Justin Hartline
Background
The last two episodes saw big changes on the show, including the departure of Alara, the ship’s security chief. While this episode seems less important continuity-wise, however, it does introduce Alara’s replacement, another female Xelayan named Talla. This choice disappoints me on several levels. Firstly, I think it was a mistake to use the same alien species to replace Alara. People were always going to make comparisons between the two characters, so I think it would have been a better idea to diverge as much as possible. Plus, with a whole universe to draw recruits from it would have been more interesting to introduce a new species.
Secondly, personality wise, they went with a battle-hardened no nonsense type which I think is a little cliché compared to Alara’s kinder nature and youthful naivety. Lastly, it marks the end of Tharl’s tenure aboard the ship. Tharl, portrayed by Patrick Warburton, a favorite actor of mine, was the interim security chief following Alara’s departure. To be honest, there probably aren’t a lot of directions that they could take Tharl’s character. He was lazy and gross and mostly played for the humor and worked better as a punchline then as a character. All that said, I only have one episode to go on at this point and may come around to her character once she’s been around for a bit.
Summary
The main plot of this week’s episode was about a civilization making first contact with the Planetary Union. Given that the first 4 episodes were more character pieces (though last week’s revelation that Captain Mercer’s girlfriend was a Krill sleeper agent was certainly a bombshell), it’s nice to see The Orville return to its stated purpose of exploration and discovery.
So Captain Mercer takes Kelly, Bortus, Dr. Claire Finn (the medical officer), and Talla down to the planet to meet their leader, a man who uses the title First Prefect. At first, things go swimmingly and the First Prefect invites Captain and crew on a tour of the capital to learn about the planet’s culture. Claire and Talla get to see one of the city’s hospitals. Talla is not impressed by the comparatively primitive technology, but Dr. Finn is fascinated at seeing the facility and compares the experience to traveling back in time to Earth’s past. During the tour, Dr. Finn discovers that there are a number of infants who are being delivered alarmingly premature and for no detectable medical reason. She’s told that they are delivered early so they won’t be violent.
From here, the episode cuts to a dinner being held in honor of the first contact. Captain Mercer gives an uncharacteristically enigmatic speech (in private he admits to plagiarizing most of it) and the two groups break bread together. The spirit of friendship is short lived when the First Prefect reacts badly to Commander Grayson mentioning her and Bortus’s upcoming birthdays. It turns out that this strange new world is run on a caste system controlled by astrology and Kelly and Bortus were born under the sign of the lowest slave cast.
Captain Mercer contacts the Planetary Union to try and get permission to extract the prisoners, but is denied on the grounds that it would not be moral to steamroll the more primitive culture with advanced technology. The Captain is left no choice but to hold the ship in orbit and try and continue negotiations.
Analysis
Without spoiling the rest of the episode, I just want to say that I really enjoyed this one. This show is at its best when it gets into how to deal with other cultures, especially when that culture’s values and morality differ from your own. I find the show’s focus on peaceful resolutions to conflict to be refreshing, even though the solution to this particular problem turned out to be a bit morally dubious. I drew a lot of comparisons between this episode and Season 1’s fantastic third episode “About a Girl”, a fact which was actually mentioned in this episode.
The show’s ability to deal with hard-hitting moral dilemmas (even if they have a weird sci-fi spin) is one of my favorite things about the show and I hope they continue to do episodes like this in the future.
