Primal Urges

I've often talked about The Orville as the never-produced "eighth season" of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It's often lighter, sometimes more crass, but the tone it's trying to strike is very much like that first Star Trek spinoff, more than the darker, more morally ambiguous Trek series that would come later.

But based on the two episodes so far of The Orville's second season, their style is changing a bit. Instead of offering episodes that The Next Generation might have done, they're now remixing episodes The Next Generation did do. Remixing, not copying, because The Orville definitely has its own approach. Its characters are far from the virtuous paragons Gene Roddenberry insisted upon for The Next Generation. They're quite flawed and quite human (even the aliens), and so the results are very different even when a story jumps off from a familiar place.

Thus, The Orville's new season began with an episode (peripherally) about an annual urination ritual. And now, its most recent episode, "Primal Urges," touches on pornography. The Next Generation memorably took on the subject of "holodeck addiction," creating both a good episode and a recurring character in the process. But let's not kid ourselves; the fantasies of Reginald Barclay in that episode were implausibly tame. Give a holodeck to any real human and tell me what you think the Time to Porn would be. I'll take the under.

So would the writers of The Orville, it seems, who crafted a story in which Bortus' strained marriage led him to escape to holographic interactive porn. The line they managed to walk was impressive; the scenes of Bortus' fantasies played for laughs, of course, (to say nothing of how a Moclan divorce is declared) but the storyline as a whole played things fairly straight and serious. There was a legitimate splinter between Bortus and Klyden, following up on their most significant story from season one. Seeing this continuity, and the plausible behavior of realistic people, made for a solid hour.

Remixing The Next Generation didn't stop there, however. The episode's B-plot had to do with rescuing the last few survivors of a dying planet. You could name any number of Star Trek episodes (of any "generation") that covered this ground, but once again there was an Orville twist. This time, it was not to take the scenario farther, or to treat it humorously, but to treat it more dramatically. They weren't able to come up with a last-minute technobabbly solution to save the day. Half the people simply could not be rescued; the half-victory was the only victory possible. (Though I wish that shuttle had looked a lot more crowded as they were flying away. Or that they'd talked about a weight capacity that would have prevented their takeoff. Anything to make them not look needlessly callous for the sake of drama.)

It was another solid episode for The Orville, which seems to have found a steady footing so far this season. I give "Primal Urges" a B+.