Command Performance opens with the Orville answering a distress call from a nearby freighter. Because we aren’t allowed to have nice things, the episode stops for three minutes while guest stars Jeffrey Tambor and Holland Taylor do their best with an extended routine about Ed’s possible diverticulitis. It’s AWFUL and sets up what you expect to be the show’s equivalent of every Lwaxana Troi episode.

It’s a pleasant surprise then that when Ed and Kelly go over to the ship, it’s revealed to be a trap. They disappear, the ship turns out to b a holographic projection and Alara, newly in command, is dropped into the deep end on her very first day.

This is the smartest piece of plotting the show has done to date and speaks to it, maybe, starting to make peace with its warring gods. The sitcom expectations of the comedy side are actually used to drive the drama here and it works surprisingly well. Unfortunately the episode doesn’t really do anything with it beyond this initial nice reveal but it’s at least stretching a bit. The idea of Ed and Kelly being put on display in a zoo isn’t exactly new and neither are the ‘You drink in the morning!’ / ‘You eat too loudly!’ tired gags they soon start yelling at one another. A better show, or perhaps an older one, would have done far more with the two leads’ lives becoming a literal sitcom. Here they mostly just sit around waiting to be rescued. Although, to be fair, the colossally toxic attitude Ed had to women last episode is almost entirely gone here.

The B plot works a good deal better, putting Alara front and centre. Halston Sage has a natural earnestness to her that helps you care about the young officer from the get go. She screws up, a lot, but she does so for all the right reasons and the script does a good job of making it clear that anyone in that position would do the same thing. The jokes here aren’t at the expense of her gender but at the expense of her expertise and that’s nicely handled. Plus her friendship with Doctor Finn is great, echoing the Kirk/Bones relationship but with a very different spin on things.

I’m hesitant to say both plots work in unison this week but both plots do actually work. There’s still desperately few good jokes (although Alara’s casually venomous ‘Thanks, DICK’ in one of the closing scenes is great) and an awful lot of MacFarlane seemingly waiting for a laugh track that isn’t there. Worse, there are some moments that just play weirdly: is the crew really facing no reprimand at all for disobeying orders? What about the other inhabitants of the zoo? How did the zookeepers get such a note perfect simulation of Ed’s parents?

Verdict: This is actually a functional hour of TV in the exact way the first episode frequently was not. It’s still not very good and there’s still a sense of a good two or three characters too many. And next week apparently deals with gender reassignment surgery which, given the sledgehammers this writing room has wielded so far, bluntly, terrifies me, But, despite that, this flight looks to be levelling out a bit. Hopefully that will continue. 6/10

Alasdair Stuart