3x09 Domino

[7.2/10] I can appreciate what The Orville is trying to do with this one. There’s some poetry in the character work. Ensign Burke starts as an anti-Kaylon bigot who wants to wipe them off the map and send Isaac to the trash compactor. By the end, she tells the other Kaylon that they could learn a thing or two from Isaac and is willing to sacrifice her life to save them from annihilation. In the season premiere, she has to be ordered to act to save Isaac and is almost insubordinate when the commands come down, and in this quasi-finale, she refuses orders to save herself in the name of saving the entire Kaylon civilization.

There’s a solid arc there. Her time with Isaac changed her mind about him, and her time with Timmis learning the Kaylon’s history changed her mind about them. I know a lot of fans weren’t happy with someone prejudiced being a major character on the show, but it gave her somewhere to grow as a character, and pays off nicely in how she sees the error of her ways on both an interpersonal and communal scale.

But the conclusion to her story comes with a few problems. First, Anne Winters has never given a particularly good performance on the show. Season 3 of The Orville, and this episode in particular, puts a lot on her shoulders. She’s not awful at carrying it, but she’s not great either, with flat or uninvolving line reads that detract from the gravity or severity of a moment or choice. It means no matter how good the writing is, Ensign Burke never really feels like a person in this world, just an actor reading lines.

Some of that, however, is on the writers, not the actor. Ensign Burke is more of a theme-delivery mechanism than a three-dimensional character. Effectively, her only character trait is that she hates Kaylon. They attempt to give her some shading with the idea that her true love perished at the hands of the Kaylon, and she misses Amanda dearly, but it all gets folded into the same hate brigade and is more told than shown. The only other thing about her is that she thinks in “four-dimensional space”, a magical talent that’s barely explained and allows her to save the day by fiat.

The end result is that I’m not really moved by her act of sacrifice or her death. I feel like I barely know her despite watching every extended length episode this season. Nobody mourns the redshirts who die in this battle or the crew of the other ships that are destroyed. That’s not unusual for Trek and (Trek-adjacent) shows, but still. The story of a bigot who sees why they were wrong and makes up for it in the ultimate way is a good one, and a tale that The Orville’s paced well over the preceding nine episodes. I just wish we had a more fleshed out, compelling, downright better character at the center of it.

I can also appreciate what the episode is doing thematically. It establishes a contrast between two titular “dominos.” One is a weapon of mass destruction, which takes advantage of the fact that the Kaylon are a hive mind to topple over one part of their network and thereby destroy everything that’s connected to it. The other is an act of mercy, of courage, of altruism in the form of Charly’s sacrifice, which sets in motion a set of causes and effects that help bring about peace from one of the most unlikely partners imaginable given the threats this season.

That is pure Trek and true to the spirit of the franchise that The Orville is paying tribute to. The essential message of this episode is that you can lean toward genocide in the name of self-preservation and praticality, or you can hew to your principles and give peace a chance, and only the latter will save your soul and effect the sort of change in the world all high-minded begins hope for. It’s true to the aspirational, violence as a last resort, respect for life ideals that those who grew up watching the adventures of the U.S.S. Enterprise hold dear. I can’t possibly fault The Orville for that.

I’ll confess though, it always makes me bristle a little bit when our noble space heroes take the high road like this when they’re facing total annihilation themselves. Star Trek: The Next Generation did it with Hugh. Battlestar Galactica did it with an anti-Cylon virus. And each time I tore my hair out a little bit the next time people died in an attack from the Borg or the Cylons, each of which were trying to obliterate humanity.

“Domino” takes the idea closer to home, basically treating the “quantum core” (a big macguffin device that’s tangentially earned as a concept since it’s based on insights from Timmis’ design) like the nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As the Americans did, the Union chooses to use its super-weapon a couple of times as a show of power in the hopes that it will provoke a surrender, which it does.

The metaphor allows the crew and the admiralty to debate the ethics of using something with such destructive power in war. It allows them to argue over whether genocide is okay when you’re not the aggressor and face extinction yourself. These debates aren’t particularly deep and don’t go past the most surface-level arguments, but the show at least uses its sci-fi abstraction to engage with these weighty ideas, which I can appreciate.

Hell, I like the idea that the admiralty settles on a “middle ground” of using the weapon a couple times to provoke the “logical” Kaylon into surrender without need for further bloodshed (so to speak), while Admiral Ted Danson sneaks the weapon to the newly formed Krill-Moclan alliance because he thinks the Kaylon can’t be trusted. It shows the force and fervency on both sides of the question here, and given that the Kaylon wish to, and seem to have the ability to, wipe out all biological life, you can understand the motivations, even if it leads to working with the bad guy crew.

(As an aside, while the Moclan/Krill alliance is a little convenient, I appreciate how Teleya basically demands an equal partnership from the Moclans if they want an alliance, with no lower status due to her gender. Even evil zealots can be feminists!)

Is some of this contrived for maximum drama? Sure. But I appreciate that the show takes time to consider the moral weight of genocide and also the pragmatic question of how unfeeling machines who’ve stated and acted on their own genocidal intentions should be dealt with.

Where they lose me is on the Union choosing to work with the Kaylon, from stopping the Krill-Moclan alliance from using a mega-weapon to finish the job. I know this is an aspirational show, but good lord, it shows an impossible amount of good faith to trust the Kaylon not to turn on the Union in an instant when it suits them, destroy the one (and so far as we know, only) weapon that can hold them in check, and return to systematically trying to destroy all biological life. I am willing to give The Orville some leeway in the name of telling a good and hopeful story, but that was a bridge too far for me.

I’m also roundy indifferent to the action-y climax we get here. Seth MacFarlane and company seem to want to make this episode their Star Wars, with ample dogfights and races against time in desert climes. Unfortunately, it comes off more like the Prequels, overly busy in almost every shot, with all of the CGI elements having an unreal, immersion-breaking sheen and dodgy green screen effects that turn the whole escapade into digital mush. The hand-to-hand fight between Grayson and Telaya is no better, with all the firefights and fisticuffs along the way turning into the same overedited, unfollowable, thousand-cut nonsense you can see in any action movie or show. You can tell how much money they spent to make this raging climax epic, but I wish they’d spend more time on make it clear and, you know, good.

Not for nothing, with Star Trek: Enterprise alums Brannon Braga and Andre Boremanis on board, I can’t help but notice the similarities to the finale for season 3 of that show, with a race against time to destroy the big giant super weapon before it does untold damage and a hero-type reducing their prejudice by better knowing their enemy, at least until the crazy explosion happens. It’s okay to pull from something you worked on [gulp] eighteen years ago, but this outing has some of the same problems that one did.

Plus, as much as I appreciate the poetry of Ensign Burke giving her life to save the Kaylon from total destruction when it used to be her wish, and she and Isaac reaching an understanding in their final moments, such that the Kaylon change their view of biologicals, the episode really gilds the lily. We get too many dialogue scenes that spell out the significance and subtext of all these choices in blunt detail. No theme or notion can go unspoken or left for the audience to surmise on its own. Ironically, it weakens what the show is trying to say, rather than strengthens it.

Overall, I still admire the ambition of all this. The Orville does some strong longform storytelling to reach this point, including plenty of episodic installments that coalesce into a greater whole. That is no easy feat, and many shows attempting similar things botch it terribly. The thematic aims here, both vindicating a peaceful approach and showing a change of heart founded on mutual understanding, are laudable to the last.

I just struggle with how all of it’s ultimately realized in this capper to the Charly and the Kaylon story (for now). Problems with Charly as a character, the way the show abstracts the idea of a WMD and genocide into its sci-fi universe, and head-scratch-worthy choices that strain the limits of even the series’ optimistic bent, undermine what could have been The Orville’s finest hour.