Kermit take the wheel
(This review contains
spoilers!)
I saw enough promise in The Orville that I felt it was deserving
enough of a second chance that it’d be worth coming back at least one more time
to see if the crew can build on the flimsy foundation the pilot left behind.
And while this episode is marginally better than the one that came before it,
it still suffers from all the problems that plagued them last week.
While on an away mission, Captain
McFarlane and his wife have been poofed away to some unknown location, and the
security officer has been left in charge of the ship because Spirit Halloween
Worf is busy laying an egg.
Thank you for not clicking off while
reading that, by the way. I wish I could’ve clicked off watching this episode.
Of course all sorts of sci-fi hijinks
ensue, as we see the security officer grapple with how hard it is to be in
control, as well as McFarlane and his wife trying to escape their new home of
an alien zoo.
The show’s biggest problem continues
to blare loud and clear. It’s rarely funny, especially when it tries to be. The
two good jokes in the episode are the very first one and the very last one.
Everything in between is either groan-worthy or facepalm-worthy. There’s a
reason why Star Trek never used
pop-culture references, and it’s because they just don’t fit in a show set
hundreds of years in the future. Granted, this episode does find ways to make
them endearing, like the Kermit doll on McFarlane’s desk and the hilarious
solution to the zoo problem at the end, but a random Dora the Explorer namedrop comes right out of nowhere and feels
completely out of place in this setting.
The writing hasn’t improved either.
The trio of leads are still just plain horrible people, and not the funny kind
of horrible you see on Seinfeld.
Their lines range from annoying to insufferable, and once McFarlane and his
wife returned to the episode after a good chunk of time off-screen, I actually
let out a “Noooooo!” I hate watching them that much.
Thankfully, the security officer
subplot is…better, but not by much. While I enjoyed her in the first episode,
here we can see that her acting ability leaves quite a bit to be desired. When
it comes to a show like this, there’s corny acting, and there’s “I don’t give a
crap and I’m just reading the lines” acting. This was the latter. Maybe this
was just an off day for her, but considering this was a big lead role she needs
to do better.
At the end of the day, this episode is
better than the first one…slightly. It got a few more good jokes in than the
first one, and the sci-fi stuff was done better than the first one. But the
problems continue to rear their ugly heads, as the majority of the jokes are
still annoying and the characters are all still unlikeable. And it really
hurts, because I so desperately want to love this show. Every episode it gets
so close, but then misses the mark completely.
Oh well.
FINAL SCORE
4/10
Mediocre
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