The Orville Needs A 4th Season

Warning: The following article contains spoilers for all three seasons of The Orville.

I’ve made it clear, I love The Orville. Seth Macfarlane’s mix of Star Trek with a touch of comedy is something I am sure many people would have been weary about initially, mostly due to the creator’s history. For some, he and his creations are a laugh-a-minute of wonder and for others, to put it lightly, he is an annoyance that won’t go away. Since 2017 the show has been something I’ve been telling his detractors: “No. Give it a chance, and a proper chance at that!”

Season 1 of The Orville is not perfect, as Alexx will tell you via his reviews and MacFarlane will also say any day. It was a show finding its feet and attempting to understand its own tone; A few missteps here and a character or two that would better fit the creator, writer, and director’s previous work, but generally stood out against its counterparts. Either in the genre of sci-fi/Star Trek-like or the comedy of The Good Place, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Rick & Morty, as well as the general cynicism of the time. Its rival of Discovery‘s first season reflected something very dark and horrible in contrast.

Season 2 greatly improved on all those aspects, making the show heavier, something grounded by its comedy instead of being weighed down by it, and overall, a much more fully formed show. It understood what it was looking to do: Tell stories and go on adventures with these people we want to be friends with. Claire, Alara, Bortus, and Isaac, all of whom play rather minor characters in the typical sense of a show led by Macfarlane’s Captain Ed and Adrianne Palicki’s Commander Grayson, but have whole arcs play out for their characters.

The show is in a much different place than the Star Trek many of us grew up watching and falling in love with, and to be clear, in multiple ways. The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine did these big character pieces too but did so with seasons that ran for 20-26 weeks at a time. In the two years with Fox, The Orville did those character moments and episodes with what one season of TV would back then. Of course, they aren’t directly comparable altogether, one does aim for a comedy bent to it and does have its own baseball-like speed while also taking inspiration from those years.

The third season, subtitled New Horizons, has outperformed every bit of prior seasons with some fantastic long-term storytelling. Character beats strike the tone wonderfully, and the extended run-time allows for these moments to play out in full instead of feeling not quite rushed but certainly appear lighter than intended. Unlike many other shows that stay similar throughout their run, The Orville has evolved into something that gets better and more refined with every season.

Spoilers will begin from here out:

I’ve said it since that third episode, there is something special about The Orville that captures that “The Measure of a Man” asperation and retains a sense of self. This is the episode that I get people to watch up to and then see what they think before telling them to keep going. The story of the Moclans and their single-gendered, militaristic, and traditional perspective has been both used for comedy and for drama. This season alone, it has been brought to the forefront with the continued story of Topa, not only closing the loop on “About A Girl” but kicking off a whole different story for her.

That notwithstanding, this season also has another story going on. With Disney purchasing the assets owned by Fox Broadcasting Company, the shift over to broadcasting through the streaming service Hulu, and the lack of renewal once again as the season came to a close. This isn’t uncommon, as a week after season 2 ended in 2019, I wrote a similar editorial begging for what we have now. Well, season 3 just ended as I write this, and once again I’m on my hands and knees looking for the house of the mouse to put all our concerns to rest. Though, unlike last time, this one isn’t a birthday wish.

I keep making the comparison, but that is simply because it is the closest we’ve got: The Orville is some of the best Star Trek we’ve had in years, and I do mean proper Star Trek. I recently did a piece on the Gene Roddenberry creation and I make mention of his Bible for the production of TNG, the closest we have to his vision for a more modern Star Trek. In it, there is a point about the crew and how the show is about them, not an individual that cries every three minutes or an old man forgetting everything he did with Data. I mean, writing on season 1 of Picard wasn’t even finished when they were halfway through shooting.

The comparison is made because it is no secret that TNG, subsequent shows in the franchise, and its tone are an inspiration for the show’s compositional and aspirational makeup. Nearly every piece of fiction today is inspired by another, with Battlestar Galactica being created by one of the co-founders of Industrial Light and Magic, which is a little-known company behind Star Wars. Not to mention, I think it is no secret early Flash Gordan films, the book Dune, and several other inspirations are behind that subsequent franchise as well. So when I say there is an inspiration and something to compare, it isn’t an insult as the internet attempts to indicate.

What The Orville, its actors, and the production team have done with three seasons over several years is revitalize a sense of wonder about space adventures. I’ve repeated it several times before and I’ll say it once more Discovery, and most of the other shows from the Paramount-owned franchise, are in that dark and cynical view that it all has to be dangerous and unpleasant. A crew that bickers, captains that revolve like doors to fancy hotels, and a lot of writing that doesn’t inspire hope. This season of The Orville struck that balance beautifully by telling a story of unhappy crew members, a danger in the stars but adventures to be had, and keeping a regular cast.

Despite New Horizons using the arc of Charly throughout, someone you are supposed to dislike by the mid-point of “Electric Sheep,” while love and understand by “Domino.” The story never concentrated on her fully this season, but despite the fallout of “Identity” taking focus, her impact is the largest. Meanwhile, Topa continues to be one of my favorite stories across seasons, and arguably, everyone gets a beat across the seasons.

The question that needs to be asked is, “Well, why does The Orville need another season?” I’d contest that none of the stories have ended, it is only new horizons (if you will) setting the groundwork for these tectonic plates to shift and create these new stakes. Ed’s story of a Human-Krill hybrid child, God-Kelly to ultra-evolved people, Moclan-Krill relations, a slight break from the Prime Directive, the Planetary Union, and Kaylon relationship doing an entire 180, and Topa’s relationship with her dads as male Moclans have become the enemy of the union. There is a constant escalation of scale and in-universe politics that could be explored.

Do I expect The Orville to nail it every time, talking about the philosophy of X, Y, or Z as Quark did via rules of acquisition, as Garak did with Bashir, or many other examples? No. Despite the intrigue of what was going on with Cherry Chevapravatdumrong’s “Mortality Paradox,” the first time around I didn’t love the episode because it felt like little more than another chapter from “If the Stars Should Appear.” I still think there are elements that didn’t entirely work. For example, this longer runtime as the episodes air through Hulu can put some off and with some episodes make them tiring.

To be clear, I want more of that or many other stories, and when it is needed as it was for “Midnight Blue” that longer runtime can sell those stories as much as it might put others off. I’ve even spent some time reading the novella of the unproduced 11th episode from this season, Sympathy for the Devil, so of course, I want to see more of this world and its many stories being told throughout the galaxy. My point is that, yes, I am a fan of The Orville and like any fan of anything, if the creators leave an ounce of something to be explored either through books, Big Finish-style audio dramas, comics, more TV episodes, and even the concept of a film, I want it.

When nearly everything else including Star Trek tries to be angry and gritty as if it is an angry teenager to the erudite and near flawlessness of its predecessors, The Orville strikes that tone between the two. Yes, there are a few spits of foul-mouthed anger or surprise, but it doesn’t sink to the depth of the angst Discovery or Picard has taken. The baton of episodes focused on dilemmas such as “do we use it as a weapon?,” “how do we respect the wishes of this person?,” or “how do we protect these people from oppression?” have been passed on to The Orville. Strange New Worlds might be course-correcting back to that, but The Orville has run with it.

So the question remains, does The Orville need a 4th season? The fan in me says yes, absolutely. Some stories have only just begun and there are still stories to be explored. The trouble is, as Seth Macfarlane made clear in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, “It really is going to depend on audience response, on whether the show gets discovered.” Contracts with actors are up, the show isn’t made on a budget of classic Doctor Who, and streaming services such as Netflix and more recently HBO Max show that everything gets canceled sooner than fans want it to be.

Saying out and out that The Orville is some kind of pale imitator of Star Trek now following such a brilliantly made season with top-notch writing, production, and acting in the face of some otherwise melodramatic scenarios, it has found its own self. Yes, the influence is there, but unlike a majority of what we see on the Paramount side of things, Macfarlane’s creation has a voice and uses it in the face of modern issues. Villians or presumed antagonists like Teleya, Klydon, Kaylon Primary, and others have layers. The world, or shall I say galaxy, is so full of depth that a wealth of stories could still be told using the backdrop of the U.S.S Orville.

So, if you’ve somehow stumbled across this article, read through it despite spoiler warnings, and still haven’t seen The Orville, give it a chance. That first season isn’t perfect, the second finds its way, and season 3 has outdone just about everything else on TV right now. I won’t do as some seem to be during the Twitter campaign #RenewTheOrville, saying the continued renewal of these Cardassians and their torturous reality TV nonsense is the type of tripe that should be shelved. I’m not saying that, but if I were to suggest a show to be cut, it would be something with Gul Dukat or that Kim person with a big bum and toxic relationship with health and social media.