The Orville: "Primal Urges"

The Orville: "Primal Urges". Fox TV. Season 2, episode 2 (3 January 2019). Kevin Hooks director. Created by Seth MacFarlane, who gets writing credit along with Wellesley Wild.

The sex part gets complicated, but the Moclan crew members Bortus and Klyden are strongly gendered male and in a marriage with a son — a marriage under increasing stress since, we eventually learn, the sex reassignment operation producing the son from the daughter that actually hatched (we said it's complicated). Relevant here, Bortus uses the Environmental Stimulator — the holodeck on The Orville — for pornography in virtual realities that may be VR but look very solid and physical and ... creative. The Moclans are militaristic and stodgy, and the physical and biological nature of Bortus's porn addiction becomes significant when Bortus and Isaac — the Mr. Spockian ship's robot — must deal with the dilemma of rescuing the remnant of Nyxians from their planet doomed by its expanding sun. Only a small number have survived to that moment — seventy or so — and with increasing breaking up of the planet, there will be time to save only thirty. Isaac does the moral arithmetic without any emotional reaction: the only issue for him is that the Nyxians chose by lot rather than saving first the most intelligent. Bortus makes clear to Isaac he prefers his own reactions: relatively more emotional, and biologically based. Bortus's line is especially powerful since his porn addiction led him to procure the equivalent of a bootleg program that introduced a computer virus into the Orville's cybernetic equipment, which led to only one shuttle being sent to rescue the Nyxians, and, adding to that, the single shuttle having time for only one trip with survivors. So Bortus's biology and psychology was part of a series of events that meant thirty people died that need not have — and The Orville was sufficiently impaired by the virus that it almost burned up before Isaac was able to eliminate the virus. So there is much to be said for Isaac's cold logic and against Bortus's biology-based actions, making the episode an interesting exercise in moral dilemmas and values (though this is undercut by the show's only slight concern for the dead Nyxians). Least ambiguously, Bortus's way of being in the galaxy is superior to Isaac's insofar as it includes family, the valuing of which is clear in the episode.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 3-4Jan19