I had forgotten how this episode was structured; I remembered it as everything up until the reveal being part of the simulation, including the death of Lt. Payne in engineering. The episode is obviously much better than that, foreshadowing the plot by having Alara cope with her trauma in the simulated boxing gym.
This episode does a good job of leading you on and making you think that all of this could really be happening up until Gordon gets swallowed. They could have kept the viewers in suspense a little longer than that if that creature had hauled Gordon away screaming instead of eating him and Alara declaring him dead.
That's a good point. It's pretty clear this far into the show that main characters are off the table for anti-climactic deaths. Still, I don't mind too much because the "it was all a dream" (simulation) story reveal is one of the least satisfying around. It softens the blow a bit to know ahead of time that this episode is going to have some form of reset by the end. Given the experience involved, I even wonder if it was done deliberately for that reason. I like that by the time of the reveal we're already waiting for what kind of reveal it will be instead of it just being out of nowhere, which is the least satisfactory kind of these.
The scene where Grayson says she's going to "shower and change" then just about falls into the abyss is a fun subversion of the standard horror trope where a woman in a state of undress gets attacked. Having her basically announce an upcoming Psycho pastiche only to hard zag away is a really fun time and one of my favorite "jokes" in an episode that's already doing a lot of good stuff comically: "Looks like a big screensaver, doesn't it?" / "She's not getting a pizza."
It's also a ton of fun to see Robert Picardo from Voyager show up as Alara's father. Overall, just a great, strong episode. I don't have any complaints, they really got it all right here. The Orville running on all cylinders.
The "stone" with the words in it has a suspiciously uniform appearance. I wonder whether it might be concrete and the letters pressed into it while wet, in which case basically none of it is true.