‘The Orville: ‘Lost’ Season 3 Episode to Be Released as Novella

Set your plasma pistols for “reading,” Orville fans.

Series creator/star Seth MacFarlane announced on Monday the digital release of The Orville: Sympathy for the Devil, an original novella that he penned which is set immediately after the events of the current season’s eighth episode.

Conceived as a Season 3 episode that ultimately could not be filmed due to the assorted COVID-related delays, the novella finds Captain Ed Mercer and his crew coming face-to-face with one of humanity’s most vile ideologies, after which they must “solve the moral conundrum of who to hold accountable for evil deeds real… and imagined.”

“Due to Covid shutdowns, we had to scrap one episode of The Orville: New Horizons,” McFarlane explained on Twitter, sharing a pre-order link. “It was an outlier — a conceptually experimental story. Rather than let it vanish, I decided to adapt it as a novelization.”

The cover art for The Orville: Sympathy for the Devil , which will be released July 9, is an original piece from Bill Sienkiewicz, an Eisner-winning, Emmy-nominated artist best known for revamping the style of comic and graphic novel illustration.

The audiobook will be narrated by very recent Orville guest star/Babylon 5 alum Bruce Boxleitner.

The Orville‘s New Horizons season continues this Thursday with the release of Episode 5 (of 10).

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