Orville started off funny, comical and taking a light hearted approach to the Star Trek genre...
This week's episode was a direct continuation, and exploring the same themes, of the third episode of season 1. It's always been this sort of show, mixing a serious TNG-style theme with some of McFarlane's regular humour, usually in a B-plot or just random interactions between the crew whilst the story plays out.
When it was announced, what people
expected was a primarily-funny show (Galaxy Quest style) but it wasn't ever that and disappointed a lot of folk when it first aired.
What has changed since the early days is that Hulu are going to make fewer episodes but increase the runtime, which seems like a mistake to me based on this week. I thought it was dragging a bit so checked how far into the episode we were and was surprised to find it was 50 minutes in, but shocked to see another 25 minutes to go.
It was also incredible how they set every element up for a fun B-plot to relieve the gravity of the main story - in the cold open we literally saw an alien pyramid and treasure room, with mention of booby traps - and then it was only used as a device to move characters about so that certain conversations could happen. It's astonishing they couldn't find 10-15 minutes of the runtime to have less moping Topa walking around the ship, and more 'landing party accidentally flips a switch and has to Indiana Jones it', or even have Gordon explain Egyptian mummies to Isaac and set up some sort of ghost story/prank.
