2x02 Primal Urges

[8.2/10] This may be my favorite episode of The Orville yet. It balances a personal story and struggle with a legitimately intriguing sci-fi scenario, and finds a way for the two of them to dovetail nicely. Along with last season’s “About a Girl”, this show seems to find another gear, and feel more true to its Star Trek: The Next Generation roots when it’s grappling with Bortus and his family’s difficulties.

Case-in-point, TNG dabbled in addressing porn addiction via Lt. Barclay, but was limited by network standards in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Granted, this episode made me wish for a little more in the way of network standards, not because anything in the episode was that lascivious, but because you can just hear the writers’ room giggling over how many adult video scenarios they can drop quasi-Klingons into, and it becomes too much at some point. One of the nice things about “Primal Urges” is that it largely elides the show’s hit-or-miss dorm humor, but the “adventurous” brutish looking aliens is the one place it remains, to the point of indulgence.

And yet, the episode takes its holodeck-based (sorry, “simulation”-based) porngraphy addiction seriously. It causes Bortus to shirk his duties at work. It causes him to neglect his partner and his family more generally. It even leads him to seek out more exotic contraband that introduces a virus to the ship. Some of this is a touch After School Special, but it’s all plausible enough in the heightened reality of the show. There’s a balance between the absurdity of two sapient lizard people grousing at one another about performing “the sexual event” and the realness of a couple struggling with something genuine that clicks here.

I also appreciate how the episode picks up on continuity. It’s not just content to introduce a heretofore unknown addiction from Bortus and then play out its consequences. There’s a psychological component to it that picks up on what the audience already knows about his relationship with Klyden. Bortus admits that his lack of desire for intimacy with Klyden began after the events that led to Topa’s operation. He goes a step further, confessing that he’s not sure he’ll ever really be over it.

That’s a deft move, connecting Bortus’s escalating addiction (which is rendered in somewhat silly terms) to a mental trauma that he hasn’t been unable to unravel and which he fears he’ll never be able to fully move past. The Moclan murder-divorce element is a little much, but there’s something just distant enough with Bortus and Kylden going through couples’ counseling in their stentorian tones mixed with something just real enough to their deep-seated problems to function in the way that great, somewhat outlandish sci-fi stories do.

Speaking of outlandish sci-fi stories, there’s some good nuts and bolts adventuring here in addition to the Bortus story. The Orville finds a planet that’s being consumed by a local star, intending merely to witness it as a cosmological event. Instead, a scan for unexpected minerals (a dilithium crystals equivalent?) reveals that there’s a small civilization living under the surface of the planet, one the Union ship can rescue via some difficult problem-solving.

That requires some of the usual Star Trek-style business. Ya gotta overpower the deflectors and reinforce a shuttle and reverse the polarity or what have you given the gravitation and radiation at play. That’s a challenge made more difficult since the ultra-porn program Bortus requisitioned from a cool-looking, big rubber suit alien introduced a virus onto the ship.

It’s a nice touch to have the two stories impact one another rather than just having a Bortus personal issue story and a sci-fi story. The ship getting infected with a porn-based virus is a little silly, but it works as a science fiction-y extension of the metaphor. The episode also finds an excuse to get Bortus involved in the action despite his big screw-up here. The radiation on the planet means only two of the Orville’s crew can go on the away mission: Isaac and our favorite Moclan.

What follows is both one of those terrifying but thought-provoking Star Trek thought experiments, as well as an important resolution to Bortus’s personal story. The planet’s accelerating destruction means that only half of the enclave can board the shuttle and escape to safety. The prime minister decides a lottery is the only fair way to decide, even as the results separate her from her husband and child forever.

Their final scene together is lovely and tragic, with the prime minister’s husband lamenting her just way and speaking poetically about how much they’ll miss her, with she in kind responding with beautiful words about all the days they’ve shared together that he and her child will still hold in their heart. There’s pathos in the parting and legitimate tension in the Orville’s escape from the sun about to engulf the planet, requiring a race against time and a close call before a returning Isaac is able to neutralize the virus.

The closeness of that call, and the problems that Bortus’s porn virus caused, prompt the angriest dressing down from Captain Mercer we’ve ever seen. But Bortus’s courage also earns him a commendation and a rejection of his tendered resignation, sparing him the worst fate this side of another Moclan divorce.

And yet, Bortus is changed by these events and, most importantly, what he witnessed. He comes to Klyden and apologizes for the strain he’s put on his partner, for his failure as a mate and a member of his family. More than that, he witnesses the prime minister’s loss of her family and their importance to one another, and realizes the value of what he has. He can’t deny his pain over what happened with Topa, but these experiences have given him a way to move forward, even if he can never fully solve the problem.

That’s an incredibly heartening place to land. The Orville certainly plays the inherent ridiculousness of a porn-addicted alien to the hilt at times. But it also doesn’t flinch from the problems that addiction causes for Bortus, or the hardship it inflicts on his coworkers and, most of all, his family. Finding a way to address those issues in a surprisingly down-to-earth way, while mixing them with an engrossing sci-fi story represents the show’s greatest achievement yet. We only have two major data points where Bortus is the star of the show, but given the track record so far, they’re a great reason to ask for more.