Cupid's Dagger

When a TV show builds a major event into a character's back story right from square one, it's inevitable that some episode will delve into it deeper. The Orville is no exception, building an episode around Darulio, the infamous "squirting blue alien" that came between Mercer and Grayson. Less expected, perhaps, was seeing that alien embodied by none other than Rob Lowe. Seth MacFarlane seems to have an exhaustive Contact List, though, and a crazy makeup job wasn't enough to deter Lowe from coming to play.

This was the silliest episode of The Orville by far; all aspects of the plot were handled lightly. That included the ostensibly serious subplot of the alien diplomatic negotiations, and Yaphit's pursuit of Dr. Finn. The actors seemed to be having a lot of fun with it, from Lowe enacting a full charm offensive to MacFarlane being dopey and smitten, to Penny Johnson Jerald going for broke and trusting the CG artists not to leave her hanging. (They didn't.)

I admit, I laughed quite a bit. Then afterward, I had second thoughts. Attitudes about consent and sex are undergoing a titanic shift right now, and this episode is airing in a world radically more aware than even the one in which it was filmed only months ago. This episode was meant to go down light and easy, and at times it did; nevertheless, taking a wider view of it, there are elements that really shouldn't read as so funny.

Darulio knows fully what he does to others while he's "in heat," but has no problem exploiting their compromised ability to give consent. This is probably now the second time he's done it to Grayson -- I'm going to go with yes; she's long been unable to fully articulate why she did what she did with him. He's now done the same to Mercer too (who, thankfully, at least wasn't "horrified" at having had a same-sex encounter). He's broken up a marriage. He's basically a walking rufie, which, when you stop to think about it more than what the episode gives space for, is kind of terrible.

The Yaphit/Finn story shows the dark side of the glamorized Hollywood "keep chasing the girl until you wear her down" trope. Yaphit has always oozed near the border of taste, and it's been just "Yaphit being Yaphit." He can hardly be blamed for what happened here, having no way of knowing that Finn was not voluntarily giving into his "charms" at last. Still, he took advantage of her, and likely would never have been in a position to do so if the prior rebuffing of his constant "background harassment" had been received seriously.

So, yeah, ugh. Hard to like this one. Hard to completely like how I reacted to it, thinking about how hard I laughed at some of it. The Orville is trying to be Star Trek (I mean that in the best way), and Star Trek tries to make you think. So you could say that this episode was a triumph; I am certainly thinking now. But it's abundantly clear that none of these issues were actual authorial intent here. It was supposed to just be a fun romp.

This one's hard to place on the scale, but I think I'm going to call it a C+. Examining the Mercer/Grayson relationship and trying to bring more closure on their past was a good instinct. The cast was game to have fun here. Not all the jokes were inappropriate (though not letting us hear Bortus sing "My Heart Will Go On" was cruel.) But the rest of the episode was simply not okay.