The Orville: "Identity, Part 1"

The Orville: "Identity, Part 1" (sic). Fox TV. Season 2, episode 8 (21 February 2019). Followed by The Orville: "Identity, Part II" (sic), 28 Feb. 2019, q.v.

The robotic/AI Isaac, a member of the crew of The Orville and an ambassador and investigator from the planet Kaylon, suddenly shuts down; to revive him and possibly get the robotic/AI people of Kaylon to join The Union, The Orville goes to the planet to make contact. The Union delegation is received, and Isaac is revived, but — it turns out that Isaac's shutdown was part of the Kaylon agenda after he had gathered sufficient information on humans and other intelligent life-forms of the Union: precisely to get The Orville to the planet for the machine-intelligences' nefarious purposes (apparently involving genocide on an interplanetary scale).

The robot "apocalypse" threat is sufficiently a cliché that we have the term, and the idea has been mocked to good effect by, e.g., the robot Bender's "Kill All the Humans" shtick on Futurama. It should be taken seriously here, however, since Isaac has been developed as a sympathetic character — as we'd expect from his parallels with Messrs. Spock and Data from Star Trek — and in preceding episodes has been shown to be entering a loving relationship with the ship's doctor and her two young sons, a relationship he seems to reject in this episode, leading to the human family's having to deal with Isaac as truly a highly-advanced machine in a Romantic or sentimental view: sentient and intelligent, but incapable of emotions.

The episode deals with a machine vs. life-form antagonism on the levels of the personal with Isaac's relationships with Dr. Claire Finn and her sons, up the scale of magnitude to the Kaylon's vs. the crew of The Orville, their own organic makers, and finally Earth, humans, and the other intelligent, high-tech life-forms of the Union.

Note Establishing shots of Kaylons' performing unexplained tasks at different levels on a wall, touching what appear to be appearing and disappearing spots of light: cf. and contrast some of the obviously important but only slightly more intelligible electro-mechanical work in METROPOLIS.

The descent into an underworld — another standard trope/motif/cliché used well — that leads to a literal land of the dead: huge piles of humanoid skeletons. Here as well. cf. and contrast, among many works, METROPOLIS.

Kaylons in combat mode having weapons coming out of their heads on what is otherwise a quite human-like body. The visual effect is something like a modern reptile or small dinosaur in a threat display of a ruff or neck frill, but higher on the head. Given the Modernist elegance of Kaylon bodies and insistence here on their "machine" attributes, it is a disturbing image, lacking the horror of the transgressed boundaries in, say, ALIEN (film) but decorously disturbing in a series where we may expect serious but light comedy.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 22Feb19