WARNING: This article contains spoilers for The Orville: Sympathy For The Devil
The Orville season 3 was originally supposed to have one more episode, but real life intervened, resulting in the missing episode being adapted elsewhere. Seth MacFarlane’s sci-fi show The Orville is currently in limbo, with no news forthcoming about the prospect of The Orville season 4. However, there is a small comfort in the fact that an unmade episode from season 3 can be enjoyed via an alternative medium, allowing the story of The Orville to continue.
The ever-expanding absence of The Orville season 4 should come as no surprise, given that season 2 ended in 2019 – three years before The Orville eventually returned for season 3. When The Orville season 3 finally began airing in June 2022, however, there were 10 episodes, rather than the 11 that were originally planned. Fortunately, The Orville season 3’s missing story is still out there to be experienced and enjoyed – albeit not quite as previously intended.
Why The Orville Season 3 Was Missing An Episode
As with many TV and movie productions during the early 2020s, the COVID-19 pandemic played a huge part in the extensive delays that hit The Orville season 3. Initially, these delays were due to the show moving from its previous home on Fox to streaming on Hulu, meaning that new episodes of The Orville were planned for the latter half of 2020. The Orville moving to Hulu improved the show, allowing it to build upon the cinematic scope and scale that won an Emmy for Outstanding Visual Effects in 2019. However, MacFarlane’s plans for a 2020 broadcast were further hampered by the COVID-19 pandemic, which halted filming in March 2020.
Filming resumed on The Orville season 3 in December of that year, but as COVID rates spiked during the winter of 2020-2021, filming again had to be halted. The need for European locations and differing COVID restrictions globally meant that The Orville season 3, episode 9, “Sympathy for the Devil,” had to be scrapped. Seth MacFarlane described the episode (via Twitter) as “an outlier” but was keen that the story did not vanish completely, so he instead adapted the storyline for a different medium.
How You Can Read The Orville’s Missing Episode
Seth MacFarlane adapted The Orville season 3’s missing episode into a 120-page novella entitled The Orville: Sympathy for the Devil, which was published via Disney books. Brilliantly, Sympathy for the Devil was published between the broadcast of The Orville season 3’s episodes 8 and 9, so that viewers could experience the story within the context MacFarlane had originally intended. The book is still available as both an e-book, should those who missed it want to go back.
The best way to read Sympathy for the Devil, therefore, is to do so after The Orville season 3, episode 8, “Midnight Blue.” Sympathy for the Devil takes place just prior to The Orville copying Star Wars in the epic “Domino,” which brought its Kaylon war arc to a thrilling conclusion. Alternatively, an audiobook is also available, read by Babylon 5‘s Bruce Boxleitner, who also played the Union President in The Orville season 3.
What Happens In The Orville: Sympathy For The Devil
Sympathy for the Devil fits alongside the darker and more ambitious tone of The Orville season 3 by telling a story about fascism. It centers on a young man called Adam Collier, who is rescued from an abandoned laboratory by Ed, Kelly, and Claire. Adam’s parents had hidden him in a holographic simulator when he was a baby to avoid him being imprisoned by the Krill. In a dark twist on Star Trek holodeck episodes, Adam lived in a simulation of Earth in the period between 1914 and 1944, covering both World Wars, turning the young man into a severely damaged individual.
In the simulation, the abandoned Adam was raised by a German couple, and lived through Hitler’s rise to power, willingly participating in war crimes and genocide. This leads the Orville crew to debate the morality of what to do with Adam, who many crew members believe is an abhorrent racist and war criminal. Claire, however, believes that there is still hope for the young man, and argues that people can be forced by their circumstances into committing horrific acts.
Interestingly, this The Orville story mirrors a Star Trek episode, also abandoned, which would have seen the Enterprise crew debate the morality of removing Hitler’s father from history prior to the dictator’s birth. Ultimately, Claire’s faith in Adam wins out, and he is taken back to Earth for extensive psychological deprogramming. A coda reveals that he goes on to live a happy life, and is eventually able to see the horrors of Nazi ideology, moving past the crimes he had committed within the simulator.
At a Comic-Con panel in 2022, Seth MacFarlane reflected that Sympathy For The Devil was an idea “so out-there and so bizarre, you don’t want to let it go,” suggesting that it could have been featured in The Orville season 4. However, the novella is perhaps the better home for it, as the story of an innocent, abandoned child being raised as a Nazi due to a lack of foresight in holographic programming might have been difficult to realize onscreen. The Orville season 3 did a great job of balancing humor with dark morality tales, but how well Sympathy for the Devil would have walked that tonal tightrope will always remain a mystery.
