Justin Hartline
Summary
This week’s episode was a different spin on the classic Sci Fi staple time travel story. It begins with Captain Ed Mercer and First Officer Kelly Grayson reminiscing about their past together. The two have been growing closer all season, and Ed makes it clear that he would still like for them to get back together. Unfortunately, Kelly still feels strongly that they can’t both be together without compromising their positions on the ship.
In the meantime, Isaac and Chief Engineer John LaMarr have rebuilt the quantum accelerator from the series’ first episode, Old Wounds. The quantum accelerator was a powerful weapon capable of creating a field which could quickly age anything inside it to dust. Isaac thinks that the accelerator may be used to create a form of time travel, but while he’s testing his theory, the ship gets hit by a gravity wave from space. The wave interacts with the field of the accelerator and pulls a version of Kelly from 7 years in the past, right after her first date with Ed. After some discussion, and since they have no way of sending her back anyway, the crew decides that there’s no need to keep the events of her life over the past seven years a secret.
The new Kelly is in shock at first, but forms a fast friendship with Talla, who also hasn’t been on the ship that long. She attempts to bond with other members of the crew by telling a story about something she did in the past, but this upsets the original Kelly, who has to command the others on the ship and feels like she is being undermined. The new Kelly doesn’t want to have to be guarded around everyone, but the original Kelly tells her that they should be able to share anything with each other because they are the same person. In the end, the new Kelly decides that she wants to stay on the Orville and asks Ed out on a, for her, second date.
Ed is conflicted about this, so he goes to talk to the original Kelly. He tells her that he has wanted to get back together with her all along and that he would rather be with the original Kelly. She tells him that nothing has changed between the two of them, so he decides to start over with the new Kelly. Ed and the new Kelly go on a date which ends in the two exchanging a goodnight kiss. Following the date, the original Kelly goes to see the new Kelly to talk about Ed. She doesn’t think that them dating is the best idea and fells strongly that it can only end in them both getting hurt. The new Kelly responds by saying that she is a different person and blames the original Kelly for letting the relationship end in the first place. She tells the original that she wanted to have found love and became a captain in those 7 years and that the original has made her future a disappointment.
The new Kelly and Ed go on a third date which ends in the bedroom, but Ed tells her that he feels conflicted about sleeping with her because he is still in love with the original Kelly. Before the two can talk out their problems, however, the ship gets discovered by a couple of Kaylon warships. The new Kelly presents an idea to hide the ship in a nearby planet’s icy rings, which winds up successful. At the end of the episode, John and Isaac discover a way to send the new Kelly back to her own time. Dr. Finn says that they could wipe her memory of the future, but it could cause permanent brain damage. In the end, the new Kelly decides that the memory wipe must have worked because the original Kelly doesn’t remember anything about her excursion into the future. The new Kelly has her memory erased and wakes up in the past, where she receives a phone call from the past version of Ed asking her on a second date. Despite the way things are supposed to go, the episode ends with her turning him down.
Analysis
I liked seeing the young Kelly interact with the crew. She’s more outgoing and wilder than her older self, and how she’s changed over the past seven years makes for an interesting dichotomy. Her interactions with her older self were especially interesting. The two obviously had no idea how to treat each other. Are they the same person? Are they sisters? Are they separate people who now must live separate lives? They went through all three of these to the point where while the new Kelly tells the original Kelly that they are separate people and that she can do better with Ed, she also later tells Ed that they are the same person when Ed tells her that he still loves the original Kelly. The entire thing is so complicated that I’m not really sure which side I come down on, even taking the end of the episode into account.
Of course, the real meat of the episode was the relationship of new Kelly and Ed. The morality of trying to date the new Kelly when you haven’t yet moved on from the original is an interesting issue. I can understand that if he and Kelly can’t be together that he would want to move on, but I don’t think that the way to do that is to date an alternate version of her. This is the first time since last season that Ed has really made a push for Kelly to take him back, and I have to admire the show for that. I think a lesser show would have taken the Ross and Rachel situation that they have going on and turned it into a big thing.
Instead, the two have just been trying to get along as friends and move on into separate relationships. That said, if the two are to truly move on from each other, the relationship they have together isn’t exactly healthy. When Kelly was dating Cassius, she would go to Ed to talk about their issues, something which I don’t think is fair to either man. Ed looks at the new Kelly as a version of her that he can have, but realizes throughout the course of the episode that while he loved the women that she was, he loves the women that she’s become even more.
I think the thing that I like most about this show is that every time I expect the show to zig, it zags into another direction. The logical way for the episode to end is for her to go on the second date with Ed and keep the timeline intact. Now that she’s tuned him down, I have no idea what effect, if any, it will have on the rest of the show. Will this change the timeline? Will Kelly suddenly be Captain in the next episode? Did her and Ed ever wind up together? It’s unclear if she’s even still linked to the show’s timeline. It’s possible that she has caused a split in the timeline that resulted in an alternate reality in which she and Ed never seriously dated. I honestly have no idea where the show is going with this surprise twist ending, and I absolutely love it.
Justin Hartline has a degree in Chemistry and puts his science knowledge to use as an investigator at a liquid coating company. His Dorky credentials include a love of Science Fiction (especially Star Wars), Fantasy (especially Game of Thrones), and superhero (especially Marvel) genres. He’s also a big fan of Nintendo games!
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