The Orville Review: “Firestorm”

An excessive amount of tarantulas

(This review contains spoilers!)

          Why wasn’t this the Halloween episode? Seriously, you’d think they’d schedule an episode all about spooky stuff and fears in October.

          Anyways, this was another excellent episode of The Orville. After Alara allows a member of engineering to be killed on her watch (wearing a red shirt, no less), she starts to question if she’s stable enough to do her job. Simultaneously, weird things are popping up onboard, from scary clowns to random black holes.

          This episode is clearly taking inspiration from sci-fi horror properties such as Alien, but it’s done surprisingly well here. Most if not all of the phobias represented here are ones we face in our day to day lives, and that makes it feel all the more real. Granted, the further we go into the episode the crazier things get, but at that point I think we were already so hooked that it didn’t really matter.

          I also really liked how the episode kept you guessing what was going on throughout. Just like how last week’s episode had the mystery of blue Rob Lowe and why everyone was acting weird, this episode has the mystery of what the hell is going on and why all this crazy stuff is coming onboard the ship. Whether it had a fair answer or not is up for debate (and I’ll touch on it in a second), but it kept me guessing throughout.

          Even better was that, despite still having plenty of serious moments, this episode was another bit of comedy brilliance. I loved Ed’s list of the stuff to watch out for when they were hunting the clowns, as well as Bortus’s surprise appearance wearing an 18th century costume in the holodeck at the beginning. They balanced the scary and funny moments perfectly, leaving me on the edge of my seat while still laughing the entire time.

          As for the conclusion, it becomes fairly obvious that Alara is either dreaming or in the holodeck in the last third, and thankfully they go with the latter option. I could’ve done without the lengthy exposition at the end of the episode where it’s explained she went through a memory wipe and put herself inside Isaac’s simulation to test her bravery, but all in all I thought it was a good way to end the episode.

          With only two episodes left in the season (nooooo!), it looks like The Orville is finally comfortable with what show it wants to be. While this episode definitely leaned into the more serious side of things, it was still full of plenty fun and silly moments courtesy of the crew, and the horror-style main plot was done perfectly. Another great job by everyone involved.

FINAL SCORE

9/10

Amazing