They could go either way; Mercer is a great hero who brought back a Krell ship, or he is a screw up who began a war.
Captain Sidney Smith, for example, negotiated a French surrender in Egypt, but the government was angry with him because they didn’t get to kill a bunch of French guys.
I don’t think saving the kids is entirely “squeaky clean.” The Orville’s officers have already had multiple close encounters with species that consider Union member species inferior* and they’re probably a bit sick of it. By saving the young Krill, they not only salve their consciences, they send a message to the Krill: “We could have just been the inferior savage species you think us anyhow and killed everyone aboard your ship. We didn’t. We chose to save the youths, even at some risk to ourselves. What does your philosophy/religion say about that?! Think about that the next time you’re stabbing a skull. :p”
Saving but keeping them doesn’t have the full rhetorical impact of sending them back. Krill propaganda could fill in all sorts of horrors if the Krill youths were kept in Union custody. “You didn’t save them out of mercy, but to exploit them” would merely be the most polite. 
Sending the youths back robs the Krill propagandists of that spin and is a Union hearts-and-minds coup. Plus I don’t see much success in keeping the youth to “use them as the bridge for communication and peace.” The more the youths are military cadets, the less likely they will willingly adapt to or adopt Union culture and values in Union custody. The younger and more malleable they are, the more likely the Krill are to consider them merely brainwashed Union minds in Krill bodies.
*One of them is a bridge officer. 
“You obviously did not want to murder the children of a superior species.”
“You fear the Krill too much to murder their children.”
“Even an inferior species can recognize the superiority of the Krill.”
The first three that come to mind.
The first that came to mind for me is Krill considering not killing the trainees as a sign of their inferiority.
‘If they’re not willing to wipe out their enemies just because they’re young, they’re obviously weak and useless.’
Or, “Leaving the children as witnesses to the deaths of everyone else is an obvious terrorist tactic, intended to intimidate.”
You know the Krill seemed awfully nice to each other. They seemed to be pretty patient with disguised Mercer and Malloy who were acting like total morons. The scene where the Avis priest expressed his concerns to the Krill captain was friendlier than I expected. Usually military and religious leaders are in opposition to each other in SciFi. The captain was a like ‘Your friendship with me has earned you some leeway. Do your investigation.’ If this show was about the Krill ships then those two would be the Kirk and Bones of the series. The teacher was nice and seemed gentle with her pupils. That guard that got knocked out by Mercer was genuinely exited by the thought of a black velvet painting of Avis. There was very little internal security on-board which suggest high trust among their species. They didin’t get violent with Malloy until it was revealed he was human.
You know, apart from the fanaticism and genocidal tendencies, the Krill seemed alright.
My fanwank:
If the Krill are that sensitive to UV-radiation then logic would suggest that other life-forms on their planet are also. They use the lights to disinfect the ship during servicing.
Yeah. In the first episode, the Krill captain provided sympathetic marital advice, as well.
And that’s what I’m liking about this show. They’re making it clear that life is more complicated than a simplistic “Do the right thing and it’ll all work out” philosophy. More than once we’ve seen the crew make what they thought was the right choice, and either not win, or be faced with it maybe coming back to bite them later. In this episode, Mercer clearly had no good choice - kill the kids too, and prove that humans are just evil, as the Krill assume we are, and live with the guilt, or let them live, and possibly just reinforce the Krill’s opinions in the next generation. You can make a legitimate case that either option was the “correct” one, without too much of a stretch either way.
Well, we do have a tradition of “leave one alive as a warning to the others”…maybe the Krill have a point. 
But for the majority of the life of the Catholic church–over a thousand years–people were not encouraged to have and read individual Bibles.
Yes, good points–and I’d add the cute kid who was curious about humans. I think we are meant to take them as a culture which has been made worse by its fundamentalist religion, and which could have potential to come around.
Indeed. I thought they referenced something from a later episode as well, but I can’t think of what it was.
Great point.
Now, now: Mercer told him he had to keep it below the console.
Sort of like the British in India?
I know you mean this to be snide, but I was born in a country that had gotten its independence from Britain only a little more than a decade earlier, and went back there for part of high school and have kept tabs since. I don’t have the impression they’ve improved the country in the independent era–more the opposite.
Right. Just like Hitler was at heart an artist, Goering loved cats, and Goebbels was a fine and dutiful father.
Jokes that don’t land was always a part of Trek though.
Data has some misunderstanding about human emotions, Riker and LaForge smile at each other, some jaunty flute music plays for a few seconds to let you know that that was supposed to be funny…
So I’m fine with them swinging and missing, especially given that they also hit much more than Trek did: every episode I’ve laughed out loud a couple times.
I will say though that they linger on bad jokes too long sometimes. “Avis” was used at least 3, maybe 4 separate times?
I hope they never mention it again in their dealings with the Krill.
When you’re Number 2, you try harder.
Excessive repetition has always been a Seth McFarlane watermark.
But that’s not what’s going on with The Orville. Only a handful of episodes of Trek - across all 5 series - have been as unrelentingly jokey as The Orville, and only a handful of those have had the humour fall as consistently flat.
I was going to say The Orville is an entire series of Profit and Lace, but that’s not fair - Profit and Lace would have been total crap even if they’d played it seriously, or hired a competent joke writer.
Honestly, I can’t think of a good comparison in Trek. TNG might have one, but since only the middle seasons are watchable, I haven’t rewatched it recently. But Trek’s humour episodes either fall flat entirely, both on plot and on humour (Profit and Lace), or have a pretty solid hit/miss ratio on the jokes.
I too would prefer a somewhat lower ratio of jokey stuff. But on the other hand, some of the comedy has been inspired: the video game in the pilot, the terrible tasting food in the colony ship, the practical joke of cutting off the leg.
Half snide, I guess. I was surprised to learn that one of the US aims after WWII was dismembering the Empire.
How you uh, how you comin’ on that novel you’re working on?