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(This review contains
spoilers!)
Last time on The Orville, we got high-stakes action, awesome alien environments,
and fantastic moral dilemmas for our characters to face! What do they have for
us this week?
A sluggish and downright annoying
episode with a preachy message and the most boring setting known to mankind?
Well, that’s disappointing.
Yeah, I wasn’t too hot on this week’s
episode. The crew is sent down to a planet to rescue some missing
anthropologists. It turns out that, what do you know, the planet is a near
perfect replica of 21st Century Earth. Wow, isn’t that convenient.
Seriously, could they have picked a
more boring idea for a location? After having episodes on Bortus’s home planet
and the Krill ship, modern day Earth feels like a cheap cop-out. Maybe the
Krill makeup was so expensive they had no other choice, but overall this episode
has just a very bland and basic tone overall.
It turns out this planet is ruled
entirely by the popular vote. If someone likes someone, they give them an
upvote. If they don’t like someone, they get a downvote. Too many downvotes and
they start parading you around so you can try to apologize to the people. If
that doesn’t work, they fry your brain and turn you into a vegetable
(figuratively).
It’s not a bad concept and there are
quite a few good morals hidden in there, but when you have it set on what is
essentially modern day Earth, it feels less like a fun allegory and more like
the writers beating you over the head saying “THIS IS YOU! THIS IS WHAT SOCIAL
MEDIA DOES TO YOU! NOTICE THAT THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE YOU!”
LaMarr gets his first major role this
week, as he earns the ire of the entire civilization after pretending to hump a
statue. It’s kind of irritating that the black guy’s first main role is in an
episode where he has to deal with oppression and is treated like a criminal by everybody
(seriously, they couldn’t have it be anybody else?), but the actor does a good
job with what he’s given regardless.
There’s also a lot of inconsistencies
in this episode. Having the crew be sent down to this planet without any
research on what the planet is like is just plain frustrating, but I guess it
can be explained away by the fact that no one aside from the anthropologists
know what the planet is like. Even more annoying is why they don’t just beam
LaMarr back on the ship and rocket the hell away. Mercer calls the admiral
early on to ask this question, but the admiral basically reads him the Prime
Directive from Star Trek to explain
why he can’t. That’s all fine and dandy, but later on they bring the doctor
back onboard no problem! And I know they didn’t use the shuttle they used to
get down there to get her back, because we see Alara use it later on by herself
to transport a girl from the planet onboard the ship!
Oh yeah, that’s a thing too. They
bring this random barista onboard the ship to try and get LaMarr out of
trouble. The way they solve the problem feels pretty “we’re reaching the 45
minute mark, think of a clever solution!”, but it’s a funny ending nonetheless,
flooding the feed with sympathetic pictures and videos of LaMarr created by Isaac.
This episode is the very definition of
weak, especially when you consider the two episodes that came directly before
it. The setting is dull, LaMarr’s storyline is just plain frustrating instead
of tense, the allegories are way too obvious, and some of the plot holes are so
big you could fly the Orville through
them. I do think this concept could’ve worked better if they tried to go a
little more sci-fi with the world instead of just having it be “oh yeah this
planet is just like Earth in the 21st century!”, like they did with the
biosphere ship episode. Overall, you can definitely give this episode a pass.
FINAL SCORE
3/10
Bad
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