I didn't know The Orville had it in it to tell such a brutal story in such a serious way. Pretty cool fight scenes, too. However the ending was a little spotty; after going into a story with such extreme complications it took some easy ways out. But good job.
Orville is moving from comedy to one of the best sci-fi shows ever made. The two episodes were just fenomenal!
Welp... They painted themselves into a corner and couldn't quite deliver an adaequate solution.
That was just too easy. And they even ended the episode with everything kinda going back to normal. Other shows who are more interested in plot development (like The Expanse for example) would have made so much more out of this.
They must have burned a huge chunk of their budget for this two-parter but, boy was it worth it !
When this show started I hadn't dreamed it would reach this level. With those two episodes they raised the bar, and I am sure the expectations of many, moving forward. Please stay on this course Orville. I am so much looking forward now for the continuation of the plots started here.
[7.7/10] The headline for this episode is “predictable but good.” There’s not much here to really surprise you, especially if you've watched other Star Trek shows or, frankl, any significant sci-fi movies over the last twenty years, but it was all generally well executed. It doesn’t quite hit the highs that The Orville was clearly going for, but it’s some good, meat and potatoes season finale-esque Trek.
The best part, somewhat surprisingly, was the battle above Earth. I will say that whatever my complaints about the writing or characterization of this show, the team that handles the exterior ship graphics has done outstanding work from the beginning. I’ve already complimented the ship designs, but the dogfight sequences here are quite well done, especially on a TV budget. The sequences are a little busy at times, but that’s the nature of the beast. In the meantime, we saw tons of explosive action, following the Orville as it tries to fire on the aylon attackers, and even getting some fighter pilot material from Malloy and the Krill. It’s a visual treat the whole way through.
I even like the irony that the Union’s efforts to get the Kaylon to join the Union to help protect against the Krill turned out to be the Krill allying (at least temporarily) with the Union to fend off a Kaylon invasion. That’s the closest thing to a genuine narrative turn in this one, and while it’s a familiar beat to anyone who watched Deep Space 9, it still works. Even when you know it’s coming, the arrival of Grayson and the Krill captain to play Big Damn Heroes, replete with a characteristic “Try to stay out of the way” bad guy quip, is plenty rousing. The prospect of warmer relations between the two peoples in the aftermath is treated with the fragility but hopefulness it ought to be.
That said, there’s a ton of convenient developments here that don’t really make sense or at least strain credulity. The reasons for the Kaylon not just killing the crew of the Orville are pretty thin, but pass the smell test at least. But it’s not clear why they didn’t just blow the shuttle out of the sky, or why the phaser rifles that seemed ineffective against the Kaylon in the prior episode are now effective enough to neutralize the robots with a single shot, or why Isaac is able to use his laser eyes to take out rooms full of them with basically no resistance.
There’s also a lot of Treknobabble solutions to problems that feel super convenient. They make a big deal about taking a shuttle out while a ship is in quantum drive mode, but then Malloy does it, while scraping the hull no less, without issue. He uses a “send all power to the quantum drive to outrun a ship” ploy that’s “only theoretical” and could blow the shuttle in half, but again, it goes off without a hitch. They come up with a way to transmit a signal to Union Central and masquerade it as background noise so the Kaylons won’t notice it, which seems awfully easy for such a big thing that their attackers are surely on guard against it. Basically, the show finds all-too-easy science-as-magic excuses to wriggle out of the Kaylons’ grasp, which lowers the stakes.
Still, we get some nice added detail with the Kaylons themselves. I like the idea that this is basically a story out of The Matrix, with robots achieving sentience and then bucking off their masters who attempted to keep them in bondage. There’s a compelling story about escaping servitude and believing that anyone with even the broadest characteristics of your former masters must share all their faults, and so refuse to even take the slightest of chances that you could be enslaved again. It’s an understandable, albeit terrifying motive from the Kaylon, which deepens them. (And bringing up Roots not only works as a reference to atrocities in human history, but as an homage to LeVar Burton.)
Of course, we get the inevitable face turn from Isaac. It hits an extraordinarily predictable series of beats, right down to him turning on the rest of the robots when he can’t bring himself to kill Ty. There’s strong material to the idea that he sees potential in Ty and Marcus in particular, unstained by human history, which gives him enough sympathy to defend humanity. The execution is solid enough. There’s just nothing about it, or the philosophical debates between Isaac and Primary about the nature of man and Isaac getting too close to the humans, that you couldn’t see coming from a mile away.
That said, this is a surprisingly good episode for Yaphet, who not only proves useful in the science-as-magic stuff, but who defends Ty in memorable fashion. It’s the most I’ve ever liked the little green slimeball (who I just realized is probably an homage to the silicon-based life form in “Devil in the Dark” from The Original Series).
There’s some nice picking up the pieces afterward, with Mercer and Grayson sticking their necks out for Isaac to the Admiral and claiming they can’t repeat the mistakes of the organics who enslaved the Kaylon. And the closing moments with Dr. Finn and Isaac are understated and effective at gesturing to a way forward.
All-in-all, this was The Orville pulling out all the fireworks it’d been saving for a clear day, and while the show didn’t knock this one out of the park or zig when we expected it to zag, it was still a good outing.
I think this episode was a branch into darkness and I liked it... Crazy times.
Not one, not two, but three Krill ships just happen across the Orville's shuttle less than five minutes after it drops out of quantum space? In what looks like the middle of nowhere? But they can't see the Kaylon sphere coming until it drops out of quantum space? Sure… I refuse to believe Kelly and Gordon are that lucky. (Of course, three thips were necessary so the Kaylon could destroy the two of them our heroes weren't aboard and drive home the point.)
And Ty punches three buttons to enter a five-character access code… What?
I really enjoyed this 2-parter, but I do have to admit to feeling a little bit let down by the conclusion. It all felt a bit too predictable to the point where it was almost like joining-the-dots, and dare I say it there was even a sense of hitting the reset button with the way things all wrapped up. It just removed any tension or excitement for me once it became clear the way things were going.
Self-contained episodic storytelling is not something I miss from the '90s, but I think The Orville gets it right for the most part by letting their characters grow across episodes (although, it's more their relationships that grow rather than the characters themselves; everyone is more or less the same person they were in the pilot episode). This one veered a bit too much in the wrong direction for me, and having Isaac back on the bridge to resume his duties is beyond insane, but it's all a fun ride.
Need more Malloy stories!
Definetly the hasty resolution I have come to expect from this show but hey, at least it wasn't a simulation!
And my GOD that dogfight sequence was amazing... This show ain't as cheap as you may think folks.
Sweet Goddess of Space Dogfights! This was an excellent action episode! Man, I was glued to my seat most of the time, petrified with excitement (is that even possible?)! I honestly felt like I was a teenager again, watching a thrilling episode of The Next Generation, with Picard doing his best to shake off the Borg menace!
I never thought I'd say this, but the lower budget on The Orville actually made the space battles feel more Star Trek-y than in STD.
Of course, like someone mentioned in the previous episode (I think), Isaac being a deus ex machina was pretty much a given, so no surprises there. What I did not expect was for the Orville crew to get in touch with their long sworn enemy to get them to join forces to battle a common enemy. That may have been an overused cliché, but it was still satisfying to see it happen.
This was a solid conclusion to what will surely be remembered as the most exciting two-part episode from The Orville.
In my opinion, 'Identity' (both parts), overall, is a fantastic episode of The Orville, and the Kaylons prove themselves to be brutally creepy, relentless and merciless. They definitely exude Spock/Cybermen/Borg vibes, but they're just not as scary as the Borg, despite the funky head cannons. Their lack of personal body shields that can neutralise "phasers-on-kill" shots seems remarkably short-sighted for a race that claims to "far exceed biological intelligence", and the Primary's obviously vindictive obsession to kill humans that clearly do not represent any significant threat comes across as very emotional, revenge-fuelled behaviour - from a being supposedly devoid of emotion - that defies the undeniable logic of Isaac's advice that slaying humans as a wanton act of punishment would be a counterproductive strategy to force compliance from the Orville crew or The Union. The Primary's justification that the biologicals deserve extermination because of what happened in his past, and because in ancient human history there is evidence of such persecution and enslavement of both artificial and biological beings, is further proof of this theory. Intentionally ignoring human evolution away from such behaviour, and the entire raison d'être and history of The Planetary Union, and also projecting the actions of their creators to all biological life forms in the universe, is a colossally illogical, irrational and paranoid ("no biological race will ever enslave us again!") mindset that diminishes much of the aforementioned scary, relentless Kaylon superiority and just makes him look like a bitter, twisted survivor of oppression that wants to make other equivalently-constructed suffer for his own vengeant satisfaction. This philosophy strikes me as being similar to some real-life terrorist cells that seem to think that killing innocents from a different country is justified because that country's government invaded and killed their comrades, and possibly innocents too. As if such retribution will prevent further killings on both sides, rather than just prolonging such senseless slaughter - totally illogical and unrealistic.
The result is that, rather than being the cool, frightening, technologically and militarily superior destructive force that the Borg were in Star Trek TNG: Best of Both Worlds, the Kaylon are just a standard (but formidable) enemy threat like the Jem'Hadar in ST:DS9 or (if they united) the Krill and the Moclans would be in The Orville. 'Identity' is The Orville's 'Best of Both Worlds' but the inconsistent, illogical behaviour of the Kaylons stop it from being in the same class, particularly when it comes to the end-of-part-1 cliffhanger. Identity is still high quality Orville excitement, with the added bonus of a pretty awesome space battle that would've been right at home in the Star Wars universe, but it's like a weaker parallel-universe version of its Trek counterpart - almost as though Braga intentionally didn't want it to be of the same calibre...
This 2-parter touches so many topics: sentient being, slavery, forgiveness, making friends with enemy... but none is explored in any satisfactory way. What a pity.
Resolution of the previous one, here they have been due to spend almost all the budget of the season, but they have been well
So I skimmed past a headline that said something like
The Orville finds itself in Identity Part 2
It inspired me to remember that Part 2 came out and catch up. 20% of the way in this is a fantastic episode. It's excellent work. All around.
There's a scene where Isaac reveals that he choose his designation in honor of an intelligent human (Newton) and Kylon Prime tells him to change it. We assume he refuses because he's later referred to as Isaac which is confusing because a) it's never brought up again or leads anywhere b) it's unclear if the other Kylon is calling him Isaac because of his old designation or because they all maintain a database of designations and Isaac never actually updated it. The point being it's a wasted scene. Well not whole scene but that line is wasted. There is no point in ever revealing why he's called Isaac. The only thing gained by it is trivia. When it's sci fi trivia night and someone asks what is the name of the robot on The Orville you can remember isaac because of newton. But it does little to expand character, setting or plot. and that small line might be my biggest complaint of the episode.
The thing of it is this episode actually did bring to mind something that I've been thinking about and that's the humor. Sometimes it's a bit non-sequiteurish. It's finally occurred to me that it feels like someone went through the script and then just inserted jokes without telling anyone and they filmed it. Things like the pee corner. If you literally clip that out. The rest of the episode feels like a real spec fic. That said the phantom script editing IS the Orville identity.
That said in no way did The Orville find itself in this episode simply because it found itself in the episode where Isassc began a relationship with the doctor. Or the episode where Bortus had tried to defend having a girl. Or even the episode where starsigns were taken seriously by a budding new civilization. Are there still random jokes someone clearly is inserting into the scripts without supervision? Yeah but all of that is part of the identify The Orville has long ago established for itself. This show has the potential to become a long remembered science fiction classic. It has everything it need to inspire spin off movies and books and RPG and games and sequel shows. And it's had all that long before Identity Part 2.
Well, it was no Kobayashi Maru but I'll take it.
Shout by Jitse LemmensBlockedParent2019-03-01T21:10:27Z
Even though a lot of plotpoints were expected this was a very exciting conclusion to the previous episode. The space battle had me on the tip of my seat and I had a few chuckles while we're at it. No lenseflares, no shakey crap. The show makes me feel how I felt when I was 17 watching Star Trek, Space Above and Beyond and other great sci-fi.
Can't wait for the next episode.
FOR THE GLORY OF AVIS!