The Orville: "Lasting Impressions"

The Orville: "Lasting Impressions." Fox, season 2, episode 11 (21 March 2019). Jon Cassar, director. Seth MacFarlane, script.

"The crew opens a time capsule from 2015." Relevant here, the capsule includes a smart phone with the data from a woman from our era, which — the data and in a sense the woman — Lt. Gordon Malloy uploads into the Environmental Simulator. Review by Dénes House notes correctly that, "There’s a good, necessary conversation about what makes a person 'real' in a world of advanced computing and artificial intelligence" — that of The Orville but to to some extent our own as well — and continues on how Captain Ed Mercer (MacFarlane) "stresses that he fell in love with someone who was lying to him, but he never lied to himself. Gordon insists that how we relate to someone is what determines whether or not they are real." House finds it, "an irresolvable question, but it’s nice to see it addressed."

"She wrote this program, about herself," Gordon says, defending her reality. In the Simulation as as a simulation, Laura, the simulation of the woman from our time, says she "wants to be remembered for something," and, in a sense, the original Laura is, raising the possibility of our data — including our usually trivial text messages, photos, et al. — taken in total can be a kind of legacy, one possible lasting impression.

In the Simulation based on Laura's data as she experienced it, Laura returns to her lover Greg. House notes, "When Malloy deletes Greg from the simulation —effectively editing Laura’s life story, making it less of an extrapolation and more clearly a fantasy — he comes face-to-face with the reality that the absence of one life can have huge ripple effects of unintended consequences" — cf., as House notes, Frank Capra's IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946). "Without Greg’s encouragement and support over their nine-year relationship," House continues, "Laura never found the courage to sing on stage [...]. Without Greg, Laura was not Laura — but with Greg, Malloy loses Laura. George Bailey [in IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE] is vindicated. Every life matters." Note that this "MORAL" of the story is made in a dialog between Malloy and Adrianne Palicki's Commander Kelly Grayson and is related to her complex relationship with MacFarlane's Ed Mercer, the "Blank Slate" theory of human development, and how she learned from Ed a silly trick with her eyes: and comes through as a serious point made with a fairly light comic touch.

See for motif of a holodeck as a space of total-immersion VR, with the virtual reality in this case including a kind of love story: for a stereotypically human emotion "inside" a real and virtual human beings, themselves inside a cybernetic space, itself within a very large device — the Environmental Simulator — inside The Orville, a large spacecraft.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 23/24Mar19, RDE, Title, 23Aug19