes, as well as the co-creator of Enterprise; the latter was the science-consultant for all the 90s Trek shows. They’re now writer-producers on The Orville and should be credited for helping create that “90s Trek” vibe the show captured so well so early on. That being said, this is their first credited episode and it’s a clunker. The biggest crime is how joyless it is. Maybe the writers wanted to test a more straight-laced version of the show, one that didn’t need to “rely” on the kind of humor and light-heartedness that has defined it to this point. I dunno. If that’s the case, consider it mission failed. This is the weakest episode of the season precisely because it feels the least like the show itself. Later episodes, particularly in season two, will do a much better job balancing genuine terror with Orvillian humor. This ain’t that. 6/10 – Pedestrian and uninspired in its storytelling, but redeemed as much as it is by good acting across the board. That’s one thing you can’t take away from the show; everyone brings their best in front of the camera. S01E09 – Cupid’s Dagger Unlike 90s Trek, The Orville is eager to plant seeds and water them for later cultivation. It’s not content to just be a “thing of the week” series the way TNG, Voyager, and half of Enterprise was. It doesn’t go so far as to be a twelve-part story like Discovery or Picard (which is fine if the story itself is good, unlike Discovery or Picard), but it does remember what came before it and uses that as a springboard for more, deeper, stories. The opening moments of the pilot episode looked to be nothing more than a classic “inciting event”/gag. Instead, here in the back half of the season, it becomes the focal point for an entire episode. Kelly’s lover, with whom she was having an affair (back when Ed was her husband) returns to arbitrate a dispute between feuding alien races. As it turns out, the lover—played with aplomb by Rob Lowe—is an alien who naturally exudes a pheromone that causes anyone around him to get super horny. This is The Orville’s take on the classic “The Naked Time (TOS)” or “The Naked Now (TNG)” or “Fascination (DS9)” formula albeit with enough of a spin to make it unique. Honestly, I think it holds up better than the latter two Trek versions. 8/10 – Season One in a nutshell: Slight and harmless, occasionally funny but just as often eye-rolling. S01E10 – Firestorm Our second Alara episode and one of the few that works better the first time you watch it and no more. There are moments of insanity that were purely delightful upon the first watch, and some of those still hold up to repeated viewings. Unfortunately, the episode has a twist in the latter part of the story that recontextualizes what’s happening, and even though the twist doesn’t negate the humor, it does negate a lot of the drama for me. That being said, any show that can deliver this discussion about a clown with such sincerity is impossible to hate: Please accept YouTube cookies to play this video. By accepting you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party. YouTube privacy policy If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh. Accept YouTube Content 8/10 – The clown discussion is worth the price of admission. The rest is fun but hardly remarkable, and the final act brings things down a notch. S01E11 – New Dimensions Oh baby this is my jam. I could write a thousand words alone about how much I loved this episode. Mostly it’s in the fact that it lived up to the Star Trek mantra: It went where no one had gone before. It embraced the idea of exploration and discovery and the wonder that comes with it, not only better than any episode before it, but better than anything Star Trek has done since…I dunno, mid-series Voyager? The episode accomplishes two tasks. First, in the macro, it explores the very dangerous “2D Space,” a brilliant (in its simplicity) high-concept sci-fi idea that works well enough on its own (and is stunningly rendered) but which needs a human element to take it to the next level. Thus, in the micro, the show is a LaMarr episode, putting the officer up as the potential new chief engineer. Instead of just doing that, half the episode is about his own lack of ambition despite his tremendous aptitude. The two ideas naturally fit together like peanut butter and chocolate, creating the best episode of the season. This is what Star Trek is all about, and it’s The Orville leading the charge. Please accept YouTube cookies to play this video. By accepting you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party. YouTube privacy policy If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh. Accept YouTube Content 10/10 – No fooling, when I first saw 2D space, my eyes watered. A wave of emotions came over me because it really felt like Star Trek as I always loved it was back. S01E12 – Mad Idolatry It’s a little bit “Blink of an Eye (Voyager)” and a little bit “Who Watches the Watchers (TNG).” The Orville’s first season ends with a great episode about a classic sci-fi trope: The dangers that come with interacting with a less-advanced alien race. I enjoyed the way the episode was structured, hopping back to the planet periodically to see how it (rapidly due to sci-fi reasons) developed and evolved over the centuries. It might not seem like the right kind of episode to end a season on (personally, I would have closed with the stellar “New Dimensions”) but I’ll say this for it: People who were thinking about writing off the show after it’s up and down first season probably decided to come back for season two after the way it closed things out in the final episodes. The final episode is, if nothing else, without any clunker moments and with a ton of great old school science-fiction to boot. If you worried The Orville wouldn’t be able to carry the “90s Trek” baton it found in whatever gutter CBS tossed it into, worry no more. The Orville—and Seth MacFarlane at the helm—knows what it’s doing. 9/10 – Nothing groundbreaking, but still a very well-put-together TV hour, which is more than can be said for most of Discovery and Picard. ***** So that’s season one. I’ll be back next month with an overview-look at The Orville’s second season, noting how the show found its groove in the first half of the second year, before flipping a switch and becoming something truly special. Until then…
