2x07 Deflectors

[7.1/10] Well we’re back to doing reskins of various Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes. This one is of a piece with “The Outcast” from TNG (e.g. Riker dates an alien from a mono-gender species). And there’s bits and pieces of various murder mystery episodes from lots of Star Trek installments -- though the one I’m most clearly reminded of is “Meld” from Voyager (Tuvok investigates a death on the ship) given our detective here.

Mixing those two together pays some dividends. The episode pivots more quickly away from the “What would it mean for someone to love a gender they’re not supposed to?” issue which is, thankfully, less foreign or challenging a thought to viewers in 2019 than it was in 1992. Likewise, the potential prejudiced/personal motivations help add complications to the whodunnit at the center of the episode.

And yet, a lot of this one left me cold. Maybe it’s just the focus on Lt. Keyali, who doesn’t feel fully integrated into the cast yet. I don’t want to slate her as an actress -- it takes time for a new cast member to jell with the rest of the group, and her final scene with Klyden in particular was nicely emotional and well-done.

But a lot of her meat and potatoes scenes were less convincing than they needed to be, and makes me a little more hesitant about her getting focus episodes like this in the future. That said, some of it comes down to the writing, which gives her Locar about 5 minutes of goo goo eyes to develop a romance so that they can get onto the murder mystery, and then has to treat their connection like the most important thing in the world.

Still, at least it’s not the insipid Grayson/Mercer/Cassius love triangle. I don’t know how to feel about what happens with them in this episode: Should I feel frustrated that The Orville wasted our time with an obvious Baxter character in a storyline that went nowhere? Should I be annoyed at the hacky, cliché fashion in which the show ends Kelly and Cassius’s relationship and turns the already drippy Cassius into a needy lovelorn middle-schooler? Should I just be glad that at least this phase of this continually unavailing storyline is done?

Suffice it to say, I didn't care about Mercer/Grayson last season, and this season has done nothing to make me care more. Coming up with a contrived, cliché-filled break between her and Cassius, with Mercer conspicuously positioning himself for the rebound and emotional support despite being her ex-husband does nothing to improve that. Casssius was always more of a device than a character, but they could have come up with a more convincing break-up for him and Kelly than this. This is CW teen drama-level crud.

Thankfully, the Lt. Kiyali/Moclan investigation material is, if nothing else, much better by comparison. There’s some good twists, from possible suspects (Bortus and Kylden, obviously) to clues (the fabricated simulator files, the familial banishment on Moclan), to Locar’s engineering skills that help justify the somewhat overfamiliar “I faked my own death” ending. A lot of the emotions don’t work, because again, we don’t really know Kiyali as a character to begin with, and we barely get time with her and Locar, but there’s at least some good ideas there.
The mystery comes with another question of moral relativism amid cultural exchange. It presents hard questions for Bortus about how he could have wanted to protect Topa against immoral Moclan cultural practices but be unwilling to extend the same protection to Locar. There’s an interesting notion about Moclan’s rigid cultural practices being a reaction to the need for survival on a desolate planet (or at least an artifact of that). There’s even some hints about the Union having core differences in values with the Moclans but needing their support which suggests an interesting, albeit largely unexplored, realpolitik approach.

It also creates a nice tension between Kiyali’s duties as a Union officer, her personal moral principles about a person’s sexual orientation, and her feelings for Locar. She’ll turn Locar in, but it pains her tremendously, and she hates Kylden for the harm his intolerance has caused.

Locar himself makes for an appropriately tragic figure, having to fake his own death in a failed effort not only to escape persecution but spare his family, and the closing montage is a piercing one. The actual plotting of this one isn’t bad, and it almost makes me wish we could have done it as a two-parter to get more meat off the bone here (or at least ditched the terrible Mercer/Grayson love triangle crap).

That said, I keep coming back to my usual hobby horse with this show -- namely that the ideas are often good and sometimes, as here, trenchant, intriguing, and poignant -- but I can’t help but wish we got to see them executed on a show with the capabilities of The Next Generation, rather than a series that’s only semi-successfully imitating it.