The Orville Marathon

[Durandal_1707]

Shit, even Enterprise was an attempt at a continuation of the Trek of old.

The fact that it tried to keep on doing the same old thing Trek had been doing for 14 straight years was the entire problem with Enterprise.

[Darmani]

I have to disagree with Chuck about a girl was in fact the episode that really sold me on the Orville not being easy virtue signal. Because us checkpoints out its sex changes for the underaged arguably the issues of how we view women train into the idea of immediately sex changes for the Young as well as how we value other cultures and how we pressure and alter them as well as how the issues escalate all well at the exact same time in a race of all men where homosexuality is the norm. That didn't strike me is virtue signaling because it wasn't an easy issue of we are good for thinking this when fact it was pointed out multiple times how maybe they weren't actually doing all that good just reactionary and more importantly they lost

He went through a whole journey and instead of going through a reset effectively ending where we began we ended up with the baby changed and learning that one of them was a female with the possibility that the entire planet had a suppressed female population that they hadn't been accepting just calling into question the traditions right from the beginning to the end. And they even managed to set this up with a joke.

All this in the next episode not only is the spouse still there along with a child but there is an ongoing concern. That pretty much meant that this was not going to be a simple Star Trek cosplay. Now I admit there's a certain energy to everything and you're what your idea of having the two of them work together would have probably been a little bit better but I don't think he drove it off a cliff

In terms of episodes that tackled this subject matter especially with an emphasis on the transsexual part of glbt it was very unique and kind of fun. In fact the point that you make about how having the croup Legend with their Supremacy and they're out of context examples of how they think other cultures prove them wrong kind of emphasized this

I even objected to shucks classifying it as toxic masculinity the planet when fact while it's true that they had a ritualize first state that ended with video games we also saw him sitting naked on an egg and planning cutesy things that are often associated with feminine actions.

All this in the put a wink and a nod towards the Klingons with the cube to sphere gavel thing

At the very least it felt like it was going somewhere meaningful and not necessarily safe even if it was in the context of something done before. Determining whether Brent Spiner is a human is absolutely silly. Data is a regular character we're obviously not going to kill him we obviously are going to respect his personhood and Starfleet as a determined is personhood up until now.. Both a spouse that isn't a major character and a baby character both races States and it was handled early enough that we didn't have our cynicism Shield up

The number one problem I have with the Orville wasn't so much how bad or good it was or was not so much as how difficult it was to follow and I felt like the pacing and overall feel of the episodes weren't quite right
But just struck me as basic show Finding its feet Growing Pains and with an episode like about a girl out the gate or very close to the Starting Gate it made me want to believe in it I didn't realize how it had a poor reception

[CareerKnight]

The fact that it tried to keep on doing the same old thing Trek had been doing for 14 straight years was the entire problem with Enterprise.

I would say it was only part of their problem and not even the biggest part. The biggest was just the sheer incompetence on display when it came to writing both story and character.

[Aotrs Commander]

I missed the start of the Orville and only came in on Krill, watching the earlier ones later. (Though apparently, I completely missed If the Stars Should Appear altogether, somehow. Huh. I mean, I'd have remembered Liam Neeson at the very least!)

I am apparently one of the few that didn't hate About a Girl; I actually applauded it for trying to tackle a difficult issue and the stuff that bugged Chunk I simply didn't notice. (But courtroom drama isn't something I'm particularly into.) I also was actually surprised they lost, because I was expecting a TNG win, there. I mean, don't get me wrong, I way prefer more starships doin' the shootin' at each other in my scifi, but for my own personal two pence, I didn't think it was actively bad myself.

I thought Firestorm was the best episode of the season, so I was pleased to see Chuck liked it as well.



Overall, I like Orville. Sure, it definitely has its issues - but the first season of TNG was pretty ropey, too - and even SG-1 and B5 took a bit to find their feet and had their respective stinkers early-on.

I'm quite eager to see the new series, as the stuff I'm watching otherwise is getting a bit off or at least being rather heavy handed *cough*Supergirl*cough*, so some light hearted sci-fi like the back end of Orville season one will be welcome. Fingers crossed!

[CmdrKing]

Y'know what kills me in About a Girl? This is based wholly on Chuck's review, but okay.

They've made this painfully on the nose, 1 to 1 allegory for the surgical assigning of sex to intersex infants. The examples they use, the terminology around it, it's very clearly exactly what they're doing. The only change from real life here is that the doctor is refusing to carry out the procedure rather than doing it automatically and, if they're lucky, telling the parents afterward "hey so there's a good chance they'll never have mature gonads and will need hormones to kickstart puberty in 12 years or so".

But intersex is sorta complicated in humans and hard to explain in a one hour drama/comedy show. So they already had a one-gender race, just make is "oh so a fraction of a percent of the time, babies recognizable to humans as female are born in the all-male race". The allegory makes just as much sense in that setting, it's easier to explain to the audience, it's good use of your sci-fi.

And then they spend the entire episode hung up on transposing human notions of gender and sex onto the scenario and end up completely disguising their extremely obvious original allegory. Like if you aren't already familiar with the basics of intersex healthcare you won't even notice that's what this is. I mean, Chuck didn't bring it up and nobody's mentioned it in this topic for example.

Which just reinforces Chuck's main criticism in the episode. They got so distracted on an irrelevant tangent that they didn't actually address the message of their message episode, and completely threw out the opportunity for nuance and actually digging into the issue in favor of retreading the hackiest comedy possibles, the Battle of the Sexes.

[Riedquat]

I've only seen Chuck's reviews, no actual episodes, but the first one (i.e. not in the marathon) left me with the impression of a rather silly, trying-too-hard programme, but he's given the impression that it's been finding its feet and looks like something I wouldn't mind watching.

Just reading up a bit on it on Wikipedia the article there makes some comments on the distance between critics' and viewers' opinions. I'm wondering whether that'll be brought up, it sounds similar to points made by Chuck in his Dragon Age II review.

[CMDR_Bob]

I came in after "About A Girl" and heard about it from word-of-mouth, so I have no personal investment. Maybe, in the future, I'll catch The Orville in its entirety as a series. For now, though, I will say what little of it I did see, I mostly enjoyed. The series definitely feels Trek-y. The first portion of the season seems clunky in how it wants to show how Trek it can be and also be its own thing with some comedy here and there. After they hit their stride in the latter portion, I can only hope that MacFarlane and co realize what they have and the direction they should go, rather than just throwing more crap at the wall and hoping it sticks.

They've had a season to ask the all-important "what worked, and what didn't?" question. Now, the real series proper can start.

[Robovski]

They've had a season to ask the all-important "what worked, and what didn't?" question. Now, the real series proper can start.

Well, we find out starting tonight - after I finish some work I'm looking forward to watching the first of the new season.

[clearspira]

My problem with About a Girl is that it does not make sense. See, I kind of assumed in episode 1 that they were not an all-male race at all and were in fact hermaphrodites. One ''man'' impregnates the other man through some orifice and then an egg comes out. But now we have actual females. So... both sexes can get pregnant? Or is the difference that men can get impregnated and impregnate others whilst the women can only do the former? And I am going to mirror what Chuck said about Kes and the Xyrillians: why is it only the females that have breasts if the males can get pregnant as well? Because that implies that when a man gives birth he is unable to feed his offspring which is the whole point of having breasts.

This is Ocampa-level reproduction insanity we are talking about here. This would not evolve.

If the date rape episode is the worst, then these absurd story contradictions coupled with the message that is delivered like an anvil makes this a close contender in my book.

[G-Man]

(Note: this post does cover some of the same ground as clearspira, who posted while I was editing)

Like Riedquat, I've never seen the actual episodes, but from the reviews I have seen, I think there is a major problem with "About a Girl."

The problem is that, as far as I can tell, they never actually explain how Moclan reproduction works. I don't mean in terms of "where does the egg come out." (That question is based on the idea that all Moclan have mammalian anatomy). My question is, if two males can produce a child, what does "female" even mean?

In Earth terms, in essence "male" means "produces the smaller gamete" and "female" means "produces the larger gamete." Assuming that babies are produced sexually instead of parthenogenically, either Moclans have non-differentiated gametes (i.e. instead of ova and sperm, all gametes are the same- but that would suggest that the egg had to be produced post-fertilization), or else each Moclan can produce both (in which case they are hermaphroditic) or some produce larger gametes and some smaller (in which case you already have sexes, they just are not terribly dimorphic).

Of course, maybe reproduction is entirely artificial. Non-nucleated ova are produced artificially and the males both fertilize the egg.

But the point is, someone should have given some explanation of how an all-male species can exist in a way that makes "male" and "female" meaningful. "Tripping the Rift" explained plot points like this more.
https://youtu.be/x4eWr9szXoc?t=244
"According to this newspaper...they're planning a planet-wide Constitutional Amendment to ban opposite-sex couples from marrying."
"Well, where do the kids come from? Test tube?"
"Oh, then you've read the article already."