![]() Gordon's relationship with Laura is thrown for a loop when the Other Guy, named Greg, whom she broke up with right before Gordon entered her life, re-enters the picture suddenly. It doesn't pretend this is a huge thing that's going to crush Gordon or lead to an unhealthy holographic addiction like in TNG's " Hollow Pursuits." It's more like an earnest VR experiment where Gordon's reality is based on how much he can trick himself into believing it, on the basis of it being based on a real person's life. What's best about the episode is its mastery of tone. This is all played for a mix of low-key humor and pathos. Later, when Laura takes enough of a liking to him that she invites him over for game night with her friends, Gordon drags along Ed, Kelly, John, and Talla, who seem to be humoring him more than anything else. LaMarr, skeptical from the outset, warns Gordon to keep some perspective and perhaps not venture down this road at all. Gordon's shipmates are not especially encouraging. Inevitably (and perhaps too obviously) he begins falling for Laura and wants to pursue a relationship. The interactive nature of the program allows him to insert himself into a fictionalized version of Laura's life, where he assumes a starring role. ![]() The writers opt to use this idea to explore Malloy and his loneliness, and it's probably the best use of Malloy to date. After watching her videos and reading her texts, he decides to use the ship's computer to analyze all the data on her phone and create an ultra-realistic interpolated simulation of this long-dead woman and the things in her life's immediate orbit, based on the brief snapshot the phone history contains. The story is about how Malloy finds himself smitten by the idea of this woman, named Laura (Leighton Meester). It's relaxing and pleasant, and in its completely non-urgent and unassuming way it says something much more significant than its modesty suggests. This story is of such deliberately low stakes that watching it, as indeed I did, right after watching Discovery's " The Red Angel" - in which all life in the galaxy supposedly hangs in the balance - plays like a sort of now-I-can-just-sit-back-and-breathe tonic. That it picks the mundane details of a would-be romance is a testament to the writers' faith in the concept. This could've gone in any number of directions, documenting any number of fictional lives. "Lasting Impressions" is the sort of story that could likely be sold with a single-sentence pitch (which is the very definition of "high concept," even though this story does not at all play like one), simply because of how many possibilities the premise opens up. His performance here suggests a specific eccentricity.) (The archeologist assigned to oversee this unearthing is played by Tim Russ, whom I haven't seen in anything since probably Live Free or Die Hard. ![]() Once reviving the phone and powering it up, the crew discovers a treasure trove documenting a short period of a long-ago life. The Orville crew opens a 400-year-old time capsule that was sealed in 2015 in Saratoga Springs, New York, and among the preserved relics is a smartphone, left behind - with all personal data intact - by a young woman. ![]()
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