The Orville

[Artabax]

What is the Spoiler Policy? Season 2 episode 2 was in Britain Thursday night; do I need to spoiler it?

Episode itself was fine, I wanna whinge about the Voyagery finale.

Bortus owned his decision and offered to resign. Mercer said 'No biggie!' It was a biggie. There were 75 people, because of Bortus' Neelixing, 45 people died, but who cares? They were only NPCs with the function of making the emotional speech to resolve Bortus' emotional drama.


That is so Voyager.

[Darth Wedgius]

I think this is sufficiently non-spoilerish...

They should have put the tardigrade's porn software into the fake data dump.

I really liked the ending to the latest episode. I think it's MacFarlane's best work on the series so far. Or Billy Joel's best work on the series so far. But probably both. And the contractions line got a surprise laugh from me.

I'm less sure of the ethics. Maybe Mercer would have been better leaving her to the not-Remans and trying to open diplomatic relations with them. But I can understand him feeling conflicted, or not trusting a species that takes no prisoners.

[Zoinksberg]

What is the Spoiler Policy? Season 2 episode 2 was in Britain Thursday night; do I need to spoiler it?

Episode itself was fine, I wanna whinge about the Voyagery finale.

Bortus owned his decision and offered to resign. Mercer said 'No biggie!' It was a biggie. There were 75 people, because of Bortus' Neelixing, 45 people died, but who cares? They were only NPCs with the function of making the emotional speech to resolve Bortus' emotional drama.


That is so Voyager.

No, if the ship crashed it would have been his fault. The shuttle had to be modified and in the time it took to modify the shuttle they ran out of time and were only able to make a single run. Nothing Bortus did slowed the engineering team in modifying the shuttle.

[Durandal_1707]

Holy shit, did this show finally get decent? The framing device of the second season premiere "Ja'loja", Bortus' "ritual", made for a genuinely hilarious teaser and got me hyped for the rest of the episode--which left me disappointed when it ended up being a bunch of lame 80s sitcom plots. But "Primal Urges" and "Home" were actually pretty good! The secret seems to be getting MacFarlane away from the typewriter and off-camera as much as possible. Unfortunately the next episode sounds like an Ed-focused one so I'm strapping in for trouble.

The second season is definitely better than the first. Which isn't saying a lot, but I am mostly enjoying it so far, with reservations. It helps that they seem to have dialed back the Seth McFarlane "jokes."

I'm definitely in agreement with the people saying Bortus should have been fired for the porn virus incident, though.

[Artabax]

What is the Spoiler Policy? Season 2 episode 2 was in Britain Thursday night; do I need to spoiler it?

Episode itself was fine, I wanna whinge about the Voyagery finale.

Bortus owned his decision and offered to resign. Mercer said 'No biggie!' It was a biggie. There were 75 people, because of Bortus' Neelixing, 45 people died, but who cares? They were only NPCs with the function of making the emotional speech to resolve Bortus' emotional drama.


That is so Voyager.

No, if the ship crashed it would have been his fault. The shuttle had to be modified and in the time it took to modify the shuttle they ran out of time and were only able to make a single run. Nothing Bortus did slowed the engineering team in modifying the shuttle.

OK, we need to watch the episode again. I assume Bortus' Neelixing fucked up ship's function generally therefore he is responsible for manslaughtering the 45. You assert that the episode specifically showed each ship function breaking and that shuttle was not on the list. We goyya watch the repeat.

[Durandal_1707]

It doesn't really matter. He disabled the ship during a crisis situation for completely unnecessary reasons, which almost resulted in the deaths of the entire crew and all of the survivors. His callous disregard for basic security makes it a risk to keep him on the ship.

[Steve]

The episode went out of its way to ensure Bortus' epic-scale fuckup was not the cause of only one shuttle flight being possible. It was always going to take that long to fix the shuttle, and the planet began breaking up early, meaning they weren't able to make a second run.

[Deledrius]

Eh, Seth McFarlane did a world without religion and envisioned it as basically Star Trek. He's actually moderated his views but they're still, "This is a horrible thing of crusades and murder we need to get rid of."

That is where the Krill comes in. They are basically the stand-in for the religious nutjobs on the show and also the big bad as well. At first, I thought that they will be more like the Klingons or maybe even the Romulans but they are more like Cylons from BSG. Hopefully they will flesh them out more and mabe not make them into the standard alien two-dimensional villains?

With "Nothing Left on Earth Excepting Fishes" they seem to be on course for this as one of the show's larger plotlines. After all this bridge-building (and sometimes accidentally kicking out the supports) that Mercer is doing, I'm hoping to see the Krill coming to the Union as needing an ally after kicking too many hornets' nests in their self-righteous expansionism. It won't be easy for either side, but coming together and making things better is what Star Trek is about. Err... I mean, The Orville.

[Durandal_1707]

Holy shit, did this show finally get decent? The framing device of the second season premiere "Ja'loja", Bortus' "ritual", made for a genuinely hilarious teaser and got me hyped for the rest of the episode--which left me disappointed when it ended up being a bunch of lame 80s sitcom plots. But "Primal Urges" and "Home" were actually pretty good! The secret seems to be getting MacFarlane away from the typewriter and off-camera as much as possible. Unfortunately the next episode sounds like an Ed-focused one so I'm strapping in for trouble.

The second season is definitely better than the first. Which isn't saying a lot, but I am mostly enjoying it so far, with reservations. It helps that they seem to have dialed back the Seth McFarlane "jokes."

Welp, looks like I spoke too soon on that. Goddamn it, Seth MacFarlane, if DS9 couldn't do this type of episode without it sucking, what made you think you could pull it off?

[PerrySimm]

What now? "A Happy Refrain" - title aside - was fine. The Orville continues to make effective use of music. A familiar tune is a touchpoint for the plot, following an in-show excuse to show off the real live orchestra!

Sure, it was a character development episode, at times it was a bit slow. A three-scene mustache gag doesn't count as a B-plot, and the BIG SPACE THING came a little too late. Lt. Keyali goes without a real introduction again, but at least has a bit of personality this week.

Overall, it's fun to see how TNG:"In Theory" could have worked out.