Episode 3 Of The Orville: Mortality Paradox Is A Fun And Uniquely Ingenious Voyage Into The Existentially Unknown

Liz Gillies as Dinal in Ep 303: Mortality Paradox. All photos courtesy of Hulu.

The episode opens with Lt. Talla Keyali coming back from visiting her family on Xelaya and promptly reporting to Cmdr Grayson that the scanners on her shuttle picked up the faintest of Kaylon warp-drive signatures near planet Narran 1 a dessert wasteland that isn’t too far off from their current course. Anything involving the Kaylons is concerning but when the crew head over to Narran 1 to take a look, what they, or at least what their scanners find is a now vibrant planet brimming with life, energy, and not a single Kaylon in sight all of which is, well, more than a bit concerning. When an away team comprised of Capt. Ed Mercer, Cmdr. Kelly Grayson, Lt. Cmdr. Bortus, Lt. Gordon Malloy, and Lt. Talla Keyali land on the planet’s surface to find out if it’s all a mistake they are in for one hell of a ride.

Upon setting foot on the planet the team finds only trees and an earth-style High School with actual students attending classes. No other buildings, no modes of transportation, no other people, just the Oakwood Tigers and some guy named Randal. Once inside the building, the team is locked in, and not even Talla can break through the doors or windows so they split up to explore their newfound holding cell and it’s at that very moment where a whole lot of geeks and nerds get to relive high school. Gordon, while separated from Talla and Bortus, gets dragged into a bathroom and roughed up by several bullies who work for Randal, a guy Gordon supposedly owes money to and said money needs to be paid by 3;15 or Randal will do something bad to Gordon. The bullies leave, but Gordon’s wounds are real and now the line between this situation being a hallucination, some form of time travel incident, or the stumbling upon an unknown type of reality is getting blurred.

The team’s only option is to find Randal and try to find some pieces to this current existence but when they find Randal, he’s a literal monster that literally tries to kill Gordon, and when that happens Gordon has an out-of-body experience, one where he’s conscience of what is happening to him but his conscience just steps out of his mind for a moment then slides back in without any effort on his part. The team runs back into the school to evade Randal except now the building is a commercial airplane flying in inclement weather and it’s Ed’s turn to both get roughed up and have an out-of-body, near-death experience. When one of the team has a near-death experience, all of reality resets itself for another team member to have one with each experience being cultivated to suit the person about to go through some stuff. Meanwhile, The Orville (with  Lt. Cmdr. John LaMarr at the helm) is unable to communicate with the away team and after a brief three-way argument with LaMarr, Ensign Charly Burke, and Isaac, Lt LaMarr sends another team to the surface to see if they can make sense of all of this and that would be a no because it simply wasn’t time for things to make sense.

After Talla’s NDE they all decided they’d had enough, they weren’t going to go through any more doors that lead to nothing which begins the breaking down of the reality they were being forced to experience both internally and externally by Dinal, an alien whose species while derived from a race that the crew has already made contact with whose planet was known to be locked in a multi-phasic orbit, meaning it hopped back and forth between two universes that orbited the same star that existed in both universes. If you haven’t seen the episode Mad Idolatry here’s a great recap. Moving on.

Dinal’s race has become immortal and when you don’t have to worry about death after a while living gets a bit stale so you need something to shake things up, which is what she did, and she wasn’t the least bit sorry about it, but her rationale and the idea that we don’t have to rely on evolution to create better life forms of all varieties is incredibly intriguing and once the away team is back on the ship and the senior staff debrief, their discussions on life and death give viewers just a sliver of something to mentally gnaw on and hopefully discuss.

The whole episode is just astonishing. It’s thrilling, thought-provoking, fun, and a fresh way to explore often pragmatic views on our existence and place in the universe and can be streamed right here on Hulu.