m. c. de marco: To invent new life and new civilizations...

Today’s Big Dumb Object (BDO) is a small but fresh example of the bioship whose passengers have forgotten they’re not on a real world. In episode 4, “If the Stars Should Appear”, the crew of the Orville are out star charting when they stumble across a vast ship drifting in space. Inside they find a flat biosphere under a curved dome that they describe as the size of New York City. The inhabitants worship a god named Dural (except for the rebels whose suspicions about the ship are heresy). Heretics are tortured and killed medieval style.

The engines are merely broken, rather than perverse in the manner of For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky, so our heroes spend most of their time fighting the powers that be gangland-style. (McCoy figured out the secret of Yonada by marriage.) Dural turns out to have been the first (and last) captain of the ship, and, to return to the BDO qua BDO, the engines are reparable and the dome retractable; we get a good Nightfall scene with surprisingly little panic.