Remember what I said about the last episode?
Tonight's episode was The Orville saying to Trek "This is how you do it", and doing it better.
That was apparently a practice run for tonight, where we get The Orville spiking the ball in the face of one of TNG's most infamously bad episodes:
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Of course, I'm talking about "The Outcast" here, which tried to do an early LBGT tolerance episode and fell flat on its face doing so. It was done so badly, that I recognized just how much of a fail it was when I was only 15. This was done better, though TBH, that's not hard to do.
I think it was a good touch that he wasn't simply portrayed as a victim either. He was perfectly willing to frame Klyden for murder, and he got called out on it. Okay, so Klyden
was being pretty bigoted here, but there's two things to point out. First, he is an established character who probably has some fans, and there's some audience sympathy for him about how being framed will hurt both him and his family. Second, keep in mind he was born female, and then had a female child with Bortas, so that may affect how he feels on top of the cultural norms.
Between last season's episode about Bortas and and Klyden's kid and this one, I suspect Seth is going to come back to these issues unlike Trek would do. While some aspects of Moclan society are clearly played for laughs, they seem to be seriously messed up under the surface. Further, these problems aren't just shallow bigotry either, since it seems there was some necessity for it in the past, but is probably not now and only keeps going because of the social pressures of tradition. They're not an all-male species, they deliberately suppress both females and heterosexual males, and since we have two Moclans as regular characters who've been personally involved in these matters, I doubt it's going to be swept away.
On other matters, the whole murder mystery aspect was handed in an interesting way. Once some doubts about Klyden emerged, I figured it was a suicide, until they revealed that was just as shaming as coming out. I also liked how they immediately assumed scanners would be useless against a very skilled engineer, and didn't bother wasting time with them. I figured out he was probably using something like a personal cloaking device or something too, since it would help with evading any searches. Trek doesn't often think things out this well.
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The flower guy was the latest interesting alien design, and the cookie bouquet was silly and funny.