A glitchy temporal experiment pulls onto the ship a version of Kelly Grayson from seven years in the past. Uncertain whether she can be returned to her original time, this younger Grayson tries to make a life for herself in the future. This puts her increasingly at odds with her own present-day version, especially when she "re-"kindles a romance with Mercer.
The idea at the core of this episode is inherently fascinating. Who hasn't contemplated being able to go back and make a key decision from their past differently? Or imagined being able to sit your younger self down and caution them about moments from your past (their future) that you wish you'd handled some other way? Where The Orville really has fun with this premise is in taking a more honest look at this wishful thinking. Would your younger self actually welcome this sort of meddling? (It's somewhat akin to the Next Generation episode "Second Chances," which posed similar questions without the time travel.)
Star Trek: Discovery could really learn a thing or two from how The Orville set up this premise. Throughout season two, Discovery sidestepped logic to get at the character drama they wanted. The Orville's sidestep here was more deft, giving us permission to not take it all So Damn Seriously. It bundled up all the questions in a tight little package (even getting a comedic scene out of it), got them out of the way, and then moved on with the story it wanted to tell. No, we don't know if time travel forms a closed loop on this show, or if it splits reality into unconnected, parallel paths. Yes, it makes your head hurt if you scrutinize it, but the characters are going to hang a lantern on that and then stop picking at it so that you can do the same.
With that out of the way, room was opened up for a really great performance by Adrianne Palicki. Tasked with playing both Commander Grayson and young Lieutenant Grayson, she truly rose to the occasion. She had a boost from the hair and makeup department (who also did great and subtle work here), but really infused her two performances with subtle nuances and made them two recognizably different people. The past version of the character was full of exuberance that poked through not just in her "party animal" moments. You didn't need the physical changes to know which version you were looking at in any given moment.
Though Grayson was the character who literally meets her past self, she was not the only character who got to explore "the road not taken" in this episode. Mercer had a nice plot arc in the episode too, basically a slow realization that sometimes, you "can't go back again." Though initially enthusiastic about this sci-fi loophole that would let him try again with Kelly as he wanted, he soon realized the awkwardness of it all in a fun and honest way. Don't get me wrong, Adrianne Palicki was blowing Seth MacFarlane off the screen, performance-wise, but it was among the better work MacFarlane has done on the series.
There was a fun little shift at the end, too. It turns out that all that earlier stuff about "what kind of time travel story are we in" wasn't just meant for laughs -- the final moment of the episode paid it off. Actually, I'm not even 100% sure how to read it, which is an unusually sophisticated choice for the series. Armed with knowledge and free will, Young Kelly changed her destiny and made a different choice for her life. I interpreted this as a one-off, a moment with consequences we'll likely never see on the show. We're just left to imagine for ourselves how Grayson's life will unfold differently in the reality where she never marries Mercer. But another way I suppose they could go with this is to permanently tweak some underlying premises of the show; when the next episode comes, we could just be living in that alternate timeline I think we were only meant to imagine.
I think The Orville delivered a solid episode here. I give it a B+. Next, we'll see how big a finale they serve up. (And whether that finale will serve for the season or, sadly, the series.)
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