The Orville EP 6 Twice In A Lifetime Shows How Clouded Judgment Can Tear A Path Into The Future

Time travel is the backbone of sci-fi. As soon as humankind discovered time, we wanted more of it. More time meant we could do more, see more, acquire more, and eventually, control more all with a varying degree of good or bad results depending on who intentionally or unintentionally was in control. Twice In A Lifetime is a brilliant walk-through of what can happen when the march of time travel progress lies in the right hands but at the wrong time and under the worst-case scenario with no way of limiting the repercussions caused by the best of intentions.

Episode 6 begins with a little get-together in Lt Malloy’s quarters with Gordon showing off his vocal skills and Charly showing off her Isaac-stay-the-hell-away-from-me skills when the ensign sees something strange on Malloy’s desk. It’s a replica of a cellular phone from the 21 rst century, one that belonged to Laura Huggins, Gordon’s love interest from season 2’s Lasting Impressions, but Charly doesn’t get filled in on the details. There’s just a quick walk down memory lane, and dated selfie with Bortus, and another glass of bourbon and they call it a night. Except it doesn’t end there and never will. Or maybe it will. Time, with all of its mysteries and fluctuations, is a weird thing to navigate.

Lt Cmdr LaMarr and his team have taken quite a liking to the Aronov device and with the upgrades they completed on it the device is now a thing of power like nothing the Planetary Union has ever seen. The quantum field it generates is considerably larger than before and the device can now send things into the future and the past which sounds an awful lot like a call to Admiral Perry. While stunned and less than optimistic about “John’s new toy” the Admiral sends a fleet to meet and escort the Orville to a maximum security research base called Sabik 3. It’s a well-calculated move but someone else is a few steps ahead of the Union and wants in on the quantum accelerator action at all cost.

When the USS Olympia (captained by Admiral Ozawa) hails the base and no one responds, the fleet double-times it to the outpost only to find it destroyed courtesy of the Kaylons who then mount a deadly offensive against the fleet in an effort to get their hands on the Aronov device and nearly succeed. However, in the heat of battle where heavy damage is occurring on all Union fronts, one helmsman is about to deal with and do the unthinkable.

Gordon is tasked with destroying the device before the Kaylons can board the ship but in the process of overloading the quantum core in an effort to break a tractor beam holding the Orville hostage, part of the surge that breaks the tractor beam is focused into and through the device, knocking Lt Malloy and the Malloys that splinter from him into space-time, with at least one version of Gordon getting pushed all the way back to Earth circa 2015. When it’s discovered he’s nowhere to be found on the ship, an incoming transmission somehow sent from Gordon in the past to intercept the Orville at that very moment in the future reveals he is trapped on Earth, and with the coordinates he provided, is asking to be rescued. With enough ingenuity and Isaac’s calculations, the ship travels back in time but can’t make it to 2015 because they run out of Dysonium, a critical source of power needed for such large energy expenditures. They find Gordon, but he’s definitely not the same guy he was before.

It’s Ed and Kelley who find Gordon alive and well flying private commercial airplanes to make ends meet. As shocked as Gordon is when they stroll up to his hanger, it’s obvious that he has no intention of going back with the crew. He has a wife, a son, and a baby on the way, a secure job, a house, and everything a regular person could want or need. When the crew didn’t come back for him, and after Gordon spent three years in solitude obeying temporal law, he decided he’d had enough and went to find Laura Huggins because he knew her timeline and could take advantage of his prior knowledge of events to find her, woo her, and create a life he shouldn’t have, potentially causing irreparable harm to future generations both here and among the stars. The showdown between Ed, Kelly, Talla, and Gordon is a rough one to watch but it pales to the goodbyes between Laura, Gordon, and their son. If you haven’t started crying yet, you will.

While all of this is going on, Charly and Isaac are off looking for a Dysonium deposit discovered in another part of the city and while they were able to procure the power source, Charly’s hatred for Isaac reaches a boiling point because she just wants to be left alone but Isaac has his own version of unfinished business with her that he will not put on pause. Charly snaps opening up her own old wounds by revealing what Amanda really meant to her and why she still harbors bad sentiments towards him. It brutal scene that gives us more insight into Charly’s unrelenting anger towards Isaac and where it may lead in the upcoming episodes.

So, with Dysonium on tap and the ship repaired, Ed makes the call to go back even farther in time, to 2015 and get Gordon before he loses his perspective and makes the same multitude of mistakes again. Unfortunately within the process of going back time the device is destroyed, making the possibility of the Orville being stuck in 2015 for at least the next six months while it’s being repaired highly likely. However, when you have a superior engineer on board who knows his way around Einstein’s special theory of relativity and an AI robot whose calculations are always perfection (unless said AI is playing golf with said engineer and a wayward helmsman) you create a way back home.

Written by Seth MacFarlane and directed by Jon Cassar Twice In A Life Time is everything a modern take on a classic sci-fi storyline should be. The story is deeply philosophical, it gives plenty of nods to all the sci-fi that has come before it but still manages to make this episode very much its own, the side stories do not distract from the main, the visuals are the stuff of dreams (and an editor’s nightmare I’m sure), and the cast is just brilliant with Scott Grimes’ performance being a solid A.

The Orville: New Horizons Twice In A Lifetime is available to stream, along with all previous season 3 episodes right here on Hulu