WARNING: This thread WILL contain unhidden spoilers for this episode and every episode before it. You are allowed to talk about future episodes of the series, but put ANY information that comes after this episode behind spoiler tags.
The Orville season 1, episode 4 "If the Stars Should Appear"
Written by Seth MacFarlane, directed by James L. Conway.
While charting stars on the edge of known space, Isaac (Mark Jackson) detects a gigantic ship floating aimlessly through space. The ancient vessel cannot be scanned and is drifting towards a star. Captain Mercer, Commander Grayson, Alara, Dr. Finn, and Isaac take a shuttle over to explore and offer assistance. What (and who) they find inside is not at all what they were expecting. Just as they are in need of assistance themselves, the Orville is called away to rescue another ship from the Krill.
Originally released: 28 September 2017
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What did you think?
This episode is a pretty weird prequel to Ted.
I had assumed this was Max Burkholder (Tomilin here, young John from the Ted series)'s first encounter with the MacFarlane-verse, but he's actually a player who Seth has been employing since he was eight years old. I don't know when they filmed these episodes, but he's probably about 18 or 19 here (and 27 today) . He's also had parts on Family Guy, American Dad and The Cleveland Show.
It makes a little more sense that they were confident he could carry so much of the weight of this episode, having worked with him previously. I don't remember that many episodes where civilians come along with the away team for so much of the mission, but Burkholder acquits himself well here.
It's kind of surprising that the boarding party don't regroup once they realize that this is a first contact event. They understandably stumble into what probably counts as a breach of their contact regs, but I don't think they really had those this early in the show, in a behind-the-scenes sense. MacFarlane did an oldplace AMA in 2017 where he said as much:
Full series spoilers
I think it's pretty clear that that's no longer the case.Commander Grayson's "contamination" in S01E10 "Mad Idolatry" is harshly rebuked, Captain Mercer explains in S02E05 "All the World is Birthday Cake" that "When a planet reaches out into space as you have, whether by ship or by transmitted message, that's when we permit ourselves to make our presence known." This is reinforced by S03E10 "Future Unknown", when Grayson explains the catastrophic results of Union interference on Gendel 3.
It's kind of neat to see the show at a point where the lore isn't quite nailed down yet. I don't think this even rises to the level of a continuity error, you can easily handwave that they already blew it and had no other option once they understood the reality of the situation. Technically, they are already a spacefaring people, whether they know it or not. But if this episode had come later, I think there would have been some acknowledgment of the complexities at play.
I really enjoyed this one. Great concept for an episode with a very Trek-like structure, which makes sense when you see that it was co-written by Brannon Braga and Andre Bormanis. This episode feels like an old comfy blanket to me, like catching a random TNG rerun. Obviously it's more jokey than most of Star Trek, but I'd happily watch several more seasons of this show, if this was all it wanted to be.