Darn kids
(This review contains
spoilers!)
Kid characters are hard to pull off.
Oftentimes while trying to avoid making them annoying, they end up too unrealistically
serious. On the opposite end, while trying to make them more realistic, writers
often overshoot their marks and end up making them annoying. There’s a sweet
spot right in the middle there you have to land on when making a kid character
feel like a real kid.
This episode’s kids feel more like the
second example I gave. Dr. Claire and her newly introduced sons are going on
vacation, but a last minute scheduling change leaves Isaac as their pilot.
Things unsurprisingly go haywire, as they crash land on a mysterious moon, and
Claire is separated from her kids.
The idea of “crew members marooned on
a planet” is nothing new for the sci-fi genre. Star Trek especially has done it more times than you can count.
These storylines usually go by the book: the crew members wind up on this
unknown planet, they meet the locals who have some quirk that needs to be
solve, through various forms of Treknobabble they are able to contact the ship
for rescue, and in the end usually manage to fix the problem the indigenous
people are having. It’s a good foundation. What matters is the spin you put on
it to make it feel more original.
And I’ll give the writers credit.
Having Claire being separated from her kids, who are left with Isaac, is a
legitimately good idea. The only problem is that the kids are just plain awful.
They range from way too annoying to way too stupid. Their arc for the entire
first half of the episodes is them swinging their arms around like angry
chimpanzees fighting over a game. They whine and complain throughout the entire
episode, and it becomes grating in record time. Even more disappointing is at
the end I didn’t feel that their bond grew at all. Their storyline is more
about Isaac growing as a character by observing them. Which, to be fair, leads
to a lot of great moments from him. The problem is that by the end of the
episode I felt the same way about the kids as I did at the beginning: I really
never want to see them again.
The B-plot involves Claire trying to
escape from being held hostage by one of the locals. It turns out they’ve been
diseased by a bio-weapon and…yeah, that’s about it. The indigenous people have
no character at all. Most of them just run at the main characters with their
arms flailing around like a zombie at the world’s worst haunted house. The one
that actually has dialogue is the one that captures Claire, but he’s about as
well defined as a sheet of glass. Why did he capture Claire and take her back
to his weird apartment building? I think it was because he thought reproducing
with her would save his species, but it wasn’t really explained too well, and
he only pops in a few times before dying in the most overdramatic fight scene ever.
Again, they do some interesting things
with the concept of the bio-weapon though. Halfway through the episode the
younger kid contracts the disease of the bio-weapon, leading to some pretty
heavy stakes. Annoyingly enough this doesn’t lead to any sympathy from his
older brother who seems more concerned about whether his mom is angry at him
for being a whiny little brat, but it’s a good plot point overall.
While this episode was better than the
last one if only because we actually got some character development for Isaac
(as opposed to last week’s episode focusing on LaMarr that didn’t give us any
new background of development for him), it’s still not The Orville at its best. The kid characters single-handedly drag
the episode down in the first half with their annoying fighting, and while
things do pick up a bit in the second half, overall the planet they’re on feels
like a lot of wasted potential, especially since the indigenous race aren’t
very interesting. If you haven’t watched the episode yet, there’s no shame in
skipping this one.
FINAL SCORE
4/10
Mediocre
No comments:
Post a Comment