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The Orville


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I'm loving this show so far. It's been a little uneven, but it's mostly golden. I don't really care for Family Guy or American Dad, so I had really low expectations, so I'm really surprised that it actually is good.

 

Having so many Trek alums helps, but I also love the fact that this is basically the Starfleet members who weren't going to make the Enterprise.

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Yeah, it's more like watching the crew that delivers people and supplies to the Enterprise.

 

There was a joke a few episodes back about "not getting out by 5" (presumably PM). It made me think that they were the kind of ship that would return to Earth regularly. It hasn't been back since the pilot, though, unless I'm mistaken. It'd be fun to see what the Earth of the 25th century looks like.

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Guest El Chalupacabra

I'm loving this show so far. It's been a little uneven, but it's mostly golden. I don't really care for Family Guy or American Dad, so I had really low expectations, so I'm really surprised that it actually is good.

 

Having so many Trek alums helps, but I also love the fact that this is basically the Starfleet members who weren't going to make the Enterprise.

That is exactly how I felt. I am not a Family Guy/American Dad fan at all. I was sure it would be dick and fart jokes, non-stop. But so far, I really like this show. I also like that it is a "B-team" crew, but they basically get things done, anyway. I'm looking forward to season 2, and hoping we see more Star Trek alums guest star.

 

Another thing I like is that all the characters are likable. Bortus is basically Worf, Isaac is basically Data, Dr. Finn (medicine woman?) is like a much cooler Dr. Crusher, and the rest of the cast is hilarious. Alara is a much, much cooler Tasha Yar and also is sort of a cross between a pseudo Vulcan, and Supergirl with golden age superman-like powers. I can't help but think the name of her planet, Xelaya, is a direct homage to Mt. Seleya on Vulcan, since they both phonetically sound so similar.

 

 

I think that the 1990s media obsession is going to wear thin pretty quickly.

I've noticed that they have been injecting more drama. I think if they put a little more comedy/parody back in, that would help.

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I have been absolutely loving it. It was poorly marketed as a whacky parody of TNG, but it is in every way a spiritual successor.

It has a lot of goofball humor that sometimes misses, but it really feels like it's not trying that hard to be funny very often. Which, in a weird way, works well. The first act or two usually has a handful of jokes and gags, but when it gets to the great TNG style SciFi plots, those usually get dropped pretty quickly. I know others feel differently, but I personally think it's walking that tightrope pretty darn well.

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What it comes down to was that Seth MacFarlane loves TNG and he wanted to make an homage to it. But the only way Fox would pay for it and be able to market it without being sued was to call it a parody.

 

But it's not.

 

It's a pretty definitive homage to TNG. All good scifi uses the alien and/or future tech and wonderment to shine a light on current social situations. All Orville has done is replace some of that scifi wonderment and replaced it with satire. It HAS to reflect back to the 90s and now,because that's where the satire comes from. Just like TOS was a reflection of the social situation of the 60s.

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My only complaint about it reflecting the 90's is the fact that the only media referenced is from the 90's. It'd be annoying whenever the show was set, unless it was set during the 90's. At least pretend there has been some type of culture in existence since 1999.

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You're right, with the Kardashians. I forgot about them, as I normally try to do. There may be more, but it definitely slants to the 90's. Which makes sense with it being a "parody" of a 90's show.

 

Last night's episode was so obviously a comment on TNG never explaining Geordi's rise to chief. Loved it.

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The latest episode had everything that was totally wrong with and boring about TNG/VOY. Technobabble problem, technobabble solution, and promotion substituted for character development. If they're going to have those sorts of "problems" driving their plots, then of course they're going to need a main character as the chief engineer. Why wasn't the chief engineer a main character from the start?

 

And you can't just stick "quantum" in front of everything and call it science.

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The difference is that TNG would've had the technobabble problem be the actual issue for the episode. That wasn't the case here, it could have been anything. The point was John and Ed struggling with their abilities. And to "fix" the fact that TNG got away with making a huge change without any explanation.

 

As for quantum - sure you can. When you're writing fiction, you can pretty much do whatever you want. It might annoy people like you, but I would say they care as much about your opinion as they do the consistency of your last dump.

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Wow. Youre usually a lot less cranky. Did you miss a nap, Fuzzie? Or do you just love the Orville that much that any criticism of it is hurtful to you?

 

If youre going to take real science terms and use them in science fiction, its important to use them correctly, otherwise why use the real term? Trek replaced their lasers with phasers and the lithium crystals with dilithium crystals very early on specifically to avoid running into criticism about the capabilities of real life technology.

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Not cranky at all. Just think that you're wrong about the technobabble aspect, and that 99.9999% of the audience really doesn't care about the things that you care about. scientific terms.

 

Similarly, people don't care about getting Catholicism right, getting insurance right, portraying geek culture right (looking at you, Big Bang Theory), or life in the Midwest. We all have interests that media doesn't portray correctly, but most people really don't care, and the people behind it definitely don't care.

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Your dump comment was more crass than your usual comments.

 

Yes, Hollywood does commonly get things wrong - we can read TV Tropes for a list of things that writers didnt portray correctly. That doesnt mean we should drop standards altogether. I could be less critical of the abuse of science terms if they had some compelling reason, plot wise or character wise, to abuse it. They havent demonstrated that they do.

 

The Orville producers and writers couldve come up with something more generic, like saying they use an FTL drive, or even call it an Alcubierre drive, which is a real theory at least but wouldnt be any more or less meaningful to the audience than quantum drive, or something more out-there, like calling it a swoosh drive or something weird, the way warp drive is both descriptive in universe and meaningless out of universe at the same time.

 

Honestly, Dr. Finns comment in the latest episode about the miracles of quantum science just irked me. Its all too common nowadays to hear peoole abusing quantum as an explanation for anything and everything. If people dont care, what is the harm in putting some effort into getting the real science correct? Its no harder to get it right than to work on making shit up. Either way the science/magitek has to have rules for dramatic purposes. Whyd they hire Andre Bormanis, a science consultant on TNG, if they had no interest in doing at least as well as TNG did?

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I didn't really think I was being ridiculous here - "no one cares" isn't true. Maybe I should not really expect anything from Hollywood. Except shows like The Expanse and movies like The Martian get things right and tell good stories, so its not a matter of people not caring.

I'm still hopeful Orville will develop its own voice.

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Since I'd forgotten about those, bad. Not that they did a great job with photon torpedoes, either, but at least there's some reasoning behind the name, since matter-antimatter reactions really do produce gamma rays. I don't know what quantum torpedoes did, other than glow blue. Another case of abusing a word that means something. May as well have called them supertorpedoes.

What is a quantum drive, why are the engines shaped the way they are, and why are there three of them? If Lt Cmdr Lamarr is in the engine room full-time now, maybe we can get some insight into the technology of the 25th century. That's part of the enjoyment for me.

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In addition to holodeck drama, I also anticipate:

 

-- incorporeal aliens take over their bodies

-- the captain is kidnapped and/or imprisoned and has to either face down, or work together with an enemy captain (and is potentially replaced on the ship with a double)

-- evil/good twins

-- the groundhog's day style time loop

-- the space/time reset button

-- the time travel to our era/past episode

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The twins thing will be hard to do without transporters. I always have to remind myself that the Orville doesn't have teleportation technologies when I see them shuttling everywhere. I suppose cloning tech could stand in for the same plot device though. They must have something like cloning to grow organs and limbs in only days.

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