Blood of Patriots

[Graham Kennedy]

Overall, pretty decent episode. Not great, though.

First off, nice to see Yaphit getting his medal! I love that guy, and it's always fun to see him oozing around.

So, my original impression of the Krill was that they were there to be the ultimate implacable enemy - the way their religion was described, there seems like there would be no possibility of peace with them. So it's kind of strange to me that they're now willing to make peace. Not a problem as such, just means my initial impression was wrong and the writers are taking it another way.

The first real issue I have with the episode comes up pretty early... as soon as the Krill accuse Gordon's pal of being some bad guy who's killed loads of their people, it was pretty obvious that they were telling the truth. Not that there were clues, but in a "what's the obvious way this will pan out" kind of a way. It put me in mind of The Wounded in TNG, and I figured they would do something along those lines as soon as that scene happened. Not a huge problem, but it would have been stronger to do something different with it.

Along similar lines, as soon as the Krill said something about him using a weapon, but he didn't have a weapon, I figured that the girl was the weapon. Only I thought it would be a bit more "mutant power"... I pictured her doing a Magneto and crushing ships with her mind or something.

Loooove Talla doing her TSA impersonation. "Do you have any fruits or vegetables?" Funny, but it does make me think - ships like the Enterprise or the Orville, why wouldn't they need to do stuff like this with people coming aboard? And the rubber glove... too funny.

Speaking of Talla, nice to see Ed asking her what she thought of the guy and she immediately says there's something off about him. As Security Gal she should have good instincts for stuff like this. I also wonder if the writers weren't doing this on purpose. One of the classic writing mistakes is to have your audience ahead of your characters, and there was an element of that here since the audience is going to pretty much know there's something off about the guy. By having at least some of the characters realise it too, even if they have nothing to base that on, they at least avoid that aspect.

Also nice to see Talla almost immediately catching him up to no good. She's good at her job!

Another weakness of the episode was Gordon apparently turning bad and helping his pal steal a shuttle. Didn't buy that for a second - there's no way a main character is going to turn evil, so it's never convincing when he seems to. Still, they only sold us that for like one scene, so it's not like it being the big thrust of the episode or anything.

And another nice Talla moment, with her "Did you ever meet a Xelayan?" I admit it, I like to see Xelayans kicking ass.

Okay, here's my biggest problem - the ending. Malloy pulls a gun on his friend. His friend knocks it out of his hand, and they fight. It was a nice fight, well choreographed. Guy sets his bomb counting down as Malloy grabs the gun. Malloy shoots the console out and puts a space suit on so that he can jump off the shuttle before it goes boom.

Now here's my problem - the guns have a stun setting. They even demonstrated that this particular gun has a stun setting by shooting Talla with it. So why didn't Malloy just shoot his Evil Pal the instant he pulled a gun on him? Then the bomb never goes off and everything is fine!

Okay, he wanted to give him a chance to surrender. So they fight, his pal activates the bomb. So why not shoot him now? Whilst he's unconscious you throw the bomb out of the back door. Bomb go boom, Malloy is fine, Evil Pal is fine but unconscious, the shuttle is fine.

It's a really simple solution that's ignored because they wanted to cool moment of Malloy jumping out the shuttle and having a 'splosion and tractor beam and stuff.

All in all, then, this was... okay. But no more than okay. I don't know that I've ever seen an Orville episode that I think is truly bad, so I don't think this was a terrible episode or anything, but in any list of quality eps, my take is that this one is going to be in the bottom five or so.