The Orville: Identity Part 1 and Part 2

[neuralclone]

I watched Identity (Parts 1 and 2) on the weekend, and oh boy! Our weird little space dramady is all grown up! It not only came me one hell of an adrenaline hit, but all the world-building that went on made my thoughts churn as well. And for me a TV show which makes me think madly is the best kind of TV show. Below are a few of the thoughts "Identity" gave rise to.

Apart from epic space battles, and all that character development earlier in the season paying off in terms of raising the stakes for all the characters, what I enjoyed about this two-parter is all the symmetry and mirroring in the script. To start with the most obvious, story begins with the Union hoping for an alliance with the Kaylon against the Krill, and ends with them hoping for an alliance with the Krill against the Kaylon. Then there is Isaac's personal arc, which is book-ended by him lying unconscious while the rest of the crew discuss what to do with him.

And speaking of Isaac -

• While the crew do have much to forgive him (not least for lying about his mission), I'm not sure that he's responsible for how things went down in the episode. Isaac didn't take the ship to Kaylon 1: the crew took Isaac there. And while the reports he made to Kaylon 1 were to be used to decide what to do with the "organic life forms", I'm not sure he thought genocide and total war would be the likely outcome. Indeed the few times we see him talking about his research you see him arguing the opposite. Perhaps he was giving the Kaylons more credit for logic than they had?
• I think "cold Isaac" in Part 1 was Isaac trying to squeeze himself back into the Kaylon mold. Indeed, I think a lot of what we saw was Isaac divided between two loyalties and trying to navigate an identity between the two. But as they say, you can't squeeze the toothpaste back into the tube.
• If I remember right, Primary said Isaac was created specifically for his mission. Which would make him very, very young and inexperienced when he first came on board the Orville, for all his downloaded skills and data. The episode makes it clear that experience is very different from data where Kaylons are concerned, so he spent his "formative years" among biologicals. (And let's not forget that he spent 700 years on "Kellyworld" in Mad Idolatry" as well!)
• And if Isaac was created specifically for his mission, does that mean his the only one of his model?
• Lastly, though Marcus and Ty were proven right in their faith in Isaac, I got the impression in the beginning of Part 1 that Claire was projecting some very human characteristics onto Isaac. So while I love Claire/Isaac to bits, and I'd like to see Isaac to stay part of the Finn family if only for his relationship with the children, I'd also like to see them acknowledge his alieness in the future.

And then there's the Kaylons.

• So we've been told over and over again that Kaylons don't have emotions. Like Hell. Primary, Secondary and Tertiary were well and truly motivated by emotion--hate, fear and resentment, spiced with a strong pinch of confirmation bias.
• Also, Primary accused Isaac of feeling "sympathy". He knows the Kaylon are not an unemotional race.
• I've been having thoughts about the Kaylon origins - namely, why would the Builders build their robot slaves with head cannons in their heads? (Head-cannons/headcanons, geddit? Gee, I hope that pun is deliberate.) It doesn't make sense if you're making laborers and servants, but oh boy, does it make sense if you're creating a robot slave army.
• Additionally to that, if you were creating a robot slave army you wouldn't want to put in any inhibitions against killing. So: create your robot soldiers, leave out the first law of robotics, and try and control them through pain. Oh yeah, that's going to end well.
• I wonder if the Builders created any non-military robots? And if so, what happened to them?
• Primary compared the Kaylons' history to the history of slavery on Earth, but I'm getting a strong hint of other strands in our history, namely the revolutions where one tyrant is disposed of and a new and worse one takes his place. Bye bye, Czar, and hello Stalin. Bye bye, Emperors, and hello Mao. Bye, bye, Builders, and hello...

So, a last word about how I'd like it to all pan out. I think Isaac is merely at the beginning of his quest to establish his identity. However this thread goes, I hope they don't make Isaac too human--I love The Orville's balancing act in at once making him completely alien and totally relatable. As far as the wider universe is concerned, I'd like to see Captain Mercer's mercy towards Isaac have significance apart from it being a way to keep a popular character in the show. What if it leads some Kaylons to reconsider their genocidal mission when they discover that the Union has neither dissected nor enslaved Isaac?