******SPOILER ALERT******
I shall be telling this with a sigh /
Somewhere ages and ages hence: /
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - /
I took the one less traveled by, /
And that has made all the difference.
(from "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost)
When you come to a fork in the road, use a spoon.
(MrGoog)
The title above would be significant if you recall a special episode of Star Trek - The Next Generation: "Tapestry" (6th Season). In it, Q showed Picard how his life would have been drastically altered by avoiding a fight when he was a young man - he never would have become a Captain, but, instead, would have wasted his career as a low-rank officer with no ambition. Here, David A. Goodman's script shows how a seemingly insignificant alteration of history - Kelly declining a second date with Ed - drastically alters the history of the Planetary Union.
In 2420, we see two men, wearing heavy winter gear, walking through the snowy wilderness of Sarin 4, approaching a Union listening post. At the abandoned post, they find a large item and carry it back to their Union shuttle as the Kaylon pursue. The men are Gordon and Ed.
Here, again, we saw a very abbreviated opening sequence, with no listing of the cast. Maybe Seth MacFarlane wanted us to suspect that the altered timeline erased everyone else. But, again, we saw the cast listing at the start of Act 1.
In this timeline, half of the galaxy has been destroyed by the Kaylon over the past 9 months. Ed and Gordon escape from the Kaylon and activate the item, which is a synthesizer. They replicate a Twinkie and split it. (Twinkies - The Official Snack Of Freedom Fighters.) But they are caught by a scavenger ship, which tractors the shuttle into the bay. However, the freighter's crew aren't scavengers; they are Kelly, John, Talla, Claire, Marcus, and Ty.
Indeed, the memory wipe that Claire performed on Kelly in the previous episode didn't work. Kelly remembers the original timeline and describes it to Ed and Gordon, who have a hard time believing it. They know only the altered timeline, in which the Orville, with a different Captain and First Officer, was hijacked by the Kaylon and used to smash through Earth's defenses. The memory wipe failed because Kelly's brain lacks a protein called beta-secretase (This is real. You can look it up.) Now John hopes to use the Aronov device to send Claire, with a memory wiper and a hypo of the protein, to 2413 to perform a successful memory wipe. Then Kelly would agree to a second date with Ed and the original history would be restored. The bottom line: one date set off a chain reaction of events that affected the galaxy; thus, just two people can make a huge difference.
Kelly, Claire, John, and Ed take the shuttle to a Resistance base to obtain a vial of the protein. They meet Yaphit and the leader of the base: Alara Kitan! (a very pleasant surprise) But the Kaylon find the base. The visitors return to the shuttle and kill a Kaylon in the shuttle. This was fortunate because now they will have Kaylon technology to use in John's plan.
The freighter's quantum drive malfunctions, so John hides the ship in the event horizon of a nearby black hole. Because light can't escape from a black hole, the Kaylon can't find the freighter. Also, the time distortion gives John time to repair the engines while the Kaylon abandon the search. (They were in the event horizon for about 25 seconds, but 2 days passed outside the black hole.) Then the freighter travels to Earth to salvage the Orville.
As John starts to access the Kaylon communication system through the dead Kaylon, the freighter arrives at Earth. The planet has no life of any type, and the continents show the scars of heavy bombardment. The crew take the shuttle, with reinforced deflectors, into the Pacific Ocean and find the Orville, 7 miles below the surface. Another lucky break: the shuttle bay's doors are open. Gordon takes the shuttle into the bay and John activates the pressurization, clearing out the water. The crew go to the Bridge, where Talla gets to open a proverbial Jar Of Pickles: the Bridge's Security doors. They find Bortus, the only survivor from the Orville's crew (the others fled in escape pods).
Bortus survived for the 9 months on minimal atmosphere and combat rations (although, as a Moclan, he could have eaten some chairs and tables). After Kelly tells Bortus about Ed, Bortus is convinced that Ed should command the Orville, although Ed lacks self-confidence; indeed, as we saw, that self-confidence had been instilled by Kelly in the original timeline. With Ed in command, Gordon at the helm, and John repairing the engines, the Orville ascends from the Pacific Ocean and returns to deep space.
John needs the temporal calculations that Isaac had performed on the Aronov device before the Kaylon War, so he uses the dead Kaylon head to access the Kaylon network and pick Isaac's brain. But the Kaylon use the link to locate the Orville. The added complication: John needs exclusive access to the quantum drive to make the time travel work, so the ship can't flee from the Spheres. As 4 Spheres approach, the enormous strain on the quantum drive destroys the Orville.
Kelly wakes up in her apartment in 2413, then vanishes (into 2420), then returns a few seconds later. (Remember: in time travel, you could spend weeks or months in another time, then return only a second after you left.) Then she sees Claire pop in the same way. Claire performs the second memory wipe and vanishes. Then Kelly wakes up just as Ed calls. He asks for a second date. Kelly replies, "I'd love it."
And the rest is history. But I hope this series isn't history after only 2 years. This is the best sci-fi series I've seen since the many pre-Discovery Star Trek series. The Orville deserves a 3rd Season - and more.
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