The Final 2 Episodes of The Orville Solidify Its Place as a Trek Cover Band

I wasn't really enthused about watching Season 2 of Fox's The Orville, but I did it anyway mostly on Hulu.  I actually saved up the last three episodes to watch all at once.  The last two were really disappointing because they were such obvious Star Trek: The Next Generation rip-offs.

The penultimate episode the Kaylon Isaac and chief engineer Lamar are dicking around with some kind of time machine thing Isaac has been working on when they hit a gravimetric wave or whatever technobabble that triggers the device shortly after First Officer Kelly Grayson had come into the lab.  Shortly thereafter a second Grayson from 7 years earlier appears.

And I'm thinking, Oh, hey, this is like that Next Generation where they found the duplicate Riker--Thomas Riker.  Only that was some bullshit with him being stored in a transporter buffer or something instead of time travel, which actually the transporter made more sense and a less messy story.

But for the most part it brought up a lot of the same issues:  the awkwardness of having two of the same person, the age and maturity differences, and the creepiness of the younger one wanting to rekindle a relationship with someone on the ship.  In the TNG episode it was Riker and Troi but in the Orville it was younger Grayson and the captain, Ed Mercer.  To the younger Grayson they had just gone out on their first date while to Mercer and the older one they had already been married and divorced.  At first Mercer thinks it's awesome to have a second chance, but then he realizes that he and this Grayson are not really as compatible as they were seven years ago.

Eventually through some technobabble they find a way to send the younger Grayson back to where she was.  But first the doctor gives her an injection to wipe her memory.  Except it doesn't work and when the Mercer of her time calls her for another date, she rejects him.  Which shouldn't be that big of a deal, right?

The next episode starts with two guys at a listening post on some snowy planet.  They're rummaging through the place to steal what looks like a microwave when they're attacked by Kaylons.  Even though the guys were wearing masks, I was thinking, come on this is Mercer and Gordon, the helmsman.  And I was right.  Then it goes all Empire Strikes Back as they fly their shuttle through an ice field to escape Kaylon ships tracking them.  Except they don't get swallowed by a giant space worm thing.

Anyway, Mercer and Gordon are looking scruffy and their ship is beat up and at first I wondered if it were a mirror universe kind of episode.  But then they meet up with Grayson and the rest of the crew on a freighter and are told that when Grayson rejected Mercer in the past it changed the timeline so Mercer never captained the Orville and the Kaylon destroyed Earth.

And then I thought, Oh, wait, this is "Yesterday's Enterprise!"  One of the better episodes of TNG and notable because it featured the return of Tasha Yar, the security officer who died in the first season.  In that episode the previous Enterprise, the Enterprise-C, had been fighting some Romulans to help some Klingons when it suddenly disappeared through a temporal rift.  That changed the timeline so that the Federation and Klingons were still at war, Worf was obviously not in the crew, the Enterprise-D was a warship instead of an exploratory vessel, and Yar was still alive.

Similarly the Orville episode brought back the security officer who left the show early in season 2, though only for a cameo that didn't do a lot.  Most of the episode has the crew going back to Earth to find the Orville and reactivate Isaac so they can recreate the time travel device and send the doctor back to wipe the younger Grayson's memory to put history right.

Here's where really we get to the crux of the problem.  The TNG episode was great because it involved Yar realizing she was supposed to be dead and then deciding to go back with the Enterprise-C to help them fight the Romulans and put the timeline right.  The rest of the Enterprise-C crew also had to sacrifice themselves to make things right, knowing full well they were going to die.  Whereas the Orville no one really sacrifices anything.  It's about as dramatic as Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure.  They try to make an issue that Mercer hadn't been in command of anything in the revised timeline and now has to take command and...sit in a chair and shout a few orders.  Ooh, wow.  Real tough.

In music to cover a song is to rerecord an old song.  Usually what you want to do is put a new spin on it.  Like doing a country version of a pop song or vice versa.  I remember one time I heard some group do a cover of Don Henley's "Boys of Summer" and it really sucked because there was no real attempt to put any passion or thought into it; they just sang the words and played the tune as blandly as possible.  Why even bother with it?

That's what too many episodes of The Orville wind up doing.  They cover Star Trek episodes but they don't really put a new spin on it.  Worse, like the season finale, they seem to miss the point of what they're covering entirely.  Why even bother with it?

My brother and I agreed that the show really sucks when it comes to big episodes because they just wind up covering Trek--badly.  The smaller, character episodes work better.  Though even that sometimes backfires like with that penultimate episode.  Or one before that when Gordon fell in love with a 21st Century woman's iPhone.  (OK, a hologram made from the data in her phone, but still it was creepy as hell.)  I already lamented they had a good episode exploring a relationship between the doctor and Isaac but then blew that up by making the Kaylon evil.  And then the rest of the season they put Isaac on the sidelines, never exploring how he was adapting to being cut off from the other Kaylons, how the crew was accepting him after his betrayal, and so on.  It's like the writers forgot about him the rest of the season.

But the overall problem is still this is a show that can't decide if it wants to be a drama or comedy so it weaves around between the two.  I guess it got picked up for a third season so I guess it'll keep limping along for another year--whenever that happens.  I'll probably again just watch it on Hulu when I have nothing else to watch.

When it comes to writing they say there are no original ideas so to an extent everyone is covering someone else.  But the point is that you have to bring your own flavor to it.  Even if you're doing a straight-up adaptation of something like Shakespeare or Jane Austen you still want to put your own spin on it to make it yours.