1x11 New Dimensions

Finally a Dimension of Depth to Lamar

I thought the episode was very good and had some interesting moments in it, the sci-fi backdrop elements was interesting and very nicely presented and executed and we’re finally given an episode that gives us some true character growth and development for Lieutenant John LaMarr.

Virtually every character in the show so far has been given a focus episode for us to learn more about them (Kelly and Ed have gotten several or sprinkled throughout, Alara has had a couple focused on her. The only one out so far is Gordon), I thought “Majority Rule” was LaMarr’s focus episode since he was central in that, but in it we didn’t get any real growth or development out of him, nor really learn much more about him. Here we’re given much more with him, more depth and a new side to him for both us and the rest of the Orville crew to see.

This is probably one episode where I’d struggle to really come up with anything negative to say about it, not sure there’s really anything in it that strictly bothered me, everything seemed to work. The characters worked, the humor was well executed, the backdrop premise was very interesting and nicely executed, this episode was almost perfect.

“Why not an A+, then?”

Well I said, “almost.” Though I cannot put a pin on how, why, or where there was just some aspects that made the episode feel shy of perfect.

Allusions to Trek episodes? The biggest one that comes to mind is the TNG episode “The Loss;” in that episode Counselor Deanna Troi’s empathic abilities are disrupted sending her into a spiral of self-doubt as she feels she can no longer perform her job without feeling the emotions of her patients. She begins lashing out to her fellow crew-mates and it takes them to help her realize she can still be of use even without her “abilities.” This arc for her is fairly similar to the one both Ed and John go through over the course of the episode as both have to in some manner find their inner confidence to do their jobs. “The Loss” also had the ship encounter “2-Dimensional beings” causing the crisis the ship was in (and causing Troi’s loss of empathic abilities; they were overloaded by the number of 2D beings the ship was trapped in. She regains them once the crisis is over.) SPOILERS BEGIN HERE

The episode begins with the Orville in a spacedock with jazzy music playing, it’s a send-off party for Chief Engineer Newton who has accepted a new job helping design a space station. He shares in some awkward banter with Ed and Kelly while we switch over to Gordon and John sharing a drink with the guy from the elevator a couple of episodes back. They’re watching over Yaphit; Gordon and Malloy share that they’re playing a joke on him as they’ve taken a piece of him and placed it on the buffet and are waiting for Yaphit’s reaction. I know Gordon’s all about jokes and pranks but this one seems sort of unusually cruel and I’m not sure where the humor of it is. You’d think of all people Gordon would know that removing a piece of someone without their knowledge isn’t strictly funny. Yaphit leaves the mess-hall’s exterior rotunda area as the three look on and laugh.

He goes to sickbay where an, understandably, annoyed Dr. Finn shows frustration and tells Yaphit she hopes this isn’t a social visit, Yaphit assures her it isn’t and lets her know he’s feeling ill. She gives him a once-over with a scanner and notices a small volume of Yaphit is missing; Yaphit had a vague sense of this but doesn’t have enough of a connection to this other piece of to know where exactly where it is. Bortus soon walks in saying he has a stomach ache, given the “iron stomach” Bortus’s species has I’ll let you do the math on this. Yaphit recovers the missing piece through Bortus’s mouth.

Understandably upset, Yaphit complains to Kelly and Kelly reprimands Gordon and John saying she’s going to put a note in their records and they’d better hope that Yaphit doesn’t pursue any serious charges and dismisses them. While, looking over John’s personnel file she reacts in surprise over what she reads. Seems kind of strange that the First Officer of this ship is shocked by the file of one of her crew, you’d think this is the kind of stuff you’d look over when assigned to a new ship in order to better understand who’s working for you.

We next see Kelly entering Ed’s office where she hands him one of the PDA-like devices, Ed looks it over and with similar shock to what she had earlier. Strangely it’s not that odd to me that Ed would be unfamiliar with the detailed information of his crew.

It turns out that John’s test scores, particularly those having to do with engineering, are exceptionally high from “Union Point,” Kelly notes that John may be the smartest person on the ship next to Isaac, which is really saying something. She recommends John for taking over the position of Chief Engineer; Ed is less sure. Ed’s concerns are that John has shown no sense of leadership or that he has these smarts and the stunt with Yaphit only proves that, Kelly says that he was likely just going along with Gordon’s antics, which Ed takes as more a reason that John isn’t ready. Kelly thinks he should be given the chance but their conversation is interrupted by a sudden jolt, the ship shaking and the lights flickering, the ship seems to have crashed into something, the jolt tosses Ed on top of Kelly, the two being in a somewhat couple-like embrace on the couch in Ed’s office.

We see the ship skimming along an anomaly at quantum speed, part of it disappearing into a void, before dropping out of speed. Kelly and Ed enter the bridge to get a report, there’s no external damage or injuries but the engines have been knocked out of alignment so they’ll be stopped for a while to fix things; while stopped they decide to take a chance to study the anomaly and map it. Isaac suggests they further investigate the parts of the ship that went through the anomaly to get more information, Ed agrees. As Isaac stands up Kelly suggestions that John join Isaac in the investigation, much to Isaac’s and John’s surprise. Ed nods in agreement.

On their way to an affected room Isaac and John come across Claire’s kids, let out of school early because of the impact (man, if they get let out of school early every time the ship experiences something strange they’re probably not in school a lot) and want to know if they can tag along. Initially reluctant, Isaac agrees to let them tag along if they stay out of the way. It’s a very nice scene tying into a previous episode (Into the Fold) where Isaac and Claire’s kids bonded while trapped together on an alien planet, showing the bond between Isaac and the kids is strong and Isaac may very well be “part of the family” now.

Once in the affected room they encounter Yaphit who immediately protests John being there. John apologies to Yaphit, promising it won’t happen again, they squabble a bit before going on to study the readings in the room, not being able to make much sense of them. There’s signs of a “quantum” disturbance they’ll have to analyze. The room is an unoccupied stateroom, one of the kids discovers a potted plant in the adjacent bedroom has died, the leaves crumbling off the limbs, Isaac and John scan it and look in disbelief. (Well, John looks in disbelief. Isaac just looks.)

In the briefing room everyone is updated but there’s not much more information, the quantum disturbances shouldn’t have affected the plant in such a manner so it’s a mystery.

Later, Kelly enters Ed’s office for them to resume their conversation from earlier, Ed says they need to fill the position right away so he’s promoting Yaphit; but Kelly insists they give John a chance to prove himself. She suggests they use the study of this anomaly for him to prove his worth. Ed, reluctantly, agrees pointing out that Kelly’s usually right with her intuition, Kelly agrees and partly lets it slip that she was responsible for Ed getting the Orville’s command. Ed catches her slip and pushes her into confessing, quickly spawning an argument between the two, he now doubts the admiralty’s trust and belief in him as well as now doubting his own ability so he speaks with Admiral Halsey and has this all confirmed. Halsey assures Ed he’s proven himself and there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind they made the right choice in giving Ed the Orville. Ed says there’s still doubt in his own mind.

John is called into Kelly’s office where she now confronts him on his academy test scores, John seems to think little of them noting that anyone could look at his records to know them and he didn’t feel any need to flaunt them. Kelly leads us into a nice look at how the world of the 25th century works.

In Star Trek we’re often told how humans no longer value money and material things and they all work to better the rest of humanity, which is all fine and good but under scrutiny it doesn’t make much sense. In Trek we still see people living and working in all sorts of positions, notably whenever we visit the Sisko’s seafood restaurant in New Orleans. We see that there’s still waiters, cooks and the like. Taking a break from his command Ben Sisko himself even takes a job there, his father’s restaurant, shucking oysters. How does such a job exist in a time period where people don’t need wealth or money to get possessions?

It’s always been my theory that everyone is provided some “base lifestyle” just by the economics and abundance of energy and materials, akin to welfare, this lifestyle perhaps being on par with what we’d today consider to be a middle-class lifestyle. If a person wants “more” they can take jobs and positions, “currency” being some kind of gain in the energy they can have to live their lives. Paid by the “government” or by some other means. It still doesn’t make much sense, really, and maybe it's not supposed to. We are talking about a culture hundreds of years more advanced than our own so maybe we simply can’t understand it. Go back in time to the Renaissance Era when people are just starting up a currency system and explain to them “Bitcoin” or the stock market filled with theoretical money not tied to any material good, they’d probably be confused too.

Kelly gives us a little bit of a glimpse at how the economics works and, in part, it goes along with how I sort of think it worked in Star Trek. She tells him that once matter replication became a thing (this eliminating a need to buy material things) the need for money died off and one’s “reputation” became the currency. (This again sort of goes along with the “we work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity” thing often said in Trek.) John says that he’s getting what he wants out of his life, he enjoys going to work, getting off, and then having a meal and a beer. It’d seem his “reputation” or behavior is giving him the level of life style he wants, if he wants more he’s got to have the ambition for it. So, Wellfare if Wellfare paid you more the harder you worked. Or something. (It could certainly be taken as something of a socialist economy, similar to in Trek.)

Kelly encourages him to push himself, to be better, and that she’s having him lead the investigation of the anomaly

On the bridge, Bortus reports to Ed that another ship is entering the area and is about to collide with the anomaly head-on; Ed makes contact with the ship’s pilot and tries to convince him to change course, the alien refuses and cuts off communication. We watch as the alien ship enters an empty area of space and disappears, soon after it emerges from the other side of the anomaly. In an interesting effect where we (the TV viewer) see a flat plane of the rear of the ship, the front of the ship growing from it, the plane unmoving until that part of the ship emerges. There are now no life signs on the ship.

Ed, Kelley, Alara and Claire dock a shuttle to alien ship to investigate, finding the alien dead in his seat on the bridge, apparently from cardiac shock, the ship is powerless. Alara walks into the room carrying a giant crate, setting it down in front of the rest of the boarding party. Once opened they find a cache of Krill weapons, Alara says there’s several more crates in the cargo hold. Everyone looks concerned, sure the Krill will be searching for these weapons and they need to hurry to get the Orville’s engines back.

On the Orville Kelly tries to talk to Ed about their earlier conversation, Ed refuses to talk at first but finally gives in. He says he realizes that Kelly was doing what she thought was right, that she was trying to help him, but now Ed thinks he’s going to be second guessing his own decisions, unsure if he’s really in a place where he should be making them since, in his mind, he didn’t get the position on his own merit. Kelly tries to get him to see that everyone gets where they are through the help of others, like he did for Gordon; but Ed’s confidence is still fractured. He’ll always be uncertain if he could’ve gotten this job without a handout from his ex-wife.

In his office, Ed encounters Yaphit who has a grievance with John being given an opportunity to show he can run engineering when Yaphit is next in line. Ed tries to explain it but ends up being called a racist (actually it’d be species-ist) against non-humanoid life-forms. Ed insists that wasn’t it, even playing the “I have a lot of gelatinous friends” card, but Yaphit doesn’t bite and leaves mad.

John paces outside the door to engineering when Gordon walks by to see if John wants to go “tie one on.” John says he can’t because he has to do lead this engineering team but isn’t sure how to go about doing it, Gordon offers advice from when he was a camp counselor as a teenager. He’d hand-out gumdrops to the attendees and they couldn’t eat it until they shared something about themselves. After initially rejecting the idea, John seems to go with this approach. It goes about as well as you’d expect.

Later, John and Isaac are looking over readings of the anomaly and Isaac reaffirms John’s own doubt on his ability to lead the team; John seems to show agreement while at the same time showing that he knows better about himself and that Isaac is wrong in his presumptions, he points out something on the console showing the anomaly’s data.

In the briefing room Isaac and John explain the anomaly is a doorway into Two-Dimensional space, a universe that only exists in width and length but not height. When the alien ship went through it he was phased into that universe, Claire then explains that he died because the shape of protein molecules is necessary for life and that when the alien re-entered normal space those molecules didn’t rebound into their correct shape and, thus, the alien died.

I’ve no idea how much of any of that is theoretically true and, obviously, there’s no way to be sure how a 3D being would react to being in a 2D space, but I’d be willing to lay down a bit of money that there’s some degree of real science and logic here at least in terms of how Claire describes protein molecules, their shape, and importance of it when it comes to living life. I only say this knowing that Seth MacFarlane is a bit of a science nerd himself and was behind the present-day version of “Cosmos” with Neil deGrasse Tyson, there’s been a few other science things scattered in the series so far I’ve picked up on that was based in actual fact. (Of note the tardigrade properties being used to enhance the longevity of the oak tree seeds in the pilot episode. Tardigrades being real organisms that can survive in virtually any condition regardless of the environment, temperatures and presence of water. Now, they’re not indestructible and can’t survive forever without he necessities of life but they have shown to be very robust and when we send spacecraft out intended to land on other worlds (like Mars) we make sure they’re clear of all living organisms, including tardigrades, to avoid contaminating the destination.)

So, I’ll give the show a dash of respect here for likely employing real-world (even if theoretical) science into its fictional tale, something true science-fiction should do.

They begin to discuss plans to further investigate the anomaly when they’re called to the bridge, three Krill vessels are inbound, estimated to be about half an hour away. The Orville having only barely survived the previous encounters with a single Krill vessel this obviously poses a problem for them as they’re still an hour away from fixing their own engines so they need to avoid an encounter. (And here I’ll toss in a nit-pick. But it’s possible I’m misunderstanding some aspect, there’s just info we’re not privy to, or my proposed solutions aren’t ones that’d work in these circumstances. In “Majority Rule” we’re shown that the Orville shuttles have cloaking devices (they use it when they land on the 21st Century Reddit planet) if the shuttles have cloaks it seems to me that the full ship should have one too. Further in “Command Performance” Alara uses a “holographic cloak” on the ship to disguise it as one belonging to the aliens that ran the zoo planet. Seems to me either option could be used here to either make the ship invisible or appear to be a more threatening ship to the Krill, like those superior aliens who ran the zoo. But maybe the screwed-up engines prevent this and we’re not told so.)

John proposes they hide in the anomaly, Ed points out they’d die if they did that but John thinks he can use the little but of functionality they have in the ship’s engines to create a 3D universe bubble around the ship that’d allow it to pass through the 2D universe unharmed. They go ahead with the plan.

In Engineering Isaac and John work to build the bubble but can’t get the power levels high enough, Yaphit comes in and offers his technobabble solution to get more power, to which John takes the advice and goes with the plan. It’s a nice bit that, perhaps, shows the reconciliation between John and Yaphit and how the two would work together in engineering.

They activate the field and enter the anomaly just before the Krill ships arrive.

Inside the anomaly everyone stands in awe, gawking out the front windows/viewscreen looking out to a stretched out landscape of 2-D space, outside the camera does a neat bit as it pans from the Orville’s ventral side, through the 2D plane (truly represented with not even a pixel of depth) to the ship’s dorsal side as it glides through the plane.

The landscape looks like a bright and colorful circuit board with colorful lines and shapes across it and moving patterns of light. It’s like a mix between Tron and an old Atari game.

They cannot communicate with any beings who may exist in this realm, all they can do is observe. Ed asks they take as many readings as they can for Union scientists to study.

In the mess hall perimeter Ed sits at one of those cheap-looking particle board high-top tables (Ikea is still doing well in the 25th century, it’d seem) looking over a PDA device, Kelly joins him and they both remark over the 2D universe some more. Kelly asks to speak freely and when given permission to do so calls Ed out on his behavior since finding out about how she helped him, saying he’s showing 2D thinking and being a prideful ass. That no one gets to where they are without help and she’s not sorry she offered the recommendation because she gets to see and work with Ed every day.

Ed doesn’t take this too fantastically well, splitting off into his protective sarcasm and counter attacks but eventually swallows a bit. He says he knows what she did was out of goodness but he needs to work these things out on his own. Their conversation is interrupted by the ship shaking violently and everyone being slammed to the floor.

The ship’s protective bubble is failing, slightly compressing the ship into a thinner 3D space, Isaac quickly corrects the problem and things return to normal, such as they are. Ed hopes the Krill are gone outside the anomaly and orders Gordon to get them out of there but Gordon says he can’t, the anomaly has just closed.

The ship can’t maintain the bubble for much longer so they have to get out and they decide to go through what they think is another opening nearby, but all of the Orville’s engines are now dead, John recommends they use a shuttle to tow the ship. Kelly wonders how they can do this as it’d put the shuttle outside the protective field around the Orville, John says they can set-up a small field that’d protect the inside of the shuttle. The outside would be “flat” but the inside would remain 3-dimensional. They go ahead with the plan, John needs to be on the shuttle to operate the generator and Ed decides to go to pilot the shuttle, saying he needs to do it to regain his confidence.

While setting things up, Yaphit asks if he can help, John give him a task and as Yaphit leaves some of the other engineering crew snicker and hope that Yaphit doesn’t screw that up too. John steps in and reprimands them for their attacks on Yaphit. John was the one who made the choice to go with the plan so the blame needs to go to him, which is why he feels he shouldn’t be in charge. Returning to work, Isaac looks at John.

The shuttle leaves the bay with John and Ed inside, they turn on the field and leave the protective bubble around the Orville, on an outside shot we see the shuttle flatten in line with the rest of the 2D-universe but an interior shot of the shuttle shows things as normal. They engage the tractor beam and begin towing the Orville towards what they’re hoping is another opening back to normal space.

While on the shuttle, Ed takes the moment to speak with John, wondering why John hides his brains. John opens up to Ed, saying the colony he comes from was largely a working class one where people generally didn’t react well to those who were smart. John had grown up learning to hide this part of himself in order to be respected and liked. Ed nods, saying that if they get out of their predicament he wants John to be the new chief engineer. John asks if Ed is sure, Ed nods. “Kelly was right about you. She was right about a lot of things,” Ed considers his words just before the shuttle violently shakes and the they’re partially flattened by the collapsing field.

Ed and John struggle to type at the controls, regaining the full field, and learn that the bubble is collapsing and they will not make it to the exit point, Ed decides to take the shuttle to quantum speed (which it seems the shuttles can do.) John isn’t sure he can maintain the field protecting them, but Ed puts his trust in him. They speed up and exit the anomaly, not far from where they were.

Later, Ed enters Kelly’s office to talk to her about what’s been going on between them. Ed admits everywhere he was wrong over their tiff and apologizes for his behavior, thanking her for what she did and saying if he ever doubts himself again he knows who to turn to. Kelly smiles at him, “It’s not the feather, Dumbo. It’s you,” another nice use of the out-of-time popular culture reference in the series. Ed smiles, leans in and kisses Kelly softly on the cheek before leaving her office. Kelly smiles.

John enters the engineering room, an extra rank stripe on his shoulders, he gives a command introduction to the rest of the engineering team who seem to accept his position, including Yaphit, before going to work. John looks over the room and smiles to himself.

Again, a good episode of the show and it’s nice to see John get some development, some very interesting concepts here with the 2D space and such and the regrowing of the relationship between Ed and Kelly.

It's really a shame next week is the final episode of the season, meaning we’ll have to likely wait until next fall for more, but in the end this is a show I’ve really enjoyed.

Please let me know what you think of this write-up and what can be done to improve it.