A Kaylon armada is escorting the Orville back to Earth, intent on exterminating all life on the planet. Imprisoned in the shuttlebay, the ship's crew must escape and warn the Union before all is lost.
This episode had a difficult needle to thread: trying to surprise the audience while at the same time organically paying off plot threads that had been telegraphed in part one. It essentially shopped from both aisles, giving us both the expected and the surprising.
Not that good storytelling is all about the surprise, but the surprising elements were the more effective parts of the hour. First, there was Grayson's idea to go seek the help of one enemy against another, by going to the Krill. The shuttle escape was a fun sequence -- and the first of a few times in the episode that the normally comic relief character of Malloy got to "save the day." Then there was just the pure Star Trek-style wholesomeness of trusting an enemy in a crisis... and them not taking advantage of the situation after the fact. Naive and a touch unrealistic, perhaps, but a full-throated endorsement of diplomacy nonetheless.
Also surprising was the way the show swung hard in its final act at being less Star Trek and more Star Wars. The final showdown between the Union fleet and the Kaylons (and then the Krill) was enormous in scale even for a feature film, much less a weekly network television series. They pulled out all the stops, blew out the budget, and served up a massive space battle that was exciting and well-staged. (Of course, it helps the clarity when every faction has their own color-coded laser beams, right?) You may not come to The Orville for this sort of thing, but it was a fun change of pace to have them do it, and a treat that they did it so well.
Less surprising, and less effective (though those two things aren't necessarily connected) was the way the Orville crew got out of their jam. It was basically inevitable that Isaac would feel some kernel of emotion that would lead him to turn against his fellow Kaylons... and even more inevitable that the moment would have something to do with Ty Finn. I don't mind Ty essentially getting to save the day in this way -- it was signaled well ahead of time, and ultimately relied on just Ty's childlike faith and love. But the parts where he was an amateur action hero, crawling through the ducts with Yaphit? Or the opening scene, when he put everyone in jeopardy again by rushing the Kaylon guards? No, not my favorite moments.
I suppose maybe there was the slightest drop of doubt in the mix here. Because the series wrote out the character of Alara earlier this season, it was at least conceivable (if quite unlikely) that they might write out Isaac too in the course of wrapping up this story. It's always hard to put a TV series' regular characters in believable danger.
Overall, I'd say the setup of "Identity, Part I" thrilled me a bit more than the conclusion of Part II. Still, I did enjoy it, and was pleased the episode didn't cop out on the threatening of Earth as it easily might have done. I give Part II a B. It was a lot of fun.
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