WARNING: This thread WILL contain unhidden spoilers for this episode and every episode before it. You are allowed to talk about future episodes of the series, but put ANY information that comes after this episode behind spoiler tags.
The Orville season 1, episode 6 “Krill”
Written by David A. Goodman, directed by Jon Cassar.
After rescuing a Union colony from a Krill attack, The Orville salvages an intact Krill shuttle from the wreckage of its cruiser. Union Command sends Admiral Ozawa (Kelly Hu) to examine the unique find and uses it to send Captain Mercer & Lieutenant Malloy undercover to learn more about the Krill. Their peaceful fact-finding mission quickly turns into a fight for survival for them and for over 100,000 innocent people.
Originally released: 12 October 2017
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What did you think?
Really love this one; I think it’s between this and “About a Girl” for best episode so far. Mercer gets to do some proper “captain stuff”, wrestling with an impossible ethical question where all outcomes are bad. It also juggles a number of solid comedy bits for an episode with such a heavy story. Having to do the mass-murder up close and personal makes this much darker than the usual “blow up the enemy ship” approach and while the show doesn’t wallow in that feeling too much, it lends a satisfying dramatic weight to the episode.
Vague spoiler for future episodes
The repercussions of this episode continue to ripple through the entire series. It’s critically important to the overall story, so it’s fantastic that it came together so well while setting up a number of plot points (and one in particular) which the audience are trusted to remain invested in. That it is able to do all of this without becoming an exposition dump episode is even better.
The writer here, David A. Goodman, is well-known in Star Trek circles for writing the Futurama Star Trek episode, “Where No Fan Has Gone Before” (George Takei: “I think I’ve done enough conventions to know how to spell Melllvar.”). He was an also an early writer on Family Guy, but the bigger story here is that you can draw a direct line from that episode to the eventual creation of The Orville.
Goodman was interviewed by TrekMovie about how this came about, but it takes a bit of backstory. Goodman’s agent called Brannon Braga over at Star Trek: Enterprise to try to get Goodman an interview to write for that show. The Enterprise team had seen the Futurama episode and were also wanting to inject more comedy into the show, so Goodman already had an in.
Goodman was recruited to the show and would write/produce four episodes. He also told the team that Seth MacFarlane was a massive Star Trek fan and got him a guest appearance in one of his episodes, “The Forgotten”. This is how the trio of MacFarlane, Goodman and Braga came together, eventually going on to produce The Orville. It’s fun to know that the sci-fi, animation and comedy worlds uniting in Futurama also brought together all of the pieces that led to The Orville.
