Talla returns from shore leave just in time for the ship to pick up a signal from Narran 1. But no one lives on Narran 1…

Spoilers

There’s a style starting to develop for New Horizons and it’s a really interesting one. All three episodes so far have taken a very hard left turn in the final act and all three have done it to pretty increasingly successful degrees. The jeopardy of ‘Electric Sheep’ felt a little forced, the chilling final moments of ‘Shadow Realms’ save the episode and the final act here not only patches any holes in the script but marks the show out as happy to return to its roots and grow something new from them.

To get there, you, like the crew, have to navigate what at times feels pretty choppy. The various scenarios they’re run through on Narran 1 play, at first, as a little cheesy. The ‘High School on an alien world!’ especially feels a little forced at first. But that fades very quickly, right around the time Gordon gets the living hell beaten out of him. There’s a trend in fight choreography at the moment to go simple, locked down and brutal. We see it in one of the early episodes of Strange New Worlds, we saw it in the fight in ‘Shadow Realms’ and we absolutely see it here. There’s no comedy, no absurdity, just an average sized guy getting stomped flat. Scott Grimes plays it brilliantly too and the trauma of that moment grounds the rest of the episode. Looking back it’s also the moment where you realize the crew’s fears are never quite assigned out loud. You can guess whose scenario is whose; Bortus’ journey through a mausoleum revealing his fear of death is especially affecting. But the show trusts you to figure it out, just like the crew trust each other. Bortus, Ed, Gordon and Kelly all get some pretty interesting stuff to do here especially when everything wraps up. Wraps up, as Homer Simpson once said, everything wraps up nicely, and much quicker than usual.

Enter the final act twist, stage left and this one’s a doozy.

In short order we get a plausible, terrifying new Kaylon weapon, a beat focusing on Charly’s hatred of the Kaylon, a pretty solid space battle and… a moment of absolute impossible scale. The image of a Kaylon vessel, frozen in time, inches from the Orville viewscreen is a high point for the special effects team who’ve never done less than great work on this show. And then we get the reveal: this is a sequel.

‘Mad Idolatry’ was the season 1 finale way back in 2017(!). It’s a great episode, concerning a planet where time moves very differently and Kelly is accidentally the basis of a major religion. Here, a descendant of the people on that world uses Narran 1 as a lab, and the command crew as rats for a simple, deeply alien reason; they’re immortal and they want to know what mortality feels like, having forgotten.,

This is classic big idea Star Trek territory and it’s territory the show is very comfortable in. There’s a lovely ambiguity to what’s going on. Elizabeth Gillies is fantastic as Dinal, the orchestrator of the experiment, giving the role a Q-esque playfulness but with a far colder, less malicious edge. This is a science experiment, one that has left no marks but does leave a lasting impression and the crew’s debate on how they feel about it is absolutely the intersection between big idea sense of wonder SF and the sort of ‘office workers in space’ comedy The Orville is getting increasingly good at. It also – given Ed’s comment about wanting to live forever and MacFarlane’s rumoured desire to be killed off – possibly sets some interesting breadcrumbs for what’s to come.

Verdict: The more I think about this episode the more I like it. The big ideas at its core are solid, the nature of the script is playful and subversive and it’s ridiculously well plotted. If this is the house style for New Horizons, it suits the show very well. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart