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I'll have more to say on the full episode lately, but just wanted to say - That score did James Horner proud! The repetitive string appregios into the frantic horns were SO incredibly similar to Horner's work in Wrath of Khan, I found myself cheering for the score. Holy shit, that was great!

Alrighty then!

Gay porn. Over and over. I admit, it squicks me some. But as they say, this is what people would use the holodeck, um, simulator, for if we had them. And I do like that they fully get into what an all-male society would be like. Contrast with Wonder Woman for instance, who is from an all-female society but is immediately attracted to the first man she ever meets. Let's be honest, the Amazons on that island should be a bunch of lesbos. Nothing wrong with one discovering that she had an attraction to a male, but it would be something weird to her, not just falling in love with the first guy she meets. On the Orville we have a planet of males, and it's a planet of gay guys. And they're not shying away from that in the least.

Love the divorce. Moclans are basically Klingons raised to 11, and then some. You can always count on everything they do being the most extreme 'dude' version of it!

And oh my god, I absolutely adored the porn alien guy! That is THE best looking alien on the show thus far. I gotta say, Orville has really raised the bar on aliens compared to the likes of TNG/Voyager/Enterprise. Of course technology and methods have moved on since then.

Love the disintegrating planet, too. That said, it's kind of incredible that anybody would be alive when it got the point we saw. A significant portion of the crust had been ripped off already. We're talking geoquakes on a global scale, thousands of times bigger than anything we've ever experienced on Earth. No way would any structure still exist, anywhere.

Plus, they engage in something that bugs me - the gravity is such that things are being pulled off the surface... but only certain things. Rocks flying into the air whilst the rock next to them still sits there and people can walk around. This wouldn't happen!

Still, those are some fairly minor nits. I can live with them.

Love that the porn program comes complete with a nasty virus. Some things never change! Will there be any comeback on the porn alien, I wonder?

And yeah, Ed is right to bemoan the discipline issues he's having. The ships third officer is goofing off work to do porn, his husband is trying to murder him, and then the same officer puts a virus on the ship that directly leads to dozens of deaths. Heroic actions or not, that should have been the end of Bortus on this ship and in this organisation.

As for the people they did rescue... they did a lottery? I was all but yelling at the screen. A lottery? So... they didn't send the children? How is that possible? How do you not just send every child you can whilst the adults stay behind? What's wrong with these people?!

Overall, I liked it. About a 7/10 for me.


Oh, an aside. Orville season one was notable for the fact that on RT the audience rating was over 90%, whilst the critic rating was 24%. This season? The critic rating for the Orville thus far is 100%.

This is, of course, absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Fox has now been officially bought out by Disney. Because that would indicate that most critics are corrupt shills. And we all know that can't possibly be true.

I LOVED the fact that Bortus’ marriage and his dispute with Klyden over their child wasn’t left in the dusty intellectual library. The actual porn was merely ancillary to that part of the story.

This may just be me reading into something that isn’t there, but the “inferior organism” Bortus rationally reminding the coldly logical Isaac not to apply Union judgement to the planet’s citizens’ use of the lottery - “It is their way” - was great, AND a great tie-in to his defense of Klyden’s attempted divorce.