On Thursday, July 7 The Orville: New Horizons debuts its sixth episode, titled “Twice in a Lifetime,” which looks like it could be another time twister. We have a sneak peek and Hulu has also released an inside at last week’s episode.
“Twice in a Lifetime”
Synopsis:
The crew must rescue Gordon from a distant yet familiar world.
Preview video:
Inside The Orville
Also released today was an inside look at last week’s episode with commentary from the cast and producers.
Keep up with all The Orville news and analysis on TrekMovie.
Time travel. I’m in.
My favorite kinda trekkin’! 😉
This season of The Orville has consistently been knocking it out the park! Absolutely loving it!!
i dunno it’s first few episodes this season haven’t been Stella, something feels off for me.
That was my feel as well. The show has forgotten how to be humorous in half the episodes, forgotten to tell sci-fi stories in half the episodes, and the crew’s moral compass seems…
Well, let’s put it this way; I’m rooting for the Kalon.
They really try to get their money’s worth out of that rig that films people running through that corridor :-D
Loved the episode!
Come on hulu give use a Renewal for Seasons 4 and 5! :-)
Probably means we wouldn’t see NeW episodes till 2024 but now we have the experience to handle that kind of Wait…
This episode was the end of a fandom that has been active since the pilot, for my wife and I. This season, while not without strong points (I thought the season opener on suicide made a great statement, and the second episode, though dire and depressing, was a good horror-adventure) has nonetheless been strongly losing us with every episode.
In this one, though, I found the crew to be morally repugnant villains. From the start, they’re smarmy, obnoxious, condescending jackasses… ready to rake Malloy over the coals for, apparently, the crime of having gotten a job and integrating into society? Apparently anything other than literally living as a recluse in the woods is forbidden by the Union.
But the garbage attitudes are made far worse when Mercer and Grayson- the crew who, last episode, when Topa wanted to make a personal choice, forsook duty, orders, the law, and risked the survival of the entire Union because it was, in their estimation, the right thing to do, cold-bloodedly assign Malloy’s family to oblivion because Duty conquers all. Here, only a hypothetical, poorly-rationalized potential danger to the Union justifies the crew acting like amoral, monstrous thugs. They come to abduct him from his family by force. They refuse to simply take his family (whom their position is shouldn’t exist in the timeline to begin with, so there’s no rational reason not to remove that contamination?) with him, and finally- as he screams and pleads with them not to erase his children from existence- unnecessarily tell him, to his and his family’s face, that they are now going to go and do just that, even tossing off a flippant ‘see you soon’, rubbing the doomed family’s face in what they intend to do.
And then the morons literally risk the destruction of their ship and crew because they aren’t willing to wait around for six months.
We ended this episode with such contempt for both characters- despite the absolution the show tries to give them through the words of younger Malloy, who categorizes his actions as ‘selfish’ somehow?- that we don’t feel we can watch even previous episodes of the series without the same visceral loathing that we ended this episode with. It has functionally ruined the Orville for us. That may sound dramatic… but this episode upset us so deeply, and we found the crew’s attitudes and moral choices so backwards and repugnant- and, frankly, evil- as well as illogical and poorly-justified… that it really did ruin the show for us.
I agree with practically everything you said about it, but it didn’t “ruin” the show for me.
Star Trek has had it’s fair share of similarly “morally bankrupt” moments.
There’s a ton more, but those are the first to come to mind.
Spoilers below…
The Orville episode ended on too much of an upbeat note. The tone was all off. Even if the episode played out exactly the same plot-wise, it needed a somber tone that was missing. Mercer and Grayson needed *something* to stick with them, even the most minimal tinge of guilt, or it needed more somber music to covey a slightly different feel, even if the shots were exactly the same.
I was hoping that the conversation at the start of the episode talking about the sandwich and universe divergence would ultimately lead to both Gordons surviving. I felt that given the ship wasn’t even using the Arinov device to return to the present, it would lead to that conclusion. Time Travel rules in fiction are all made up anyway, so there’s no reason not to do that.
As it stands, they did pick up Gordon about 4-5 months before he sent his original message, which means they introduced a paradox where they pick up Gordon before he would have sent the message that would cause them to travel back in time in the first place.
After my preference of both Gordons surviving, I would have rather had the crew find that they made the *wrong* decision, and that taking Gordon out of the past actually harmed the timeline and that they actually broke a predestination paradox that should have existed and with the destruction of the Arinov device, they’re stuck with their decision.