Krill

The Orville feels like it's still trying to find the right balance of comedy and drama, and with its most recent episode, turned the dial sharply in the comedy direction. "Krill" was far and away its funniest episode yet. If I were just tuning into The Orville for the laughs, I might be inclined to say that this is perfect -- keep things right there. But the prior episodes of the series have established that they're not just here to crack jokes, they're here to tell legitimate Star Trek stories as well. And from that angle, the episode was decent, but still a bit off.

The moral line this story tried to walk was a bit too tricky. Mercer and Malloy started their mission as an earnest attempt to understand their adversaries better. But then it took a sharp turn into planning a mass murder. And then the scales of that were somehow meant to be balanced by their efforts to save a group of children. Sure, war blurs the moral lines, and you could weigh the lives they were saving against the lives they were taking, but the episode didn't really do that effectively -- the one good moment in this regard was the final scene, in which the Krill woman Teleya chillingly pointed out that they've made enemies for life out of each of those rescued children. Perhaps without all the surrounding comedy, this material wouldn't have seemed so jarring. Or perhaps it's simply that because the humor seemed at its most dialed in, I wanted the drama to be too.

I certainly did enjoy the episode for that humor, though. The endless jokes about the Krill deity Avis never seemed to get old (may he cover the loss of our vehicle). But there were plenty of other funny moments too, from the general sloppiness of Mercer and Malloy as undercover operatives (though that too may have hurt the credibility of the drama), to the "Bortus eats anything" cold open, to the great callback about Malloy's new leg. If the show can continue operating at this level, I feel like it will have nailed a key part of its formula.

We skip The Orville this week, thanks to baseball playoffs. Hopefully this doesn't cost them too much ratings momentum just when they're building up a rhythm. I'd mark "Krill" a B+.