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Found this one a little "meh" to be honest.

The Orville is transporting a time capsule from 2015. Amongst the stuff in it is an old iPhone donated by a woman, Laura Huggins. Gordon has the computer download all the data from the phone and recreate her in the holodeck simulator. Naturally, he falls in love with the woman.

This was a pretty well done story, but it's one of the few times Orville has felt to me like it's just retreading old ground. There's a LOT of Star Trek elements that have crept up in the show, but I've always felt that they put enough of their own spin on them that it didn't feel old when they did it. But this time... we saw Geordi fall in love on the holodeck, we saw Janeway fall in love on the holodeck, and it was pretty much this story. They even had "Delete Greg", whereas Janeway had "Delete the wife."

So the A story was a bit meh for me.

Other thoughts... how can Laura phone Gordon when he's on the bridge? He shuts the simulator down when he leaves, right? So it should be essentially paused whilst he isn't there. Likewise, how does he save the simulation whilst he's in bed with her, leave, then come back and find she's got back together with her boyfriend? It seemed odd.

Also, simulator tech has been around for a while. Yet everyone acts like Gordon is doing something very weird by getting involved with a simulation. Surely this would be a pretty common issue in this society. Not that it would necessarily happen to everyone, but surely it happens often enough that it would be a pretty well known issue, even a cliche. Yet everyone acts as though this is something really weird and unusual that Gordon is doing.

I did like Gordon's pointing out that they can't know for a fact that Isaac is a conscious entity, rather than a computer advanced enough to simulate a conscious entity. It's a bit of a philosophical pet peeve of mine that people blithely assume that humans and maybe animals are conscious, but various other things are not. It's perfectly possible that rocks are conscious - how could we ever prove it or disprove it? Literally the only test we have for consciousness is if the thing in question expresses itself somehow. But if you can have an expression that looks like it comes from consciousness without actually having consciousness, then there's no way to tell. And of course, Gordon's right - when you reach a point where consciousness is perfectly simulated, it's effectively the same thing as actually being conscious.

"Wireless Telephone Facility", LOL.

Nice to see Tim Russ here! I still want to see Shatner or Stewart on the show, though. Preferably together, in the same episode!

B story... again, a little meh. We've seen a LOT of Bortus and Klyden this season, we couldn't have Talla be the one who got addicted?

All in all, I'd rank this as one of the weaker episodes of the season.

Personally I found the Bortus/Klyden story to be hilarious. Something about two aliens smoking kept making me laugh.

As for the "A" plot, it wasn't until I finished watching it that I realized that the episode was inspired by the film noir Laura, starring Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney and a young Vincent Price before he became a horror icon. The film is about a woman named Laura who is murdered and Dana Andrews is the police detective who investigates her murder. In the first act he finds himself falling in love with a dead woman based on the stories told to him about her, her personal correspondence, her portrait.

And then Laura shows up and she goes from murder victim to murder suspect. It's a fantastic movie.

Didn't care about the whole cell phone part. Bortus getting addicted I found funny.

Bortus outside the serious episodes, is the deadpan comedy relief. Which I think is the appeal.

It doesn't work with anyone else. Would not have worked with the humans and obviously Issac. Which leads us to Talla which counterminds the badass thing they got going for her.