History NightmareFuel / TheOrville

** In part two, as a punishment for Ed trying to warn a Union ship (which the Kaylon destroyed), Primary has a random crew member flushed out an airlock. He makes it clear he's ready to do it again if the crew try to fight back.

* Sargus IV and Lysella return in this episode, and much of the FridgeHorror from that episode is confirmed. The planet's society has continued its downward spiral, and its upvote/downvote system has been turned into a cultural weapon that sees people being "corrected" (i.e., lobotomized) just because someone didn't like them and started a campaign on the Feed. Two of Lysella's closest friends were downvoted to the point of no return, and she is too scared and stressed out to take it anymore now that she knows there's something better out in the stars.

* On top of that, it's announced any child who is born in this month must be turned over to the government immediately.
* Ed, Talla and Finn are subjected to a rough treatment of having their [[TheToothHurts mouths probed]] to "prove" they're not born under this month.
* The concentration camp for those born under the sign is as nasty as you can expect when Kelly and Bortus show up.
* How deeply bound is this belief in the race? The actual prisoners in the camp don't even bother trying to escape as they're convinced they're "monsters" and thus this is where they belong.
* Customs do not arise from a vacuum. For example, it's speculated that the personality traits supposedly associated with Zodiac signs are due to deficiencies of specific vital salts, which you wouldn't absorb from your mother during gestation. Why does this specific zodiac sign lead to a majority of the people born under it being considered "monsters?"

** Just the idea that if you're born in a certain month, you're somehow a murderous monster on this planet. That means countless pregnant mother undergo C-sections to ensure their otherwise perfectly healthy children aren't born in this time period to "save" them. Finn openly rants on how "they're pulling these babies weeks, even ''months'' before birth."
** On top of that, it's announced any child who is born in this month must be turned over to the government immediately.
** Ed, Talla and Finn are subjected to a rough treatment of having their [[TheToothHurts mouths probed]] to "prove" they're not born under this month.
** The concentration camp for those born under the sign is as nasty as you can expect when Kelly and Bortus show up.
** How deeply bound is this belief in the race? The actual prisoners in the camp don't even bother trying to escape as they're convinced they're "monsters" and thus this is where they belong.
** Customs do not arise from a vacuum. For example, it's speculated that the personality traits supposedly associated with Zodiac signs are due to deficiencies of specific vital salts, which you wouldn't absorb from your mother during gestation. Why does this specific zodiac sign lead to a majority of the people born under it being considered "monsters?"

** Each of the scenarios the crew encounters seems tailor-made to trigger a different primal fear. The first is a classic; while exploring an American high school that appeared out of nowhere on the planet they're investigating, Gordon is badly roughed up by three bullies who tell him to pay off someone named Randall or face even more severe consequences. Being menaced by a loan shark is bad enough, and then it turns out that "Randall" is a [[DiabolusExNihilo thirty-foot-tall troll with an axe]]. The second scenario is a plane flying through heavy turbulence, ultimately crashing into a mountain range and nearly plummeting to its doom. The third involves a Moclan morgue, where Bortus encounters a dead copy of himself that reanimates and tries to choke him to death. The fourth scenario involves a Xelayan lake monster attacking Kelly and nearly drowning her. The final scenario is the worst of all; the landing party thinks they've made it back to the ''Orville'' with evidence of a new Kaylon psy-ops weapon, only to be ambushed by a squadron of Kaylon ships, one of which moves to ram them.

* The latter half of the episode is high-octane AdultFear nightmare fuel: Topa is abducted from the female Moclan colony and hauled off to a black site to be tortured for information on Heveena's UndergroundRailroad. By the time Bortus and Kelly find her, she's been beaten bloody and tortured into submission, and the Moclans are about to kill her and dump her corpse.

Just because it's a pasitche of ''Franchise/StarTrek'' doesn't mean it can't bring the nightmares.

* What happened to the poor scientist who got caught in the time-acceleration beam in "Old Wounds." She shrieks, ages 100 years in a second, and drops dead while the rest of the team looks helplessly.

* "Krill" has Mercer and Malloy infiltrate a ship of nightmares belonging to an AlwaysChaoticEvil enemy that LooksLikeOrlok, but special mention goes to the travesty of a church service. Watch what they do to that severed human head and try to get a good night's sleep.

* The purely democratic law system of Sargus 4 in "Majority Rule" is eerily similar to the society in the ''Series/BlackMirror'' episode, "[[Recap/BlackMirrorNosedive Nosedive]]". Everyone has to wear a badge with a up-vote/down-vote button from the beginning of adulthood. Unfortunately, if you get caught doing something disrespectful -- intentionally or not -- it has the potential to go viral and [[DisproportionateRetribution get you in a lot of trouble down the line]]. Every downvote you received in your early adulthood will stick with you for the rest of your life, to the point that public services can reject people with 500,000 or more downvotes (as demonstrated by the middle-aged woman in the cafe, who claims she got those downvotes in her 20s and has turned over a new leaf since then, but was denied service nonetheless). If it gets past a million, you get arrested. If it gets to 10 million, the accused is [[GettingSmiliesPaintedOnYourSoul "corrected"]] through electroshock therapy, but since the technological development stage of Sargus is comparable to 21st-Century Earth, [[AFateWorseThanDeath this method is effectively a lobotomy]]. Not even Union medical technology can reverse the damage done.

* The TechnicallyLivingZombie population of the planet in "Into the Fold." Drink the water, fall into the water, bathe with the water ... and end up a brainless monster. Worse, this was the result of a bioweapon gone wrong.
* Darulio of "Cupid's Dagger." He never raises his voice or [[DissonantSerenity seems to show strong emotion]], even when the ship he's on is caught between two hostile fleets that could obliterate the ''Orville''. And he comes from a culture that is so [[Literature/BraveNewWorld open about sex that it's considered rude to refuse an offer of a roll in the hay]] (that is, if he is telling the truth), ''and'' has such powerful pheromones that it can ''induce'' obsessive lust in another person, even if that person ''just'' told him that they hate his guts. Worse, he doesn't see anything ''wrong'' with the whole idea - as far as he's concerned, the worst that happens is "great sex." It's left open as to whether or not he used his pheromones on Kelly the first time they slept together...y'know, the time that Ed walked in on, the one that sent him and Kelly to divorce court, sent his career in a tailspin, and so forth. But the fact he uses a [[FantasticDrug fantastic date rape drug]] on ''both'' Ed and Kelly, accidentally doses Claire, and shrugs the whole thing off as no big deal is a ''terrifying'' look at a sexual predator and how the victims will likely end up blaming themselves for it.
* "Firestorm" takes this to new levels when Alara unknowingly gets trapped in a nightmare simulation that combines the worst fears of all the main characters. Among the ordeals she faced was a MonsterClown with superhuman strength, a giant spider immune to energy weapons, being StrappedToAnOperatingTable by an insane Dr. Finn, and getting stalked relentlessly by a murderous Isaac on an otherwise abandoned ship on a collision course with certain doom.

* Ed's gravity suit failing in "Home," leading to the lovely sight of his shins ''snapping'' as they're crushed under the gravity of Alara's home planet. He lets out a bloodcurdling shriek and almost immediately passes out from the pain. Unlike with previous leg injuries on the show, it's ''not'' played for comedy.

* "All the World is a Birthday Cake":

** Customs do not arise from a vacuum. For example, it's speculated that the persomality traits supposedly associated with Zodiac signs are due to deficiencies of specific vital salts, which you wouldn't absorb from your mother during gestation after your birth. Why does this specific zodiac sign lead to a majority of the people born under it being considered "monsters?"

** The sheer lividness of supposed emotionless robots doesn't gel well with their power or how potentially meaningless fighting them could be. Isaac has shown the ability to survive his bodies destruction at least twice and their 'massive' fleet was mostly assembled ''on screen'' while characters were watching.
* In "Blood of Patriots" Gordon is forced to walk out into open space, doomed to float helplessly in the emptiness unless the rest of the crew can find him. Scott Grimes' performance fully plays up the existential horror of the situation, which thankfully doesn't last long.
* "The Road Not Taken" is BadFuture to the extreme. Thanks to time travel antics, the Kaylon have exterminated over half of organic life in the ''entire galaxy''. The worst part is the crew doing a scan on Earth to find ''no'' trace of life, not even in the deepest parts of the Marianas Trench.

* "Shadow Realms" cranks the Nightmare Fuel knob to eleven in a way the show hasn't attempted since "Firestorm".

* "Mortality Paradox" isn't quite as creepy as "Shadow Realms", but it doesn't take its foot very far off the nightmare fuel pedal either. The premise is simple and chilling: the landing party ''du jour'' (Ed, Kelly, Gordon, Bortus, and Talla) are put through a series of increasingly terrifying and dangerous scenarios that always end in a near-death experience. As each of them is about to die, they feel as though they're having an out-of-body experience. Meanwhile, the rest of the crew on the ''Orville'' is desperately trying to find the landing party and failing, and then they get a call from Talla, [[WhamLine who's still waiting to be picked up from her shore leave]]. The "Talla" with the landing party reveals that she's [[TheBusCameBack a member of the time-displaced species]] from "Mad Idolatry", who have gone through ''50,000'' years of evolution since the ''Orville'' encountered them in the first season. They have advanced so far that they are now effectively immortal, but as a result [[WhoWantsToLiveForever their culture has stagnated and they've become indolent and bored]], so they decided to put the ''Orville'' crew through the wringer so they could share their consciousnesses and remember what it means to be mortal. Ed tears into her for using them in such a way, but she [[BlueAndOrangeMorality casually shrugs off his lecture]] and disappears, [[KarmaHoudini having gotten what she wanted with no repercussions]].

* Kelly and Ed find and Rescue Gordon from 2015 in “Twice in a Lifetime.” In doing so, they RetGone Gordon from 2025 and his family, including two kids. They’re clearly shaken by what they did Afterwards.
* Despite how cruel and horrific the Kaylon creators treated the robots, it's still chilling in "From Unknown Graves" when K-1 is the first to murder the family in their own beds.
* "Midnight Blue" features high-octane nightmare fuel: Topa is abducted from the female Moclan colony and hauled off to a black site to be tortured for information on Heveena's UndergroundRailroad. By the time Bortus and Kelly find her, she's been beaten bloody and tortured into submission, and the Moclans are about to kill her and dump her corpse.

* Sargas IV and Lysella return in this episode, and much of the FridgeHorror from that episode is confirmed. The planet's society has continued its downward spiral, and its upvote/downvote system has been turned into a cultural weapon that sees people being lobotomized just because enough people on the Feed didn't like them. Two of her closest friends were downvoted to the point of no return, and she is too scared and stressed out to take it anymore now that she knows there's something better out in the stars.

** Relatedly, when Bortus sees what's been done to his daughter, he ''snaps'' and beats the Moclan torturer half to death, roaring with fury the entire time. Kelly has to [[ThatsAnOrder tell him to stop]] ''three times'', and it doesn't take until after he's nearly caved the torturer's face in and rammed the man's Krill shock stick into his remaining eye. It's legitimately scary to see the most controlled and composed member of the ''Orville'''s crew losing his temper in such a way.

* "Midnight Blue" features high-octane AdultFear nightmare fuel: Topa is abducted from the female Moclan colony and hauled off to a black site to be tortured for information on Heveena's UndergroundRailroad. By the time Bortus and Kelly find her, she's been beaten bloody and tortured into submission, and the Moclans are about to kill her and dump her corpse.

* "Despite how cruel and horrific the Kaylon creators treated the robots, it's still chilling in "From Unknown Graves" when K-1 is the first to murder the family in their own beds.