THE ORVILLE S2, E9: "IDENTITY, PART II"

I don't think Identity Parts 1 or 2, or combined, were as good as BOBW Part 1. That just was a jaw dropping season finale, one that was so good that they didn't know how to match it, and certainly not exceed in it in the lackluster BOBW Part 2.

Looking back, I wish that they had made BOBW a three-parter, and used the second episode to actually show the Battle of Wolf 359, and it could've been in that episode they sneak introduced Sisko instead of the pilot of DS9. (I really liked the opening of Emissary, but I would've been fine to have gotten more of Sisko, the Saratoga, and the overall battle in a second episode, with the TNG crew capturing Picard and the end of that episode and then working to free him from the Collective in the third episode.)

I was hoping they would've included that sliver of Emissary or maybe some new footage of Wolf 359 (perhaps splicing in some scenes from the Borg video game) when they released the Blu-Ray of BOBW a few years back. It got a theatrical showing and I wish they had sweetened the pot by adding some new stuff, like showing us the Endeavour, the Roosevelt, and perhaps the Borg Queen.

I don't think Identity Part 2 was much of a letdown for me because I'm not as invested in the Orville characters. I thought, as it stands by the end of Part 2, that Isaac got off a bit too easy, but who knows what MacFarlane might have in store in future stories. Overall it was my favorite two-hours of Orville thus far, and it even exceeded BOBW in one respect, in showing us a kickass battle.

 

The Borg didn't get nerfed until Dark Frontier.

Finding a way to hack into them is the least nerfing way they could have dealt with them, at that point Starfleet weapons could still barely scratch the surface. The Borg adapt to attacks made against them, maybe nobody ever successfully kidnapped a Borg and hacked in through their interface before.

What would you suggest for how to beat that kind of threat without 'Nerfing' them?

 

Not possible - Sisko didn't exist in 1990. He wouldn't be invented for a couple of years.

 

First of all, the rescue of Picard, while suffering somewhat from the problem of having the excitement of it sucked out by both exposition excess and narrative linearization (as I'll just refer to it for now), worked well enough. Picard's cross to bear is treated in "Family." There's your BOBW3: Picard must come to terms with the guilt of being an unwilling accomplice in the deaths of so many. Again, not perfect, but not the biggest problem. So, leave all that intact.

The ideas for fixing the rest are right out in the open in "Identity Part II." I don't need to invent it, so much as translate it into Trek terms, while also staying in-premise to flesh out the rest.

We have a Borg cube which has adapted from the encounter in "Q Who," plus various outpost and miscellaneous ship hooverings. We also have post-Shelby Starfleet Tactical and a fleet that is forewarned that Picard has been captured. Whatever fleet is deployed to meet the cube, we should expect that every Starfleet starship has a Shelby underling, fully briefed in every trick she knows. Has Picard seen Shelby in action? Yes. But do we know that Starfleet weapons are capable of doing heavy damage to cubes, if they can break through their force fields? Yes. What we're looking at is heavy attrition, but we should expect (from a story-telling perspective) that every now and then concentrated fire from multiple starships will chink the cube before their squadron is blown away.

So, the ships fight bravely, falling back, doing damage bit by bit. The cube repairs itself, but the ships keep coming, dying heroically, fighting tooth and nail, never giving up, never surrendering, chink, chink, boom. But there just aren't enough ships.

And then, when all hope is lost, and Earth is in sight, a fleet of Romulans swoops in and finishes off the cube. SQUEEEE.

The Romulans have realized that they cannot have a Borg-occupied Federation at their border. The other shoe drops and S1 "The Neutral Zone" is concluded. Total game changer for the rest of the series.

 

I'd put some of the DS9 Dominion War battles up there with Identity II.

 

The Wall O' Ships battles? No.

I don't think there's been anything close to this on television. NuBSG managed to do a lot for the time, though.

 

Uh..no. I like history. I had to google this.

I think being a geek about something outside of popular cultures means being educated in a specific area. No biggie

 

Honestly, I didn't much care for it as a concept. I prefer the Orville as a lighter more sitcom in space fair with the occasional adventure.

I just can't bring myself to care about a big epic threat.

 

Yes, you can see the bluish tinge on the elements but i'm not sure if those are visible in-universe or just an artefact of the costume design to be ignored like a visible seam on a latex prosthetic.

After all the tinge is a side effect of a coloured piece sitting between the light source and the outer shell of the costume, and we know from Alara's holodeck episode last season that Kaylons can switch colour at will which indicates, that Kaylons in-universe don't put coloured elements into their bodies to generate the desired colour.

 

13-BUTTON SALUTE / THIRTEEN-BUTTON SALUTE :
euphemism for when a sailor pulls down sharply on the upper corners of the fall front on his uniform breeches so as to quickly and fully expose his genitals, often to accommodate a powerful urge to urinate copiously, or to immediately satisfy a lustful desire; see FALL, BIB, FOREPLAY.

 

Or seams/zipper lines on uniforms supposedly closed without using a zipper (more of a Star Trek thing, since zipper-less clothing hasn't been established yet in Orville.)

Anyway, I considered that part of it, that we're not supposed to see the blue tint to the lenses and it's just a small enough aspect that it's not something the show was worth producing around (making a separate costume without the bluish lenses) so leave it alone and people will deal.

So, maybe the lenses weren't the way they could tell it was Isaac, but as noted above there were other physical difference between Isaac and the other Kaylon, and there may have be some internal aspect that distinguished Isaac from the other Kaylon (something they could pick up with their sensors) or something as "simple" as detecting traces of Claire's and the kids' DNA/fingerprints on him. (It's likely there's a good deal of traces of Claire on Isaac .)

Simply put, they have spaceships that can travel the speed of light, I think they can pick out the right Kaylon they want to mourn over/revive.

 

So it should have been more closely related to the pee-corner?

 

Key word here is 'wish'. That being said, Sisko wasn't created at the time of BOBW (however I don't know when the ideas for DS9 started percolating), though they could've tied him retcon style to one of the vessels mentioned at the battle, and for the theatrical release they could've spliced his scene into that, and the Blu-Ray release.

I was thinking about this because of how TNG introduced the Maquis and built up the Maquis-Cardassian conflict before DS9 premiered. I had also read on Memory Alpha that VOY was thinking of introducing the Suliban before they showed up on ENT.

 

Not for some time after, when the studio asked Berman and Pillar to develop a follow-on Trek show. The characters did not come into being fully defined even then.

 

I haven't read all the posts, are they actually doing that? I know it's fashionable to gush over Orville and bash Trek in these threads, but not from me. It was a damn good 2 part episode, but it's not in the same league as BOBW. Maybe I am looking at the TNG episodes through rose colored glasses, but it is what it is. I doubt people will be talking about this Orville episode 30 years from now and calling it a classic.

 

Yeah, fans look at Trek in general through rose-colored glasses now.

BOBW was a good hour followed up with a disappointing second hour. They literally did not know what Part II would be when they wrote and filmed part I.

I like The Orville a great deal more than I have most of Trek since the end of TOS. It is, as you say, what it is.

 

They also didn't know if Patrick Stewart was going to re-sign at the point Part I was filmed IIRC. My problem with BOBW2 was that it just wrapped everything up to quickly and the limitations of the effects budget really showed.

 

Those ships of theirs were quite powerful. I thought the battle was quite good, managing to give us both a feel of Star Trek and Star Wars at the same time. Overall, I liked the episode.

Does anyone think that maybe Isaac has a tracking signal that the Kaylon would be able to use to track them?

It was quite a bit darker than most of the other episodes, but I think it makes up for it with the fantastic world-building that they've done. It also adds more of an immediate and lingering threat to the overall show.