Seth MacFarlane's The Orville

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 ...

... 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!

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.)

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.

I didn't particularly like this scene, because of the sloppy continuity.

I just thought it was a sloppy shoot in what was, at the time, a better Star Trek than any of the contemporary, official, Star Treks.

!The once so overused catchphrase of Ed finally pays off, now he has a jar of pickles to open for himself.!<