The ship discovers an unusual planet that spends half its orbit in our universe and half in another. Commander Grayson explores the surface as her crashed shuttle is being repaired, and accidentally interacts with the local primitive population before the shuttle can depart. But when the planet vanishes and reappears, the full import of what has happened becomes clear. Time passes differently in the other universe, and 700 years have gone by during the 11 days it was gone. And in those centuries, and entire religion has sprung up around that one chance interaction, deifying Grayson and altering the entire culture.
Star Trek has played around with some of these ideas before, of course -- the culture that experiences time faster than humans, the culture that perceives a crewmember as a god figure. They even mashed these two ideas together a bit in a Voyager episode called "Blink of an Eye," which I now vaguely remember as being decent, but didn't actually remember at all when I was watching this episode of The Orville. And that, I think, may be because The Orville managed to put the parts together in its own unique and interesting way.
The emphasis here was more personal than the clever sci-fi trappings: it was squarely on Grayson and the guilt she felt over the interference she'd caused. It's one thing to feel badly about violence carried out in the name of a religion, and quite another to feel it's being done in your name. I liked that the story wasn't principally about the series' substitute for "the Prime Directive," it was about the emotional toll on Grayson.
The episode also cleverly used Isaac in the story by sending him down to the planet to spend 700 years in its alternate universe. The Voyager episode did something similar with the Doctor, I recall, but on a far less extreme time scale. That makes a difference -- or, at least, it will if the writers actually allow Isaac to be a different character after this. If the passage of 700 years doesn't change him in any way, then it's basically saying he's a character beyond any capacity for growth or change at all, which is a rather big dramatic liability.
The ending sort of out-Star Trekked Star Trek, in a way, as the now-evolved aliens came to deliver the moral message to our heroes, rather than the other way around. Religion is going to spring up around something, they wisely noted, so Grayson should not feel responsible that their planet's centered around her. It was an interesting tweak of the Prime Directive's nose, putting the notion out there that maybe the heroic explorers we follow in these shows can't really change things as much as they think.
And it all played out against the backdrop of Mercer and Grayson exploring whether or not to renew their romantic relationship. I liked seeing this story addressed. The Orville is, of course, most similar to The Next Generation among all the Star Trek shows, and that show was notably stingy about this sort of material. It had meaningful character back stories in place pairing Riker and Troi, and potentially pairing Crusher and Picard, but generally pulled away from dealing with them. The Orville dived right in, and when at the end of the episode the decision was reached not to pursue any relationship, it made sense for the characters. "Doing nothing" was the consequence of something, rather than simply ignoring a potential story.
I'd give this installment of The Orville a B+. Though the series never really rose to truly lofty heights during its first season, it did serve up enough "pretty good" episodes to be worth the time. I'll be back for more when it returns next season.
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