In Review: The Orville – All The World Is Birthday Cake

Synopsis: The Orville makes First Contact; A new crew member joins the ship.

Review: This week’s episode sees the crew run into problems when on a first contact mission.

The Story

A first contact mission and Birthdays play a big role in this episode when the crew potentially loses Bortus and Kelly due to them being born under a bad sign.

Over the course of the story, we learn that the planet has a class system, which is decided by what star sign a person is born under. When Kelly and Bortus are arrested for revealing their Birthday’s, which leads to them being detained in a prison camp.

This spurs Ed and his new security officer Lt. Talla Keylai to try and find a solution, which does not involve going in guns blazing. Which involves a fair bit of research of the planets media to find out what happened to cause such a primitive belief.

The Acting

Jessica Szohr makes a really strong first impression as The Orville’s new security officer Talla Keylai. She gets plenty to do in the episode and is even given some of the funnier moments of the episode to play around with.

The actor who played the Alien Planets Prefect also put in a really strong performance as did most of the guest cast in this episode.

Overall

This was another solid episode for the series, which seems to have really found a solid balance this year between the drama, social commentary, and comedy. It avoids being preachy, entertains and most likely provides some interesting conversations around the water cooler.

The concept of a planet that believes you can be born under a bad star sign was fairly clever and I loved how Ed and his crew went around solving the problem and eventually getting their two lost crew members back.