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Anyone watching "The Orville"?


Ser Scot A Ellison

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I rather liked "If the Stars Should Appear".  Guest appearance by Liam Neeson was a surprise.  A clear reference to Climate Change denialists and the idiotic flat Earthers.  It seems the "Interplanetary Union" doesn't have  "Prime Directive". 

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2 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

It seems the "Interplanetary Union" doesn't have  "Prime Directive". 

Meh. Neither did Star Trek. :lol: The writers of the original series knew it was a wise angle. But, it severely hampered storytelling. ;)

I enjoyed the ep. as well.

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6 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

 It seems the "Interplanetary Union" doesn't have  "Prime Directive". 

Maybe, maybe not. The episode is essentially "For the World is Hollow and I have touched the Sky", even down to the colony ship reveal. And there Kirk and Spock dismissed the Prime Directive right away saying "a change of knowledge is preferable to sure extermination". Here something similar might have applied, though I would have liked to see more of the results except that distraught reaction shot of their backyard dictator. The fallout is likely going to be pretty heavy...

But then again... while it might be an even more blatant rip-off of an existing Star Trek episode than "About a girl" was, I must admit that I really, really liked everything about it regardless (or maybe especially because). Even the humor wasn't as cringe-worthy as before. Heck, aside from these two snippets that had already appeared in the trailers ("We are not here to harm you, aside from shooting your dad!") it remained a very serious episode and it profited a lot by that.

Damn, they are really pulling off that "TNG light" stunt, aren't they?

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2 hours ago, Toth said:

Maybe, maybe not. The episode is essentially "For the World is Hollow and I have touched the Sky", even down to the colony ship reveal. And there Kirk and Spock dismissed the Prime Directive right away saying "a change of knowledge is preferable to sure extermination". Here something similar might have applied, though I would have liked to see more of the results except that distraught reaction shot of their backyard dictator. The fallout is likely going to be pretty heavy...

But then again... while it might be an even more blatant rip-off of an existing Star Trek episode than "About a girl" was, I must admit that I really, really liked everything about it regardless (or maybe especially because). Even the humor wasn't as cringe-worthy as before. Heck, aside from these two snippets that had already appeared in the trailers ("We are not here to harm you, aside from shooting your dad!") it remained a very serious episode and it profited a lot by that.

Damn, they are really pulling off that "TNG light" stunt, aren't they?

I agree.  It does seem to be "TNG light".  

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Enjoyed the first 2 episodes well enough. Nothing special, but good enough to watch. Episode 3 however was a trainwreck. If you're going to do social commentary, you absolutely need to have a nuanced understanding of the issue you're tackling. The writers of "About a Girl" don't seem to have had even a basic understanding of the issue. It was hard to watch. 

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The fourth episode was great, the show is definitely an homage to and drawing inspiration from the original Star Trek series.   Have enjoyed the Orville more than the first episode of Discovery.   Also liking it more than I ever liked the first few episodes of the  Next Generation, which also rehashed some of the original series' episodes.

The Liam Neeson cameo was great and it looks like Charlize Theron will be on next week in much more than a cameo role. 

Also like the tribute to Isaac Asimov naming the robot after him.

And someone else pointed out, that Adrianne Palicki's character, Kelly Grayson, is probably named after Spock's mother Amanda Grayson.  (especially as she also slept with an alien ;) )

 

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Had to watch the most recent episode to get the bad taste of Discovery out of my system.

It was... well, okay. I feel Theron was a little wasted, given the cliché story full of tired old tropes that made it awfully predictable. Especially in regards to this whole femme fatal thing when the closest Trek comparison to her would be Rasmussen from "A Matter of Time", who made a very interesting episode without sleeping with Picard.

What I did like were the antics of Gordon and Isaac. This episode worked really well as a comedy for a change, and their pranks made me really laugh out loud. It is also interesting to see that the lecherous slime guy was now seen as an Engineering officer and that we got to see the Engine Room and Chief. The world-building seems to start taking shape with every episode.

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1 hour ago, Toth said:

Had to watch the most recent episode to get the bad taste of Discovery out of my system.

It was... well, okay. I feel Theron was a little wasted, given the cliché story full of tired old tropes that made it awfully predictable. Especially in regards to this whole femme fatal thing when the closest Trek comparison to her would be Rasmussen from "A Matter of Time", who made a very interesting episode without sleeping with Picard.

What I did like were the antics of Gordon and Isaac. This episode worked really well as a comedy for a change, and their pranks made me really laugh out loud. It is also interesting to see that the lecherous slime guy was now seen as an Engineering officer and that we got to see the Engine Room and Chief. The world-building seems to start taking shape with every episode.

I agree Theron was wasted.  I thought Issac's joke, given the fact that they could just regenerate the leg, was pretty funny in the context of the Mr. Potatohead joke that had been tried on him.  

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1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I agree Theron was wasted.  I thought Issac's joke, given the fact that they could just regenerate the leg, was pretty funny in the context of the Mr. Potatohead joke that had been tried on him.  

He essentially asked for it... and Gordon himself admitted it was pretty funny in hindsight, so yes, this was awesome! Isaac seems to become a Data with less restraints and certainly no desire to actually be human, just to understand them.

I'm also looking forward to what is going to happen now that Mercer owns a personal teleporter from the future. That'll certainly come in handy in one episode or another (though by the logic of the episode, it should have disappeared alongside Pria...).

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Norm McDonald is what brings the whole thing together with his highly believable portrayal of the blob character.   The guys are funny, their den mother saves them from their stupidity and has a nice smile, every ep will feature the security chief opening a jar of pickles for her weak-armed captain, the egg laying guy is weird which makes it great when he looks miffed at the humans as if they're the weirdos, the robo guy is openly a dick, the girls ep is being taken too seriously, thank gods they didn't cowtow to the official correct way of dealing with social issues but remained unchained as storytellers , it's a sign they deserve to exist and will not be mere mouthpieces for whatever ludicrous lord of the dems currently calls the shots in this culture,  and the future lady repo ep was neato with its representation of darkmatter which was cancelled and now this homage to it, and she thought it was an interesting enough job to put up with banging the self indulgent seth, and it was interesting but that's a bummer the show didn't just stay in that future for the rest of the season and shift into high gear.   

 In a word, crotchtastic.  (Though i also wouldn't miss it yet if cancelled.)

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This show is so MacFarland. It goes from just boring awful noise to pretty great hilarity scene from scene.

MacFarland does appeal to me at times, in a sort of wink-nod way. For instance he's not even a good actor but he made the tropic 'human eats foreign food, is grossed out' bit actually funny by buying in on the sillyness.

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Now that was an odd episode. On one hand the "let's try to make every conversation as awkward and cringeworthy as possible" from earlier episodes returned, making it quite hard to watch at times. On the other hand did they go out of their way to flesh out the Krill and humanize them, which was quite a success especially since they addressed pretty much all the fallout of Mercer's actions in the end. Yes, he wanted to show that humans have a soul by sparing the kids, but he still murdered all their parents and no (regardless of whether it happened in self-defence or not), the kids won't forget that! And they actually made sure to drive that point home, making the episode end on a very bitter note in spite of the successful saving of the Union colony.

And how they portrayed the Krill... okay, on the one hand we had the very heavy-handed shitting on religion by the Union admiral (wonder how the usual Fox News crowd will react to this...) and the fact that the Krill themselves are crusaders, but with a very casual attitude to their holy conquest. We had the very genre-savvy priest, the very laid-back captain and with the lonely school teacher the only one who expressed her religious fervor even outside of the public space. All in all enough of a varied depiction that they seemed like real people. It's also helped that from episode 1 onwards the Krill tend to join in on the occasional goofiness when the Union crew ropes them in. So despite their religious believes of being the only chosen people being very prominent, it didn't consume them into being one-note evil.

Funnily enough, with their attitude the whole reason of their expansion and the way they dismiss the Union as anything that can be reasoned with they kinda remind me of how the Gorn are usually portrayed in the Star Trek EU... the addition of children and schools on their ships seems a logical conclusion then...

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One of the things that Rodenberry said was that TOS Klingons couldn't exist, insofar as they were purely evil... and devoid of depth... which makes sense... how could such a species ever be capable of space travel? ... which is why the cultured was retconned through Worf in TNG..... MacFarlane is making sure that he gives some rationale to the Krill so as to not create such an obvious fault in the cannon...

This show reminds me of when I watch the original series (and sometime TNG) and --even though I love it-- I find myself goofing on it... its so easily made fun of... The Orville removes any pretense, and is just a self-aware sci-fi show that reminds us of how --no matter how advanced we become-- we are all just a bunch of moronic meat sacks trying to find our way.

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I'm shocked at myself, but I'm sitting here watching the USC game waiting for SNL to come on and I keep having to physically check myself from going back to the fox website to watch more of this show because I've seen all the episodes so far.

There's some weird personal quirks for why I keep doing that, but at the end of the day I want to see more.

I guess that means I like it.

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14 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

Yeah, I dig it too. It manages to be its' own thing and channel a Trekkie vibe.

I feel even crazier than usual saying this but I think that some of the eye-rolling cheese and underwhelming dialogue is what gives the show some of its charm. It's like McFarland and the rest of the cast and crew are giving us a wink-nod and saying 'yeah, man. This is our thing. We're doing a Trek thing but it's ours. And we're ballin' on a budget here, have fun with us!'

Seriously, the show is a fucking trek-derivative fanfic on a major network. I'm on board!

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