[7.2/10] “Shadow Realms” is a tale of two elements. One is the lingering interpersonal awkwardness melded with affection between Dr. Finn and Admiral Christie. It has the sort of recognizable, layered personal dynamic that marked the best of the shows The Orville is aping. The other is the attempt at doing genre-mixing horror movie in the midst of the show’s usual modus operandi when the crew starts being infected and taken over by some spider-like race. And it is...not very good.
Maybe it’s just that I’ve seen my share of horror movies at this point, so nothing here is particularly novel or fearsome. “Shadow Realms” does muster some good body horror, between Admiral Christie’s mid-transformation facial protrusions, to the quick changing of some poor redshirt who gets sprayed with the key microparticulate and transforms much faster in real time.
But otherwise, this episode isn’t especially scary, despite turning over most of the runtime to the horrorshow. The Orville loses power, which is supposed to give the ship a haunted house feel. The problem is that it just looks like the normal “Hampton Inn in space” sets with the light turned low, which isn’t particularly frightening. The monsters themselves aren’t that creepy 90% of the time either. It’s hard for the show to shake the sense of “It’s just a guy in a big rubber suit” vibe of the costuming, and the transitions between the practical versions of the monsters and the CGI versions is conspicuous and immersion-breaking.
That’s all a big problem, because the show moves at an incredibly stolid pace through all of this. A more measured rhythm for a horror story can work, because it creates empty spaces for the dread to leak into. But if you can’t pull off the dread, then the whole thing feels long and boring, which is where “Shadow Realms” lands. If these horror sequences and moments of suspense were any good, I think I’d be praising The Orville for giving the terrifying elements the time and space to unfurl. Such as it is, though, the monster attack sequences and attempts at a Jaws-style “less is more” approach soon become tedious.
I do appreciate the method of defeating them though. The idea that after transition, the alien insectoids haven’t fully developed an immune system yet, to where a common cold virus would kill them, has an intuitively satisfying explanation built in. It made me think of human babies, who (to oversimplify things, which is fine for Star Trek-adjacent stories) have to get their immunity from their mothers until they develop. It’s a clever enough answer to the problem of how to defeat them without just beating them up or otherwise harming the rest of the crew (who presumably have fully functional immune systems).
Plus, as a Trek nerd, there’s some appeal to the Nelvac aliens as a realization of the original conception of the Borg, who were supposed to be more insectoid, hence the idea of drones and queens and such. If I were to speculate, this feels like two Trek vet writers pulling from that unrealized original idea and trying to realize it in a spiritual cousin T.V. series instead. Who knows if these will become recurring big bads, but the show seems to be setting them up that way. I can’t say I’m terribly enthused at the prospect given these early results, but the idea that the Krill view them as possessing demons at least adds some extra juice to the development nod at play here.
But the meat of this one to me is the relationship between Dr. Finn and Admiral Christie that complicates the whole thing. Honestly, you could strip away the insect monster attack, and still have a damn good (arguably better) episode about two people who had something meaningful years ago reckoning with what it means to them in the here and now.
The conversations between the two of them where the Admiral is trying to rekindle things and Dr. Finn is more sanguine, even regretful, rather than wistful about their relationship are well-written. Dr. Finn confiding in Grayson about the May-December romance and the way Admiral Christie didn’t treat her like a partner, more like a bed-warmer makes for a writerly scene, but a strong one as well. You can see easily why there would be meaning and attachment there, but also strong reservations and regrets. That adds an emotional contingent when Dr. Finn gets through to the insectified Admiral Christie (and the ring is a nice setup and payoff for how she’s able to identify him). Hell, the whole thing even does a good job of gently nudging Dr. Fin and Isaac back together.
On the whole though, the episode is much more focused on its monster mash than on the human elements here, which takes a promising episode and turns into a B-grade imitation horror flick. Star Trek has done horror well in the past. (Hell, one of the writers of this episode oversaw one in Enterprise’s “Impulse”), but with cheap-looking effects and direction that can’t make the most of it, this one doesn't measure up.
Why in the hell would you go to a new area of space onto a new station like ship and not have on your protection suits :joy: that space exploration 101 . The Admiral clearly didn’t see the movie Alien in the archives, who sticks there face in a unknown object with no protection
And then you know he got exposed to something and you as a doctor is touching him with you bare hands :man_facepalming_tone3: you would almost forget these people are in the far future from now you’d think humans would smarting up and use there common sense more but i guess thats too much to ask.
Let me go secret the hallways with no weapon
So the power goes out and that means that the whole ship crew are just missing? No one is walking the halls?
So if you now know that the creature spits stuff on you to change you your next step should be the wear a suit for protection. Such lazy writing, this whole episode could have been solved with Suits for all applications lol
WHERE ARE THE DAMN WEAPON!!!! your telling you dont have weapons that dont use power as a source onboard
How did he turn on the force field and had enough time to jump inside of it.
How about you kill the these instead of knocking them out 47 times :man_facepalming_tone3:
Issac making on get away instead of protecting the crew is so stupid, whats the point of him being there then
58 mins in before we see ONE weapon
Good guys never learn, lets let them go so they can regroup and come back to have more casualties later on
Despite the terrible lack of the most basic standard procedures, like
- Going into uncharted, allegedly dangerous space with one ship and no backup, support, or escape routes
- Loading all the most essential crew, including the captain and an admiral, onto one shuttle, which is also the first shuttle, into a clearly Daedric (Elder Scrolls) space station
- Proceeding to split up in said unknown space station for no critical reason
- Crew members nonchalantly touching and getting their faces close to unknown substances and power sources
- The admiral, of all people, sticking his face in what clearly resembles an Alien (Ripley) face-eater egg (This one is slightly acceptable since he sits behind a desk all day and isn't well-practiced in maintaining standard procedure at every moment)
- Ed, the admiral's expedition partner, after hearing the admiral say something opened in his face, not immediately quarantining the admiral and scanning his biology for potential contaminants, but instead letting him freely wander around listening to sensitive discussions like nothing happened
- The captain, after the admiral was shown to have been infected by something, not immediately revoking his access codes or putting any information security measures in place due to such a high-level officer being compromised, but just winging it
- The crew, after the infected admiral has clearly gone rogue, not arming themselves in any way was OK, because the power was cut before anyone could be warned, so they were all in the dark (pun intended)
- The nurse putting 100% attention on the obvious bait in the middle of the hallway, not looking around at anything that might've caused it, until it's right behind him (I mean he's not security-trained, so maybe it's realistic)
- The kids not staying in one location to wait for help was realistic to what actual untrained kids (and many people in general) would do
- Everything else in terms of procedures made enough sense that I didn't mind the rest, except for the plothole that the approaching alien ship just... what, took the aliens and decided to just leave the lone, vulnerable ship to go free?
Despite all of this, I like the new theme and the direction Seth and the team is taking the series. It's moving away from "Family Guy IRL" towards more "Real Modern Star Trek" (because yes, the classics also had standard procedure problems with how they handled situations recklessly), but also keeping the good humour and jokes in little lines here and there, and there are actual story elements developing over the episodes that build their new Orvilley-style Trek universe.
I'm interpreting this as Seth growing his writing and directing skillet and perspectives beyond the limited cartoon-style humour and is learning and reaching for greater things while also keeping the best funny parts as comic relief. In my opinion, he's succeeding and doing at least a little better with every season.
But maybe I'm an idiot. What do you think?
Review by Ragnar LothbrokBlockedParentSpoilers2022-06-09T16:47:54Z
Oh man, all this is such a lazy bad writing... so they're going into an unknown potentially dangerous place. And the alien race warns them specifically saying that is a very dangerous place indeed. They come there and who goes into the recon mission? The admiral, the captain of the whole ship, the first hand, the main doctor, the main engineer - so, all the "head" of the ship. So if something happens the whole ship has nobody to command. It's an official union explorer ship with hundreds of people on board and they have no exploration team who goes first at all. Okay, even if I can forgive them that stupidity for the sake of tv-show excuse to show the main characters more often. But what's next?
Do they go into this dangerous place in space suits with weapons? Of course no, they go just like that and admiral literally put his face into some weird looking bio-thingy. It's like Space 101 of what not to do. Of course he gets infected, of course he's a trojan horse. They don't even secure him anyhow, just walk and go, do whatever, infect others. Then we going to spread around the ship while having no weapons at all, because why would we, we're going to have them for a minute at the end of the episode otherwise no thrilling moments.
If you think you already seen all of that somewhere but in a much less stupid way - you are right, the episode of Firefly had exactly this, but much more logical.