A lot of the people producing the show are veterans of Star Trek, which is full of time travel stories, plus time travel's been shown to be possible in The Orville, so I sort of hope a story happens involving this:
Orville crew members time-travel to 20th-century Earth or a similar planet and epoch. Bortus is along, disguised as a cosplayer who invented his own alien species to portray. They run into someone smoking a cigarette. Bortus is annoyed by the cigarette, and asks the smoker to put it out. The smoker says no, so Bortus grabs the cigarette out of their hands and chews and swallows it. Bortus's friend and colleague Malloy would be both surprised and delighted. The smoker would be just surprised.
This thought's inspired by seeing people smoking at the TriMet bus and MAX stations and wondering, frustratedly, how many people ever accidentally eat their cigarettes. You know it's a non-zero number.
