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?
This show was not even a year and a half old when it made the departure of a series regular genuinely hurt. Taking to school a certain well-known space opera that tries and fails to do the same thing literally months later, a franchise that The Orville was suppose to be a parody of.
It still blows me away how much ground gets covered in a single episode. Home expertly uses every second to steadily push a multi-arc story forward without feeling busy or rushed. The crew is keeping busy during down time, then Alara has to face a serious medical issue, then the Orville drops her off on another planet, then she has to navigate a homecoming with a distant family, then a mystery appears alongside a threat, then Alara has to take stock and decide which life is more important to her. Again, every scene gets to breathe as it needs to. It feels like an entire movie condensed into a hour of network television.
Probably why there's almost no B-plot to speak of. Just a smooth-talking elephant man slamming some good home cooking while getting work done.
The goodbye really hurts. It's really touching, everyone embracing Alara in their own way. The gift to Captain Mercer is such a sucker punch. Not only is it a genuinely good throwback to the pilot episode, it clearly shows how far The Orville had come in such a short time.
(Behind the scenes, Halston Sage's exit is not so pleasant. A classic, and completely avoidable, case of what happens when you date the boss. Echoing Nichelle Nicolas's fling with Gene Roddenberry, which almost made her leave Star Trek. Sage and MacFarlane broke things off for whatever reason and it was too much for her to continue being a part of the show. Not like MacFarlane was going to be the one to leave.)
Spoiler for seasons 2 & 3 of The Orville
Sadly, we only get to see her two more times in the series. (At least, so far.)And I can't press Post without saying John Billingsly stole the entire second half of this episode. The mid-sentence tone shift when he tells Picardo to put his hand in a boiling pot still gives me chills. No one ever could have expected to see TWO Trek doctors face off in an episode of a Fox SciFi, but boy was it worth the cost to hire them both.
It also put me in mind of the way a certain character fairly unceremoniously left early TNG. That was still season 1, but episode 23, so technically further into the show than we are here if you're counting in minutes. And it was much worse. The Orville absolutely gave a masterclass here.