After destroying a Krill vessel that was attacking a human colony, the Orville discovers a shuttle that was thrown clear from the ship. It’s intact and, desperate for intelligence on their enemies, the Admiralty order Ed and Gordon to use it to go undercover on a Krill ship. But when they do, they discover the awful truth not just about their enemies but what they’re planning…

After a run of good to ‘Wait a second that was actually pretty great’ episodes, The Orville crashes with this absolute honker of an hour of TV. It’s redeemed by precisely three things: the profoundly dark and nuanced ending, Michaela McManus’ work as Teleya, and the fact it eventually ends.

The basic premise should work, and for the first ten minutes or so it does. A welcome cameo from Kelly Hu sets up a really smart and compassionately based idea; steal a Krill bible (known as the Ankhana) as a means of better understanding them and hopefully making peace. The Orville recovered the shuttle, they’re right near the border and they have a limited time window. All of this makes sense.

The episode stops making sense around the time Ed and Gordon realize they never bothered picking Krill cover names. It gets worse when Gordon starts a never ending stream of variations on the same. exact. joke about the Krill god sharing a name with a 20th century car rental firm. By the time this exchange happens:

‘Where is your compatriot?’

‘…I don’t know what that word means.’

It becomes painfully clear that the show has a serious problem, and it’s Gordon-shaped. In fact it’s Gordon- and Isaac-shaped. Six episodes in, Isaac is a plot device with legs and Gordon has had a lot of development. Almost all of it is that he’s a barely functional moron who is a liability in every single situation that doesn’t involve flying a ship. That has the potential to be interesting, as the episode examines the pressures of working undercover. It even does that for the first few scenes as the two human officers settle in as best they can.

Then the Avis jokes start and the entire thing nosedives. It’s not even that it’s good comedy, it isn’t. It’s that it’s terrible comedy that renders the dramatic elements nonsensical. Gordon and Ed should be killed as traitors within minutes of arriving. Instead, they’re allowed to bumble around on a ship we’re told is crewed by the most dangerous race in the universe. A race that lets two of its soldiers, calling themselves Chris and Devon, pass unopposed.

This becomes especially egregious as the episode takes a hard right turn into serious drama. The three stage reveal should work: Ed and Gordon discover the ship is about to bomb a human colony, they discover there are Krill children aboard and they make the best of a series of bad calls. It’s classic Starfleet ‘needs of the many’ stuff. Or it should be.

Instead, we get a 10 minute countdown for no reason except drama, Macfarlane getting an extended fight scene that seems to be the same corridor shot from two different angles and Gordon being an idiot, yet again. Worse still, the pay off to this, with Ed facing down the children and Teleya (Michaela McManus) their teacher and the sister of one of the Krill killed in the opening scene, is this.

‘…Don’t be mad.’

You can actually hear the air rushing out of the episode. Not even the actual ending, which confronts Ed with the impossibility of the right choice lands after that. The gear change is too drastic, the jokes too relentlessly unfunny and appallingly badly placed.

Verdict: ‘Krill’ has some decent lines and good jokes in the opening quarter. The special effects are great and the central dilemma should work. Instead, this is the worst episode of the season to date by some margin. It’s not funny enough to work as a comedy and not dramatic enough to work as a drama. Unlike its leads, it lacks the courage of its convictions and if the show has more scripts this bad on the way, it’s in serious trouble. Here’s hoping this is the bottom of the dive. It needs to be. 2/10

Alasdair Stuart