The Orville: Sympathy for the Devil (Ebook/Audiobook)

[AnimeMania]

The Orville: Sympathy for the Devil, a digital novella by MacFarlane adapting a script intended for an episode of The Orville: New Horizons that never went into production due to COVID-19-related obstructions. 

When Captain Ed Mercer and the crew of the U.S.S. Orville come face-to-face with one of humanity’s most vile ideologies, they must solve the moral conundrum of who to hold accountable for evil deeds real… and imagined. Occurring just after episode S03.E08, this is the Orville like you’ve never seen it before.

The Orville: Sympathy for the Devil is an original 120 page digital novella/ 3 hour audiobook and would have aired as the ninth episode of Season 3 of The Orville: New Horizons. 

The book "The Orville: Sympathy for the Devil" is available on July 19. The Ebook is $2.99 available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble and the Audiobook narrated by Bruce Boxleitner is available for $7.99 from Barnes and Noble and for $6.99 from Apple Books.

[AnimeMania]

Here are two of the set locations that would have been used if "Sympathy for the Devil" had been filmed.

[shapeshifter]

12 hours ago, AnimeMania said:

Occurring just after episode S03.E08, this is the Orville like you’ve never seen it before.

I wonder if this means there are plots and issues covered in this audio book that will be referred to in later episodes?

[Chicago Redshirt]

9 hours ago, shapeshifter said:

I wonder if this means there are plots and issues covered in this audio book that will be referred to in later episodes?

I will keep my fingers crossed that there are many more later episodes for them to potentially revisit it, but I'd tend to think that with just two episodes this season, they would shave any built-in references to an unaired episode.

It looks like it's on Audible, so I likely will give it a listen and give some thoughts and a summary sometime soon.

[ketose]

21 hours ago, AnimeMania said:

Here are two of the set locations that would have been used if "Sympathy for the Devil" had been filmed.

The second picture looks like it's from "All the World is Birthday Cake"

[Chicago Redshirt]

So I listened to it, and relatively enjoyed it. It was probably more interesting as an audiobook than it would have been as a filmed episode.

FWIW, it doesn't seem likely to have much impact on the greater Orville universe, as it's a pretty self-contained, low-stakes adventure.

But if you have a few bucks to spend and a few hours to kill, you could do worse. And hey, if the audiobook/ebook sells well, maybe it will increase the odds that there will be a fourth season.

I'll give a summary and some further thoughts under spoiler tags. 

The episode starts around 1914 in a New York hotel. A woman frantically runs in and hands a baby to a clerk. The hotel staff gives the baby to a German couple that returns to Germany. Otto grows up to be a young Nazi who falls in love, gets married, has a son. He becomes estranged from his own baker father as he gets deeper and deeper in the Nazi party. Otto rises up the ranks to be commadant over a concentration camp that is scheduled to get an inspection from the Red Cross. The inspectors turn out to be: Ed and Kelly. 

It turns out that the parents of the baby were off-grid engaging in forbidden energy research when the Krill learned of them. While the scientists were in the aforementioned simulator with their son, Adam, the Krill attacked. Desperate to try and secure the baby's safety, they stuck him with simulated people and tried to throw the Krill off-track. So while they were captured by the Krill and held for 30 years, their baby got the identity of Otto Vogel, and the simulator kept going for 30 years, all while he came to embrace Nazism. The Krill eventually released the scientist parents, who had been haunted all this time about the welfare of their son.

Adam is now a man out of time, firmly believing in Nazi principles that of course have no place against the backdrop of the Planetary Union. They try to ease him into the reality of the situation. The crew debates what to do about him and how to get him to adjust to their reality. Prisons as such no longer apparently exist, and his crimes of killing numerous simulated people aren't really crimes. Or are they? Is he a psychopath or just a normal person who bent under the influence of a demagogue like many of us might? Gordon shows him a clip from Flash Gordon to ease him into the concept of space travel, and then they show him the windows outside to space. He is still having trouble accepting all this, and eventually breaks free and gets to a simulator and sets it for post-war setting where Germany has won and he is back with his wife and son. 

In a flashforward epilogue, Adam is a 95-year-old baker in the real world, and an older Ty buys a loaf from him. So he has apparently eventually decided to give up his Nazi past and fake reality.

It felt to me like there was precious little time spent with the actual crew of the Orville and the most interesting thing was the dilemma about what to do with Adam, and that was glossed over. The story was pretty much done straight-up, which makes sense, because Nazis. But it's again something where part of the attraction of the show is how it weaves in humor and I was missing that.

Edited July 22, 2022 by Chicago Redshirt

[greekmom]

On 7/22/2022 at 9:03 AM, Chicago Redshirt said:

So I listened to it, and relatively enjoyed it. It was probably more interesting as an audiobook than it would have been as a filmed episode.

FWIW, it doesn't seem likely to have much impact on the greater Orville universe, as it's a pretty self-contained, low-stakes adventure.

But if you have a few bucks to spend and a few hours to kill, you could do worse. And hey, if the audiobook/ebook sells well, maybe it will increase the odds that there will be a fourth season.

I'll give a summary and some further thoughts under spoiler tags. 

  Hide contents

Thank you for the synopsis.

I now want to buy and read it but question before I do:

Spoiler

Does it explain how or why Adam went from Nazi dude in the simulator to a simple baker?

[Chicago Redshirt]

2 hours ago, greekmom said:

Thank you for the synopsis.

I now want to buy and read it but question before I do:

  Hide contents

Does it explain how or why Adam went from Nazi dude in the simulator to a simple baker?

 

You're of course welcome. And, no. The last chapter has him running to a simulator on the Orville and figuring out how to program it to take him to a scenario where the Nazis win and have installed a puppet regime in America and he's with his wife and now-16 year-old kid. He was 30 in real chronological years at that point. Then there's the epilogue where he's a 95 year-old baker and Ty buys bread from him. So we are left to assume that somewhere in the next 60ish years, he managed to outgrow his Nazi ideology and live in the real world.

Edited July 24, 2022 by Chicago Redshirt

[benteen]

I thought it was good and the idea was interesting but it was too short.

[anna0852]

I really liked this! And it was well written, to the point where I could really envision it playing out on screen. I think it was a great way to get that storyline out there even though they couldn’t shoot the episode. If they don’t get picked up for season four, I wouldn’t mind getting some more novellas in this style.

[DoctorAtomic]

I just finally read this in 2 days. I was confused as to how The Orville would work into the story. I thought it was going to be time travel and that Otto had some effect on the Union. 

I thought it ended too pat. I almost wanted it to end with Adam disappeared into the simulation. After all the prison discussion, I thought that willingly entering into the simulation was the prison. 

Having him not rehabilitated seemed more Orville to me. 

How was he fed in the simulation? 

[Chicago Redshirt]

On 8/10/2024 at 5:48 PM, DoctorAtomic said:

How was he fed in the simulation? 

Assuming the simulator tech in the Planetary Union is roughly the equivalent of holodecks in Star Trek, the Planetary Union's replicator equivalents would allow for actual food and/or the ingredients to make food to be produced. So when his wife says "Darling, I've made your favorite wienerschnitzel!" the simulation would prepare such food and he would eat it. If Adam said "Hey I feel like baking a cake to celebrate all the Jews I murdered," he would be able to go to his pantry and fridge and get the eggs, butter, cream, flour, sugar and other ingredients, and he could put them in a sim-oven and bake them.

[DoctorAtomic]

That's a long time and a lot of raw materials and energy to have on hand. 

[anna0852]

34 minutes ago, DoctorAtomic said:

That's a long time and a lot of raw materials and energy to have on hand. 

They’ve commented in the show that synthesizer technology has essentially rendered the need for raw materials moot. They can essentially ask it to create any kind of food stuff without needing to worry about a supply line.

[Chicago Redshirt]

In Star Trek and The Orville, they live in post-scarcity societies where they can have access to essentially infinite energy and can convert that energy freely to basic forms of matter. There are apparently a few exceptions in Star Trek -- the Ferengi and others use for their chief currency latinum, a kind of metal that can't be profitably replicated. I don't know if there is a similar limitation in the Orville-verse.

In any case, coming up with decades of food and drink for a single person and his holo-characters is a pretty easy achievement.

The thing that has to be handwaved is that the simulator is only a limited space and so trying to simulate activity in a bigger space shouldn't really be possible. If the guy is taking a train or a car from Berlin to his concentration camp, it would seem difficult to make that journey of hundreds of miles seem real. You could project the horizon in the distance, but eventually if you're driving a real/real-adjacent automobile or other vehicle, you're going to exhaust that physical space. Or maybe I'm just thinking too two-dimensionally on this.

[anna0852]

9 hours ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

The thing that has to be handwaved is that the simulator is only a limited space and so trying to simulate activity in a bigger space shouldn't really be possible. If the guy is taking a train or a car from Berlin to his concentration camp, it would seem difficult to make that journey of hundreds of miles seem real. You could project the horizon in the distance, but eventually if you're driving a real/real-adjacent automobile or other vehicle, you're going to exhaust that physical space. Or maybe I'm just thinking too two-dimensionally on this.

I think when the simulator needs to simulate a vast area, the floor almost acts like a treadmill. The person in the simulator experience is actual movement and the environment changes around them. We saw this in the first season episode, whose name I cannot remember, when Alara developed that fear of fire and decided to test herself to make sure she had no other undiscovered fears. Her perception was that she was racing from deck to deck within a burning Orville, while the crew members watching from an observation gallery, essentially saw her running in place.

[Chicago Redshirt]

58 minutes ago, anna0852 said:

I think when the simulator needs to simulate a vast area, the floor almost acts like a treadmill. The person in the simulator experience is actual movement and the environment changes around them. We saw this in the first season episode, whose name I cannot remember, when Alara developed that fear of fire and decided to test herself to make sure she had no other undiscovered fears. Her perception was that she was racing from deck to deck within a burning Orville, while the crew members watching from an observation gallery, essentially saw her running in place.

I think simulating a space like a ship that is larger but still essentially limited would be doable, especially if you did not care to fully replicate the experience.

I think it would be a lot harder to attempt miles and miles of a real-world environment such that it would be indistinguishable from the real world.

Having a treadmill big enough and versatile enough that it could go at 40 mph when it was simulating a car/train, but 3 when someone was walking seems like it would be tough to get right. But maybe the gazillion advances in computing power could solve that.