Nightmare Fuel / The Orville

Having 2001: A Space Odyssey flashbacks yet?

Just because it's a pastiche of Star Trek doesn't mean it can't bring the nightmares.

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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Season 1

Old Wounds

• What happenes to the poor scientist who gets caught in the time-acceleration beam. She shrieks, ages 100 years in a second, and drops dead while the rest of the team looks helplessly.
  • Take a moment to think about that. There's no indication that the beam makes you unconscious, and no reason why it shouldn't accelerate your consciousness along with everything else. Which would mean that from her point of view she was essentially tied down and left there, immobile in that same position, for the entire rest of a full lifespan. It's about the most horrific way to die that one can imagine.
  • Nope. She would have died of dehydration within a few days.
  • With her heart outside the field, she would become unconscious in seconds and die shortly after from lack of blood circulation to her head. Larry Niven's short story ARM (1975) discusses the hazards of accelerated time fields.

Krill

• The episode sees Mercer and Malloy infiltrating a ship of nightmares belonging to an Always Chaotic Evil enemy that Looks Like Orlok, but special mention goes to the travesty of a church service. Watch what they do to that severed human head and try to get a good night's sleep.
  • Even more fridge horror is this: during the first episode of the series, the Orville goes up against a Krill ship, which they destroy. At the start of "Krill", they go up against another Krill vessel, successfully destroying it. Then we learn that the one that picks up Ed and Gordon has children on it. There is the horrifying likelihood that there were children on the past two ships that Ed and company have destroyed.

Majority Rule

• The purely democratic law system of Sargus 4 is eerily similar to the society in the Black Mirror episode "Nosedive". Everyone has to wear a badge with a up-vote/down-vote button from the beginning of adulthood. Unfortunately, if you get caught doing something disrespectful — intentionally or not — it has the potential to go viral and get you in a lot of trouble down the line. Every downvote you received in your early adulthood will stick with you for the rest of your life, to the point that public services can reject people with 500,000 or more downvotes (as demonstrated by the middle-aged woman in the cafe, who claims she got those downvotes in her 20s and has turned over a new leaf since then, but was denied service nonetheless). If it gets past a million, you get arrested. If it gets to 10 million, the accused is "corrected" through electroshock therapy, but since the technological development stage of Sargus is comparable to 21st-Century Earth, this method is effectively a lobotomy. Not even Union medical technology can reverse the damage done.
  • While we don't follow the planet long enough to see anything else that could happen to John, the fact that he ends up just a few votes shy of 10 million downvotes brings up another dark realization: those downvotes don't go away, and he could still potentially get brain zapped if he gets just a couple more. Think about how many people react in the slightest negative way to you in a day. If John stayed on the planet, he wouldn't last five minutes. What happens to people that escape brain zap judgment?
    • And following on that, given the way people react to others with 500,000 downvotes, imagine how badly they would react to someone that did an Apology Tour and survived, but ended up with more than a million downvotes. Homeless would be a polite way to put it.
  • Picture what the events of the episode must have been like from Lysella's perspective: Here she is, minding her own business, living an ordinary (by Sargun standards) life, when all of a sudden she discovers that not only have beings from another planet infiltrated her world, but that they weren't the first to do so. On top of that, she got a first hand look at Alara's super strength, so she knows that people with such abilities exist. Sure, these particular alien beings are benevolent, but now she'll always have that little voice in the back of her mind wondering who else isn't who she thinks they are.

Into the Fold

• The Technically-Living Zombie population of the planet. Drink the water, fall into the water, bathe with the water ... and end up a brainless monster. Worse, this was the result of a bioweapon gone wrong.

Cupid's Dagger

• Darulio never raises his voice or seems to show strong emotion, even when the ship he's on is caught between two hostile fleets that could obliterate the Orville. And he comes from a culture that is so open about sex that it's considered rude to refuse an offer of a roll in the hay (that is, if he is telling the truth), and has such powerful pheromones that it can induce obsessive lust in another person, even if that person just told him that they hate his guts. Worse, he doesn't see anything wrong with the whole idea - as far as he's concerned, the worst that happens is "great sex." It's left open as to whether or not he used his pheromones on Kelly the first time they slept together...y'know, the time that Ed walked in on, the one that sent him and Kelly to divorce court, sent his career into a tailspin, and so forth. But the fact he uses a fantastic date rape drug on both Ed and Kelly, accidentally doses Claire, and shrugs the whole thing off as no big deal is a terrifying look at a sexual predator and how the victims will likely end up blaming themselves for it.

Firestorm

• This episode ratchets the nightmare fuel to new levels when Alara unknowingly gets trapped in a nightmare simulation that combines the worst fears of all the main characters. Among the ordeals she faces: a Monster Clown with superhuman strength, a giant spider immune to energy weapons, being Strapped to an Operating Table by an insane Dr. Finn, and getting stalked relentlessly by a murderous Isaac on an otherwise abandoned ship on a collision course with certain doom.
  • Special props to Penny Johnson Jerald's excellently creepy, Cosmic Horror-tinged speech in the brig, complete with Laughing Mad.
  Do you ever sit in your quarters and look out the window? Do you ever stop and watch the darkness out there? It's very, very dark in space. Looks so empty. But there are terrors lurking all around us in the infinite shadows. You can't see them but they're there...
  • And she has no idea why this is happening, because of what happened with Dr. Finn she can't trust anyone around her, and she can't trust reality itself.
  • And the icing on the cake is that she literally brought it on herself by insisting that she go through a simulated house of horrors and had her own memory of the decision wiped so she would be convinced that it was all real.

Mad Idolatry

• "Mad Idolatry" puts any lesson from Star Trek on why the Prime Directive exists to shame, as a planet's Year Inside, Hour Outside setup shows Kelly that a brief incident where she healed a local's injury has become an entire religion, with countless people having been killed over the course of centuries as their justice system is to inflict a fatal wound on the suspect and see if she heals it. In the course of a few weeks, she has to deal with being the cause of mass suffering on a literal planetary scale.

Season 2

Home

• Ed's gravity suit fails, leading to the lovely sight of his shins snapping as they're crushed under the gravity of Alara's home planet. He lets out a bloodcurdling shriek and almost immediately passes out from the pain. Unlike with previous leg injuries on the show, it's not played for comedy.
  • Alara's father is forced to put his hand into a pot of boiling sauce. The rest of the episode features several close-ups of the horrific burns and blisters, and Robert Picardo never lets up in acting out the pain of using it.
  • Hell, everything about Cambis torturing Alara and her family as revenge for his son's suicide, refusing to acknowledge that Alara's father wasn't responsible for it. John Billingsley sells the Tranquil Fury frighteningly well.

All the World is a Birthday Cake

• Just the idea that if you're born in a certain month, you're somehow a murderous monster on this planet. That means countless pregnant mother undergo C-sections to ensure their otherwise perfectly healthy children aren't born in this time period to "save" them. Finn openly rants on how "they're pulling these babies weeks, even months before birth."
  • On top of that, it's announced any child who is born in this month must be turned over to the government immediately.
  • Ed, Talla and Finn are subjected to a rough treatment of having their mouths probed to "prove" they're not born under this month.
  • The concentration camp for those born under the sign is as nasty as you can expect when Kelly and Bortus show up.
  • How deeply bound is this belief in the race? The actual prisoners in the camp don't even bother trying to escape as they're convinced they're "monsters" and thus this is where they belong.
  • Customs do not arise from a vacuum. For example, it's speculated that the personality traits supposedly associated with Zodiac signs are due to deficiencies of specific vital salts, which you wouldn't absorb from your mother during gestation. Why does this specific zodiac sign lead to a majority of the people born under it being considered "monsters?"
    • This is addressed in-story - a child is born and a star "disappears from the sky". Later claims of 'more prone to violence / substance abuse' is standard theory running backwards - Gilliac's are that way because they're socially disadvantaged, not due to any innate characteristics.

Identity, Pts. 1 and 2

• Pretty much the entire second half of "Identity" runs on this trope, as Kaylon's dark secrets and Isaac's real mission are revealed. Reveals like Mass graves with billions of bodies buried under the planet, and the Kaylon conquering the ship like a Sunday errand. And plotting course straight for Earth.
  • In part two, as a punishment for Ed trying to warn a Union ship (which the Kaylon destroyed), Primary has a random crew member flushed out an airlock. He makes it clear he's ready to do it again if the crew try to fight back.
  • The sheer lividness of supposed emotionless robots doesn't gel well with their power or how potentially meaningless fighting them could be. Isaac has shown the ability to survive his body's destruction at least twice and their 'massive' fleet was mostly assembled on screen while characters were watching.

Blood of Patriots

• Gordon is forced to walk out into open space, doomed to float helplessly in the emptiness unless the rest of the crew can find him. Scott Grimes' performance fully plays up the existential horror of the situation, which thankfully doesn't last long.

The Road Not Taken

• The episode's entire premise is Bad Future to the extreme. Thanks to time travel antics, the Kaylon have exterminated over half of organic life in the entire galaxy. The worst part is the crew doing a scan on Earth to find no trace of life, not even in the deepest parts of the Marianas Trench.

Season 3

• Most of the New Horizons trailer, which has Marcus running through the ship while a massive battle against the Kaylon rages outside, meaning that the Orville universe may be going through its own version of the Dominion War. He barely makes it to his brother Ty, and Isaac shows up to rescue them... only for his eyes to turn red and open a gaping mouth with many teeth before lunging at them. Even if it's likely a nightmare it doesn't help much, more so by the fact it seems to be the opener to the new season followed immediately by an upbeat, heroic opening with a remixed theme song.

Shadow Realms

• This episode cranks the Nightmare Fuel knob to eleven in a way the show hasn't attempted since "Firestorm".
  • The Orville has received permission to explore an uncharted sector on the far side of Krill space, only for the Krill envoys to warn them away from an area called the Kalarr Expanse, which they claim is inhabited by demons that possess unwary travelers and drag them away to the underworld. When the Krill envoys leave, they offer Ed and the others a prayer for those who are about to die.
  • The crew investigates nevertheless and finds an alien space station, only for the visiting admiral (also Claire's ex-husband) to be infected by a pathogen that mutates his DNA, turning him into a hideous spider-like creature that reproduces by spitting mutagenic goo. The admiral sabotages main power and begins stalking the crew through the pitch-black corridors like a xenomorph, infecting and turning several of them in a process that looks incredibly painful. Ty, Marcus, and Talla all nearly fall victim to the pathogen as well, and then comes the kicker from Claire: she has no idea how to reverse the mutation. The best she can do is to create a synthetic virus that will kill all the mutated members of the crew.
  • When Claire tries to negotiate with the creature that used to be the admiral, he tells her that he plans to turn the entire crew. Claire tells Ed to release the toxin, convincing the admiral to take the other mutated crewmembers and leave on an approaching ship. Before he goes, however, he says "Not. Forever.".

Mortality Paradox

• This episode isn't quite as creepy as "Shadow Realms", but it doesn't take its foot very far off the nightmare fuel pedal either. The premise is simple and chilling: the landing party du jour (Ed, Kelly, Gordon, Bortus, and Talla) are put through a series of increasingly terrifying and dangerous scenarios that always end in a near-death experience. As each of them is about to die, they feel as though they're having an out-of-body experience. Meanwhile, the rest of the crew on the Orville is desperately trying to find the landing party and failing, and then they get a call from Talla, who's still waiting to be picked up from her shore leave. The "Talla" with the landing party reveals that she's a member of the time-displaced species from "Mad Idolatry", who have gone through 50,000 years of evolution since the Orville encountered them in the first season. They have advanced so far that they are now a race of immortal Reality Warpers, but as a result their culture has stagnated and they've become indolent and bored, so they decided to put the Orville crew through the wringer so they could share their consciousnesses and remember what it means to be mortal. Ed tears into her for using them in such a way, but she casually shrugs off his lecture and disappears, having gotten what she wanted with no repercussions.
  • Each of the scenarios the crew encounters seems tailor-made to trigger a different primal fear. The first is a classic; while exploring an American high school that appeared out of nowhere on the planet they're investigating, Gordon is badly roughed up by three bullies who tell him to pay off someone named Randall or face even more severe consequences. Being menaced by a loan shark is bad enough, and then it turns out that "Randall" is a thirty-foot-tall troll with an axe. The second scenario is a plane flying through heavy turbulence, ultimately crashing into a mountain range and nearly plummeting to its doom. The third involves a Moclan morgue, where Bortus encounters a dead copy of Klyden that reanimates and tries to choke him to death. The fourth scenario involves a Xelayan lake monster attacking Kelly and nearly drowning her. The final scenario is the worst of all; the landing party thinks they've made it back to the Orville with evidence of a new Kaylon psy-ops weapon, only to be ambushed by a squadron of Kaylon ships, one of which moves to ram them.

Gently Falling Rain

• The Krill punish couples who get abortions by taking DNA samples from both parents, creating a hologram of what the aborted child would have looked like, and have the hologram talk to the couple, asking them why they didn't want the child. No matter what your stance on abortions is, we can all agree that's messed up.

Twice in a Lifetime

• Kelly and Ed find and rescue Gordon from 2015. In doing so, they Ret-Gone Gordon from 2025 and his family, including two kids. They’re clearly shaken by what they did afterwards.

From Unknown Graves

• Despite how cruelly and horrifically the Kaylon creators treated the robots, it's still chilling when K-1 is the first to murder the family in their own beds.

Midnight Blue

• The latter half of the episode is high-octane nightmare fuel: Topa is abducted from the female Moclan colony and hauled off to a black site to be tortured for information on Heveena's Underground Railroad. By the time Bortus and Kelly find her, she's been beaten bloody and tortured into submission, and the Moclans are about to kill her and dump her corpse.
  • Relatedly, when Bortus sees what's been done to his daughter, he snaps and beats the Moclan torturer half to death, roaring with fury the entire time. Kelly has to tell him to stop twice, and it doesn't take until after he's nearly caved the torturer's face in and rammed the man's Krill shock stick into his remaining eye. It's legitimately scary to see the most controlled and composed member of the Orville's crew losing his temper in such a way.
    • The Krill shock stick that the torturer uses is said to kill humans and nearly do so to Krill at the setting he had it at. All it does is piss Bortus off even more.

Future Unknown

• Sargus IV and Lysella return in this episode, and much of the Fridge Horror from that episode is confirmed. The planet's society has continued its downward spiral, and its upvote/downvote system has been turned into a cultural weapon that sees people being "corrected" (i.e., lobotomized) just because someone didn't like them and started a campaign on the Feed. Lysella notes that everyone is too scared and paranoid to trust others now, and that mass downvotes are the only time anyone feels like they're part of something bigger than themselves. Two of Lysella's friends were downvoted to the point of no return, and she is too scared and stressed out to take it anymore when she knows there's something better out in the stars.
• When Lysella tries to steal specs for some of the Union's technology to take back with her, Kelly takes her to the simulator to show her why the Union refuses to hand out things like matter synthesizers and quantum cores willy-nilly. Early in its existence, Union explorers acted like missionaries instead of observers, preaching the benefits of advanced technology and planetary cooperation to races that hadn't yet developed those things on their own. When they reached the planet of Gendel III in 2235, they found a sharply divided and nuclear-armed society and tried to fix it by revealing themselves and offering their bounty of technology. The people of Gendel III immediately tried to seize the Union's technology and exploit it for personal advantage or political dominance, and a series of wars broke out that saw the planet reduced to an irradiated cinder by 2240. Kelly shows Lysella the before and after: a thriving city surrounded by forests and water, and then a bombed-out husk surrounded by bare deserts and dried-up basins, inhabited by half-feral victims of radiation poisoning.
  Kelly: They wiped themselves out in five years. Nine billion people, gone. After that, new laws were put in place. Strict prohibitions when it came to cultural contamination. And all they tried to do was help.