The Orville Marathon

[Robovski]

Yeah, this isn't the flagship, or even a large cruiser or something like that. This is more like a patrol boat, but it's crewed from utopians who want to do something here instead of whatever else they could be doing.

[BunBun299]

Ok, took me a lot longer to get back to this thread than I anticipated, but to continue;

Episode #6, Krill, my favorite episode thus far. We get to learn about the primary enemies of the Union, and we learn with the crew. Turns out the Krill are largely a mystery to them as well. It was fun to see Ed and Gordon bumble through their infiltration, and good to see them act heroically.

Episode 7, Majority Rule. My second favorite episode, at least so far. This felt like a classic Trek allegory episode. Take modern social media trends to an extreme, where enough downvotes can get you lobotomized. And it comments on just how judgemental people can get, even without knowing all the facts. And they don't change the planet, but they do seem to change one person, which is a start.

Episode 8, Into the Fold. Not quite up to the bar set by its two predecessors, but still an episode I quite enjoy. I liked Clair's struggle to escape her captor, and Isaac taking care of her children. This bond between robot and the Fynn family continues into the new season, btw. Also, based on the fact that Clair had two children by donated sperm, not through a husband or boyfriend, I've come to think that Clair may be asexual. At least, when not under the influence of alien hormones.

And episode 10, Firestorm. Another enjoyable episode. I kinda don't like the reveal of Alara being in the Simulator, at least not as presented. Seems to undermine the tension. But then, I'm not sure finding out when she did would have really worked better. Still, fun mind screw episode, and I like the idea that she did this to herself, rather than some alien messing with her head for reasons unknown.

Also, the recent episode Primal Urges, revealed that Bortus is still greatly bothered by the events of About A Girl. He feels he failed as a father to protect the daughter nature gave him. Since they didn't just drop the issue after the credits rolled, this kinda makes me like About a Girl a little more. It still had some issues, of course.

So, anyway, I love this show. It is the spiritual successor to Trek.

[Riedquat]

People are comparing this show to Trek for obvious reasons, but it also has shades of Red Dwarf in that it is a comedic science fiction series. Acting like an unprofessional idiot or laughing at a severed leg that is easily regrown is classic RD. Its just not a problem for me.

Red Dwarf can get away with it because the characters aren't supposed to be the most able professionals in the top roles, they're the bottom of the heap who end up having to fend for themselves.

Nor are the Orville crew. As I said: Miranda Class.

The RD crew might fit as the janitors on the Orville. What we've seen of Red Dwarf's more senior crew is that they were a bit more professional.

[Zefram Mann]

Found this show a bit late and still making my way through S1, but I thought I'd toss in my opinion of a couple of things, specifically about episode 3.

Forced gender assignment at birth is a HUGE problem for people born intersex. Medically unnecessary surgeries on intersex infants happen to roughly 1 in a 1000-2000 people. That sounds rare, but we're still talking hundreds of thousands of people in the US alone.

Seth MacFarlane lacks dramatic writing experience and probably should have consulted more with the community to smooth out some of parts he got wrong (Rudolph's nose being useful shouldn't have been a prerequisite for him being accepted). Whoever said this should have been a S2 ep was on the money, as it would have benefited from MacFarlane and the show getting more comfortable with the role they play before tackling it. He may have jumped the gun, but if he didn't know if he was getting a second season, he probably didn't think he'd get the chance to tackle the subject again in this way.

Ultimately, though, they deserve a lot of credit for even trying, which is a lot more than Trek has done since Next Generation. To date the only episode of Trek to even bring up gender reassignment surgery was fucking Profit and Lace! That's a dismal goddamn record if there ever was one.

[Sir Will]

We do not speak of that episode. At least Threshold was so bad it's funny. The other worsts are just painful and offensive.

[Nessus]

The whole Moclan(sp?) gender thing has me confused in way that distracted me too much to let me get engrossed in the issue of the episode.

Like, what's the Moclan definition of "female" to begin with? It doesn't seem to be reproductive, as the "males" are fully capable of that naturally without special measures. But for us, the male/female distinction arises from reproductive mechanics. Even as extended political/cultural constructs detached from biology, those concepts begin with our biology.

So they seem to be operating on a concept of gender that's different enough from ours to qualify as an outright mistranslation. They aren't talking about sex or gender, they're talking about something completely different that for some reason gets translated as such.

I understand that answering "technical" sci-fi stuff like this is outside McFarland's comfort zone, and for many casual viewers would be functionally identical to technobabble, but to me it seems kinda glaringly key to the whole "cultural relativism" aspect of the plot's debate. If you're going to map our views onto the Moclans, it's kind of important to establish you're actually talking about the things you're ostensibly talking about. The episode unwittingly raises this issue and makes it THE first question that has to be answered before the argument can logically proceed at all but does not recognized it, much less answer it.

The episode wants me to get on board with the whole gender equality vs cultural relativism debate, but the way it's set up, it kinda looks more like the whole thing is just a case of a rampant mistranslation.

The practice of "fixing" intersex babies would indeed seem to be a much better fit (or possibly circumcision, depending on how cosmetic the alteration is), but the episode explicitly frames it as a gender equality thing.

[AllanO]

(Rudolph's nose being useful shouldn't have been a prerequisite for him being accepted).

You know thinking about your comment, I don't think it was. Rather Rudolph's nose being useful was the process by which the people who laughed and called him names came to recognize that he should be accepted. They not only laughed and called him names but presumably internalized prejudices about him being useless if not vaguely malignant. So him being useful puts those prejudices in sharp relief and dispels them. He is not actually that useful only due to a freak fog that we have no reason to think will recur, so his usefulness would soon fade so if that were the moral of the story Rudolph would not go down in history, since he would soon be useless and therefore mock-able.

In real life we overcome prejudices and the like about others is by a long hit and miss process of building acceptance, challenging rejection and so. The song and movie go for a dramatic series of events, but that is different then suggesting usefulness is the actual factor of importance, although I guess it garbles the message.