WARNING: This thread WILL contain unhidden spoilers for this episode and every episode before it. You are allowed to talk about future episodes of the series, but put ANY information that comes after this episode behind spoiler tags.
The Orville season 2, episode 3 "Home"
Written by Cherry Chevapravatdumrong, directed by Jon Cassar.
Dr. Finn tends to Alara after she surprisingly broke a bone arm-wrestling Isaac. This leads her to realize the amount of time Alara has spent away from her home planet of Xelaya has caused her entire body to atrophy. The only meaningful solution is for Alara to temporarily return home and rebuild her strength over time. On Xelaya, Alara is immediately overwhelmed by the native gravity and also has to confront her parents (Robert Picardo & Molly Hagan) who never really supported her choice to serve in the Union. On the Orville, Alara's absence is felt as the crew deals with an interim Security Chief (Patrick Warburton) and works to devise a way for Alara to return.
Originally released: 10 January 2019
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What did you think?
Without wanting to get into too much behind-the scenes drama, there may or may not have been some interpersonal stuff behind this episode. Halston Sage (Lt. Alara Kitan) and Seth MacFarlane (Capt. Mercer) were at one point in a romantic relationship, and then they weren't any more, and then Alara left the series. Nobody has outwardly connected those things in a causative sense; in public, the explanation was simply that this was the right story for the show. I find that a little hard to justify, though, and promptly ...
Future episode spoilers
... replacing her with a new Xelayan ...... smacks of allowing rewrites of future scripts which expected her to be available.
That said, this episode itself is very strong (even if Alara isn't!); it doesn't feel like a rush job in any way. Alara's family (and old friend Robert Picardo again) initially seem a bit one-note with their "Military bad" attitudes, but are revealed to have more depth as we spend more time with them, in part through their almost complete helplessness when confronted with a stressful situation. It's a shame it took this to get them to find respect for Alara, but that's families for you.
Something I frankly never noticed before was that Halston Sage has no Xelayan prosthetics in the fantasy sequence where she rides an Eevek (Xelayan horse thing) on the beach, as seen in the thumbnail of this post. This was included in the script, confirming that it's not a production mistake. Alara picturing herself as happily human gives her some additional depth. She's an outsider in both Xelayan and human society, so this represents one of the paths she could take to finding a place.
It's a fantastic farewell to a character who I wish we got more time with, an arc cut short by ... something. The only problem I have with the episode--besides it including Alara's exit-- is a minor one: the grieving-cum-vengeful parents appear comically villainous (e.g. when threatening to start lopping off Solana's fingers: "Which one, sweetie?"). I think they could have been given a slightly less scene-chewing evil that didn't take so much relish in violence. There's no room left to sympathize with them, because they're just awful. Maybe that's to soften our feelings about the Kitans. They could be worse!