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THE ORVILLE S2, E14: "THE ROAD NOT TAKEN"

They lost me four times:

  1. Beta-whatthefuck fixes everything.
  2. Let's go in the event horizon, cause there's nothing dangerous about why light can't escape.
  3. Seven miles of pressure differential going down in a couple of minutes, no problem!
  4. We can fly a crashed ship back up seven miles in a couple of minutes - still no pressure problems - and across the galaxy.
Hardly exhaustive - everyone can add to the list.

I thoroughly enjoyed the dumb thing. Because Ed and Kelly and Claire and Alara and Everybody.
 
Well, I'd like to have seen the last few minutes of the episode, but FOX's website ran the countdown to another show and jumped right to it while I was still watching. For some reason, there's no progress bar on the website, so I can't just jump back to where I was. I'll have to wait until it hits Hulu tomorrow before I see the last few minutes.

That said, what I did see was a lot of fun! So Lt. Kelly did remember because a chemical that deals with memory was deficient in her brain leaving the mind wipe ineffective. She decides to reject Ed in the hopes that she will save them both a lot of pain, not really considering how that will strongly affect the timeline, because she likely had no idea just what kind of shit they managed to prevent over the course of a few years on board.

Side note here: When talking about Ed and Kelly in the "correct" timeline, Ed asked whether they were getting along, and alternate Lt. Kelly said that yes, his Cmdr. Kelly *loves* him. She clearly saw that our Kelly still loves Ed. I want that explored further next season.

It was great seeing our characters in somewhat different surroundings, with the Kaylon having successfully decimated the Union, taking out Earth, Moclas, and who knows what else. Our favorite characters as a ragtag rebel group with Alara (hey! :D ) running an underground outpost was really cool. Seeing them return to Earth and the Orville resting on the sea floor was a great shot. Hell, the effects shots were brilliant in this episode. Between the effects and the music, though I had a distinct classic Star Wars impression. I loved seeing the crew bring the Orville back to life, and emerging from the ocean floor. I think this was the episode that sealed the Orville as a character herself, something I hadn't yet cottoned on to in the series. Now, I was rooting for her to pull herself together and haul ass out of the ocean and back into space where she belonged.

That, also, is where the episode cut off for me, so I'll have to catch whatever was left on Hulu tomorrow, and I don't care if it's only a whole minute or ten minutes, I want to see every second of it, because this was a fun ride. I think The Orville has made great strides in its first two seasons. While I genuinely enjoy them, I find that The Orville's first two are markedly superior to TNG's first two.

That said, since I didn't see the last bits, I can't say much on the ending, but I do know its a cliffhanger, unless they solved everything in a handful of minutes, which I doubt. So it's a cliffhanger, you bastards? Yeah, I want a third season. This was a lot of fun, which makes it a win for me.
 
Also a lot of Voyager's "Timeless" in this one. And parking below the event horizon of a black hole could be done. So what if light can't escape from it, if your ship can fly faster than light.
 
Gasp! Alara!!!! :adore:

Okay, that was really a fantastic episode. Push me down, I could really get nitpicky, but it was really good and everything played out nicely and made sense in the logic of the show. It's interesting that while Ed/Kelly was the crux of the diversion point the real key to everything was the Claire/Isaac relationship.

But, man, there was a lot to really like here, the music in it was fantastic (some of it kind of reminded me of Wrath of Khan) and liked seeing the "battle hardened" versions of these characters, even if it'd only been a few months.

Some.... "Timeline disparities" I picked up on.

Talia was only on the Orville at Ed's insistence of having another Xelayan security officer when Alara left, a lot of "just happened to..." would need to occur for Talia to end up on the Orville too from whomever got the ship instead of Ed. Along the same lines, it was Dr. Finn who developed the painful "gravity treatments" for Alara to potentially stay on the Orville, again, a lot of things would have to so happen to happen for the doctor on the Orville to develop the treatments for Alara (and for them to available to her after society in the galaxy collapsed.)

And my nitpicky issue...

Okay.... I can kind of "buy" that the FTL drives in this universe work in a manner to "really" move an object FTL so that it can escape a black hole. Maybe. But the ship was able to withstand and tolerate the gravitational forces of being in the black hole (spaghettification, anyone?) either due to shield or construction technology but it couldn't survive at the bottom of the Mariana Trench? And if the freighter could go in the black hole, certainly the Kaylon fighter could have? Right?

Bah, whatever.

it was a good episode, really enjoyed it and hope to see a Season 3!

(If not the two seasons work "nicely" as a closed arc.)

And parking below the event horizon of a black hole could be done. So what if light can't escape from it, if your ship can fly faster than light.

Ehhh..... Maybe. Depending on how you want to think of how their FTL drive works. Is it really generating a force that is pushing the ship to FTL speeds or is it manipulating the fabric of space so that moving at slower speeds is like moving faster than light? And even if either of those is the case and it's able to get the ship out speed-wise, there's the immense gravitational forces at play. Your head is 5-6 feet or so further away from the center of the Earth than your feet. Your head, thus, is pulled ever so slightly less by gravity. Well, in a black hole this is magnified countless times over the the point where the disparity between to atoms is so great that they're stretched out into strands of energy.
 
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Also a lot of Voyager's "Timeless" in this one. And parking below the event horizon of a black hole could be done. So what if light can't escape from it, if your ship can fly faster than light.
According to this physicist, sure:
Dori Reichmann PhD in physics/String Theory said:
Could a particle just inside a black hole's event horizon quantum tunnel to a point just beyond the barrier?
That is a very good question.

To answer, it we need to remember that for a large black hole the horizon has no unique local property (the event horizon is a global property that cannot be “seen” locally).

For a particle near the edge of the horizon (doesn’t matter which side) spacetime looks quite normal, with a large enough black hole, the gravity can be weak as necessary to be ignored. So going outside the horizon isn’t a case of a large barrier at all.

So what happens at the horizon ? The particle light cone is directed toward the singularity, hence going outside the horizon means the particle needs to travel back in time, or move on a space-like curve.

So we can re-ask the question as
  • “Can a particle tunnel in a way that breaks causality ?”
To answer the question we need to look at relativistic QM (non-relativistic QM has no light-cone constraints). Here we can use relativistic propagators (Propagator - Wikipedia) to see that there is no support for the wave function outside the light-cone. Ie, a particle cannot tunnel in a non-causal way.

Conclusion: A particle cannot tunnel itself outside the black hole horizon.

Comment for the experts: I am ignoring issues related to complementarity, firewall etc. In the above the horizon is exactly the classical general relativity picture with no additional quantum properties.
Source: https://www.quora.com/Could-a-parti...tum-tunnel-to-a-point-just-beyond-the-barrier

So, light speed? No.
Faster than light using some method of non-relativistic motion? Quite possibly. Since the "Quantum Drive" operates under properties we don't understand from this side of the TV screen, the answer is clearly yes.

As for surviving the event horizon, well according to this article: https://www.space.com/black-holes-event-horizon-explained.html
Event horizons aren't quite what we think they are, and may not actually consist of hard boundaries as we know them.

In short, there's just enough hand-wavey science to suggest that what the crew did was plausible. That's more than enough for me, not that it bothered me either way.
 
I'm going to avoid the spoilers, and just vent here.

I missed starting the show at 9:00, so I started watching at 10 on Fox's website. For some reason, the little progress bar which allows you to jump back and forth though the episode isn't there.

I got around 2/3rds through the episode (right to where they talk about going to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean) and I got stuck on an endless commercial break with no commercial. After a few minutes of this, I paused and unpaused in an effort to stop the freeze. The entire episode restarted from the beginning and I'm unable to jump ahead. Meaning I have to let the episode now replay in the background for nearly 30 minutes - or just give up on watching it until they actually allow me to jump around.
 
I'm going to avoid the spoilers, and just vent here.

I missed starting the show at 9:00, so I started watching at 10 on Fox's website. For some reason, the little progress bar which allows you to jump back and forth though the episode isn't there.

I got around 2/3rds through the episode (right to where they talk about going to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean) and I got stuck on an endless commercial break with no commercial. After a few minutes of this, I paused and unpaused in an effort to stop the freeze. The entire episode restarted from the beginning and I'm unable to jump ahead. Meaning I have to let the episode now replay in the background for nearly 30 minutes - or just give up on watching it until they actually allow me to jump around.
Last week, they couldn't even get the videos to load on the site for hours. I ended up just waiting the next day as I have Hulu. That said, tonight I got to the last few minutes when a timer popped up saying it was jumping to some other FOX show I didn't care about in 10 seconds. There was no way to stop it, no way to cancel any countdown, and so at 0 it jumped to whatever the hell was trying to load. I went back, and the Orville episode started over. There is no progress bar at the bottom for some dumbass reason. FOX's webmasters don't seem to be very good at their job.
 
I think the best thing about this episode in particular and the show in general is the essentially sweet natures of the people and of Ed and Kelly's relationship. None of these people are really either titans or rogues. They're just folks.

And again, I loved that what held the universe together was Ed - not because he's gifted or a hero or a brilliant tactician or anything, but because the people who have been moved to help him would not be together otherwise.

You notice that his career neither went off the rails or tremendously improved because Kelly wasn't in his life? He just plugged away going somewhere, neither a washout or a fast track kind of guy.
 
I liked the episode a lot. If the show isn’t renewed it’s s worthy finale.

The black hole thing I’m going to pretend they didn’t do or my science brain will break harder than the red matter thing.

Also it made me really miss Alara.
 
Last week, they couldn't even get the videos to load on the site for hours. I ended up just waiting the next day as I have Hulu.

I have Hulu TV. I used the DVR feature to record it because I knew I wouldn't get home in time. I ended up seeing it at ten.
 
This episode just didn't work for me at all. The SFX and music were great. Some nice homages to other franchises (ESB asteroid field.) The story and characters just didn't work for me though. Easily my least favorite episode of the season, and maybe of the show so far.
 
I have Hulu TV. I used the DVR feature to record it because I knew I wouldn't get home in time. I ended up seeing it at ten.
We had Hulu TV for a while, but our local cable provider came up with a better offer (in terms of live TV) and so my family went for it. I mean, waiting a day isn't a sacrifice or anything, but it's super frustrating when you're only looking to see the last, say, 5 minutes of an episode that was cut off.
 
We had Hulu TV for a while, but our local cable provider came up with a better offer (in terms of live TV) and so my family went for it. I mean, waiting a day isn't a sacrifice or anything, but it's super frustrating when you're only looking to see the last, say, 5 minutes of an episode that was cut off.
Oh yeah, been there. And the DVR isn't perfect either. I still got to see the end, but the recording skipped a couple of minutes during the climax.
 
Last week, they couldn't even get the videos to load on the site for hours. I ended up just waiting the next day as I have Hulu. That said, tonight I got to the last few minutes when a timer popped up saying it was jumping to some other FOX show I didn't care about in 10 seconds. There was no way to stop it, no way to cancel any countdown, and so at 0 it jumped to whatever the hell was trying to load. I went back, and the Orville episode started over. There is no progress bar at the bottom for some dumbass reason. FOX's webmasters don't seem to be very good at their job.

So, I let the show play in the background again...stayed up for it. I managed to get to the one commercial break that I hung on for awhile before. It hung for me again, but eventually I got through it.

Right around when Ed was opening up a bottle at the bar on The Orville, a thing came up on the bottom (even though there were like 13 more minutes on the guest pass!) saying Gotham was going to start in 30 seconds. There was no way to stop it. I paused, and The Orville teed up again with no progress bar.

I give up. It doesn't seem like I'm missing much.

Edit: In past episodes, I haven't been able to use the progress bar for a short period of time close to broadcast. I think Fox does this to ensure that no one actually skips ahead while the show is in live broadcast in order to spoiler the ending for everyone else. But it seems like whoever's job it was to fix this was asleep at the wheel.
 
Really a fun little episode in a brainless kind of way. There were so many eye rolling, head slapping moments, I had to watch it the way I watch some of the bad TOS episodes to really enjoy it, and have fun I did. Hardly anything worked for me but it was fun. I would have preferred they stay in the alternate universe and work their way out next season. Why does alt Kelly look more attractive than Orville Kelly? Is it the hair, the rebel outfit? It would have been fun to spend more time with the rebel crew. That's my take away.
 
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