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Yes, The Orville's Alara & LaMarr Had a Secret Off-Screen Romance
While most of The Orville crew's time is spent dealing with major threats and exploring new worlds, the Union officers still find time for romantic misadventures. From Ed and Kelly's will they/won't they to Claire and Yaphit's Retepsian-influenced hook-up, the course of true love never did run smooth. However, nowhere is that more true than between Chief of Security Alara Kitan and Chief Engineer John LaMarr.
A super-strong Xelayan portrayed on TV by Halston Sage, Alara is a fan-favorite Orville crew member who sadly had to leave the ship when her body began to have an adverse reaction to spending time outside Xelaya's intense gravity. Alara's time on the ship was marked by strong bonds with her friends and a number of failed romances which became fodder for crewmate gossip. J. Lee's human officer John LaMarr likewise gives the franchise much of its relationship drama, most notably due to a romance with Alara's replacement Talla Keyali, whose enhanced strength posed major problems in her physical relationship with the genius engineer.
However, before John and Talla got together, LaMarr had an only briefly alluded to relationship with Alara. This took place in the alternate timeline created by Commander Kelly Grayson's younger self, where the Kaylon's attack on Earth was successful. Fans actually got a hint at this in The Orville season 2, episode 14, 'The Road Not Taken,' when a brief reunion between the two sees Alara imply that John let her down in this version of events, sarcastically stating, "You have to be able to count on someone." However, The Orville: Digressions (a comic tie-in from David A. Goodman and David Cabeza) makes the nature of their romance explicit by showing the early days of the new timeline.
In this look at The Orville's alternate timeline without Ed Mercer as captain, there are many differences, but one of the most fascinating is the romance between Alara and John. When Alara's strength begins to fade, she decides she has to leave the ship, resulting in a kiss between her and LaMarr after the two discuss their attraction. They then begin a relationship which ends before Alara actually leaves for Xelaya, with LaMarr showing irritation at Isaac for bringing it up later. While the comic prequel doesn't add many more details to the implications of the show, it does directly confirm and depict the implied relationship between Alara and John. Sadly, it doesn't clear up why Alara is so irritated at John when they meet later, though it's likely their physical relationship would've hit the same roadblocks as LaMarr's relationship with Talla.
One of the big take-aways from this interaction is that with the timeline only splitting on Kelly's decision not to go on a second date with Ed, it's likely that Alara and John shared a similar unspoken attraction in the main timeline, albeit one they didn't act on. It's also interesting that John's most significant romance in the main timeline is with someone who shares so many of Alara's traits, with Talla being from the same society (which generally avoids Union service), fulfilling the same role on the ship, and possessing the same dangerous superstrength.
With the door open for Alara Kitan to return to The Orville in future (indeed, actress Halston Sage continues to make cameo appearances in important episodes), there's still a chance she and John LaMarr could find love at some point in the main timeline's future. Until then, however, fans of The Orville will have to make do with the fact that they weren't imagining the vibe between the two in the show's alternate timeline episode, and that they indeed shared a tragic romance that wasn't depicted on screen.
