Alara's strength is beginning to fade. She's been away from the intense gravity of her homeworld for too long, and needs to return and reacclimate or lose her strength forever. Returning home means she'll have to deal with her disapproving parents, who never liked that she joined an alien military organization. Still, she does what she has to -- only to find herself in the middle of a mystery back at home.
Pieces of this episode do work. It's great to see Alara's parents back, and not just on a viewscreen this time like during their brief season one appearance. In particular, it's just fun to have Star Trek: Voyager's Robert Picardo back on screen, along with Molly Hagan. They both do a great job with the material, delivering passive-aggressive putdowns to one daughter as the praise the other.
The visual effects were top notch. I just recently read a book about the production of season one of the original Star Trek (blog post coming soon), and a recurring theme of that book is how expensive it was to produce even the cheesy visuals they achieved 50 years ago. Many grander ideas never made it past early script drafts because they just weren't feasible to achieve. This installment of The Orville gave us a gorgeous ringed planet, sprawling technological cityscapes, a wheelchair-hovercraft, gallops down the beach on the back of an alien animal, and more. And it all looked pretty great.
The more horrific elements in the episode worked well too. The scene in which we learn (SPOILER) that the neighbors are the ones to fear is great. John Billingsley (another Trek veteran, this time from Enterprise) gives a chilling performance as he forces Alara's father to torture himself. Kerry O'Malley is just as icy as she wields garden shears in a menacing way.
But these are strong moments amid a story that really doesn't work right. The whole episode is clearly set up as an arc about Alara finding more self-confidence. As she's losing her strength aboard the ship, she's told quite explicitly by Mercer that she's more than her strength, and she can keep her job if she wants it. She then finds herself in the middle of a mystery, where the obvious and logical conclusion would be that she saves the day with her smarts and learns for herself what Mercer was trying to tell her. We don't get that. Instead, Alara suddenly recovers her ability to walk for no stated reason, right at the moment she needs it. She saves the day and defeats the villains with brawn.
The second main arc is about Alara reconciling with her father. This element is bungled too, as logic is tossed aside in dogged pursuit of that outcome. After Alara's father is seriously injured (in that earlier, effective scene), he should be pretty well out for the count. Yet Alara asks him to perform heroics at the end when her mother and sister -- two other perfectly capable, able-bodied, and uninjured people -- are right there. Sure, the needs of the story say it has to be Dad, but then the other characters really needed to have been sidelined to justify that. It wouldn't have been hard; shift the soup scene from Dad to Mom, actually go through (off camera) with the garden shears moment, and you're there. Or lock the two of them in a room somewhere. Something. Anything.
The comedy involving Patrick Warburton was a bit off too. Oh, it was hilarious, to be sure (even if Orville's penchant to turn aliens into dude-bros is starting to wear a little thin). But it felt like a waste of Warburton not to have more of him. And at the same time, it was quite a disruption and distraction from Alara's story to cut away from it as long as the episode did.
Then there's the question of what to make of that ending. (SPOILERS again, of course.) Is that it? Is Alara (and actress Halston Sage) off the show now? Permanently? Temporarily? I do like being surprised and uncertain by this, unlike, say, any previous Star Trek show where I'd heard about all the major exits in advance. But it seemed rather odd to go to all the trouble of finding a technobabbly solution to Alara's problem (an obvious one) only to not use it.
And I wish the goodbyes had resonated a little better. It's hard, given that it's been so long since season one of the show, and we've now only been back a few episodes in season two. Your memory really has to be working for Alara's tearful goodbye to hit as hard as it should have. That final shot, for example, was kind of perfect -- calling back to Mercer always asking Alara to "open this jar of pickles for me." Except that, when I watched with friends, not everyone remembered back to those early episodes with that running gag.
It's definitely the first misfire of season two, featuring too many plot holes to be overlooked. I give Home a grade C. Perhaps, if The Orville runs for many years and this goodbye really is permanent, this episode will have more resonance when revisiting it. But for now, I think it's one of the series' weaker installments so far.
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