The Road Not Taken

It may not have been the communal pop culture milestone of Avengers: Endgame or the Battle for Winterfell, but last week, The Orville aired its second season finale. It was a fun and unexpected conclusion to an enjoyable second year that improved on the first.

In an alternate timeline, the Kaylons are well on their way to wiping out organic life in the universe. Earth has been annihilated, and now only a few scattered survivors remain, struggling to rebel against the unstoppable invaders. Armed with knowledge about how the past might have gone differently, Kelly Grayson has a plan to change their fortunes.

I had expected the ending of the prior episode to be an unresolved, Twilight Zone-like twist just put there to make the audience speculate. Instead, it was the set-up to an action-packed episode. Word is that renewal of The Orville is something only slightly better than a coin flip at this point, but it seems as though if they are going out, they chose to leave it all on the field. They did something wild and different while they had the chance.

This visually striking episode included location shooting to present us with a winter landscape. It gave us great CG visuals, including the creepy floating Kaylon heads of death. It spent big on new sets, giving us Grayson's beat-up rebel ship, and the interior of the rebel base. Costumes, lighting -- money was spent there too to give this episode a unique flavor that stood out from other episodes of the show.

Throughout its run, The Orville has been a love letter to Star Trek (particularly The Next Generation). Yet while the idea of a "dark alternate universe" is certainly one embraced by Star Trek, this episode of The Orville was actually a love letter to a different franchise: Star Wars. It presented a world full of dirty environments, fighting rebels, and desperate flights through asteroid fields. We even got a fairly explicit nod to the door of Jabba's Palace, with Yaphit serving as security.

Composing the musical score for the episode, Joel McNeely was in on the gag, and "yes, and..."-ing it. He included explicitly Star Wars-sounding phrases, but also elements of Alien, Star Trek III, and more. It was referential without being unoriginal, a fun synthesis of John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, and James Horner that was uniquely his own. One of the best scores of the series. (And it's had many good ones, enough that a double-sized soundtrack of Season One has been released.)

On screen, things were just as fun. The characters, still themselves at the core, were thrust into different situations. It was nice to see LaMarr with a larger role again -- one that even had more personal moments in it, as a relationship was implied with the returning Alara! (And what a fun little cameo that was, bringing her back again.) No deep message to any of it, no Trek-style metaphor being presented. But it was okay to shake things up and just have fun.

I certainly do hope that coin flip comes out in The Orville's favor. I think the show really came into its own in year two, developing its own flavor and becoming more than a Star Trek "cover band." I'd love to see a season three. But I suppose if this wound up being the end, this episode could serve reasonably enough as a series finale. I give "The Road Not Taken" a B+.