Bortus, the ship's Moclan second officer, welcomes a baby with his mate Klyden. But the happy occasion quickly becomes a moral quandary. Though Moclans are an ostensibly single-gender species, the baby has been born female, an extremely rare genetic "defect" that Bortus and Klyden want corrected with surgery. When Dr. Finn refuses, they reach out to their homeworld, soon bringing about a diplomatic and legal battle.
Seriously, a story doesn't get more quintessentially Star Trek than this. Dressing up a conflict in a sci-fi veneer, the more modern the better, is what almost all the most lauded episodes of every Trek series did. The fans rightly elevated the ones that did so more subtly ("The Measure of a Man," for instance), but the blunt episodes of the original series are just as famous (the racial allegory of "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield," to name one).
"About a Girl" hews more to the latter category than the former; no one is going to miss the transgender parallel being drawn here. Still, the arguments are shuffled up just a bit. In the real world, transgender people (and those who support them) argue to be taken at their word on their own sexual identities (with or without surgery). In this episode of The Orville, the people arguing for a surgery are the ones denying a gender identity.
The premise is squeezed of all its metaphorical juice as the episode also touches on feminism along the way. The Moclans' objection to the female child isn't just about her rarity, it's about their viewing women as inferior, teeing up another Star Trek hallmark: a court battle in which the crew members are pressed into service as attorneys. Here, because The Orville has one foot planted in the world of comedy, the characters are able to comment on how ludicrous an idea this is on its face. And then, impressively, they're actually able to provide a better justification for it than perhaps any Star Trek episode ever offered: Commander Grayson must argue on the baby's behalf because no Moclan wants the job.
Not only has The Orville done its best job yet of delivery a sci-fi morality tale, its humor was dialed in at its best yet as well. The episode got full mileage out of letting its characters "be regular humans" in this episode -- characters talk of penises and vaginas (hardly dirty words, but nothing you would ever imagine a Star Trek character saying), and helmsman Malloy is allowed to look flat-out stupid when questioned in the trial.
Then came the episode's finest touch: they lose in the end. The trial reaches the most realistic verdict to expect from a monolithic, indoctrinated society, and forces the gender reassignment surgery on the baby girl. There are a handful episodes of Star Trek where the characters "lose" (and some of these are the most beloved; see "The City on the Edge of Forever" -- seriously, see it), but that is decidedly the exception to the rule. In opting for this ending, The Orville declared that it not only will claim Star Trek's allegorical mantle, and not only will try to be funny, it will be a more modern show that tries to allow for more realistic storytelling.
Pretty impressive in all, if you ask me. (And you did. You're reading this.) I of course wish the episode were more subtle and nuanced. And I also think this story would land better if it could somehow be told in a world where we knew the main characters better, having lived with them for, say, a full season or two. But it's undeniably The Orville's best episode to date, and indicative of the direction I hope they continue in. It's also notably better than The Next Generation's "transgender episode," "The Outcast." I give "About a Girl" a B+. As I said in my Discovery review, I think that show might have entertained me more this week, but The Orville felt more like "Star Trek."
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