The Orville

Yeah, definitely a decent episode!

I've been saying for months, this show needs to "go full Red Dwarf".

MacFarlane hasn't seen Red Dwarf (a detail that came up in a Scott Grimes interview, IIRC) so I wouldn't hold my breath.

Yeah, those two classic eps were pretty decent as they had a purpose, AND tied in to the major storylines throughout the series.

The Enterprise one had literally ZERO effect on anything around it. There wasn't even any character development! "Sato is stuck in the transporter buffer for an extra 8.3 seconds, and hallucinates an entire episode worth of meaningless gibberish."

The most recent episode is basically if Geordi LaForge being promoted from bridge guy to chief of engineering was an episode, but with elements of the plot and structure of the Voyager episode "Parallax" where B'Elanna Torres was promoted to chief engineer (including a first officer pushing the chief engineer candidate on their merits, who had previously wounded the other chief engineer candidate, and the sceptical captain eventually being won over in a heart to heart in a shuttle while they are working through helping their ship escape an anomaly) but with the two dimensional beings from the Next Generation episode "The Loss"... or, admittedly, Flatland.

I guess those guys we ran into are kind of Orville's Ferengi, at least in the TNG sense of foolish, stupid antagonists who don't listen even when the heroes are trying to help them.

On the other hand the show got close to articulating where it stands on post-scarcity, post-capitalism utopias in its suggestion that people's personal 'wealth' is now measured in success, a slightly less idealistic formulation than Trek's but more in keeping with the Regular Joes attitude of the program.

The ridiculously clumsy exposition in which that was explained--"as you know, fellow future person, we have long since given up currency..."--demonstrates that the writers can't really distinguish between the bits of Trek that should be emulated and the bits that could be improved. I also like how whatshisface has only a vague understanding of what "money" is, yet consistently demonstrates an encyclopedic knowledge of early-aughts pop culture.

I wouldn't agree there. We've had so many alternatives to Trek over the years on TV and they all, consistently, project the idea that some form of capitalism will persist in outer space societies often hundreds if not thousands of years into the future; this is true from Babylon 5 to (ironic given its name) Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda.

It's been done, but it's also indicative of a lack of imagination on the subject of economics, an idea that maybe we've plateaued on that area and our current system is an eternal endpoint. Whatever the issues with TNG's hypothesis that a post-scarcity economy would radically redefine economics, it's at least an idea, and one that Seth MacFarlane actually grasps (if a bit clumsily explained), and given Discovery is set before TNG, this is oddly enough the only show on TV now which is running with this concept.

It's true it doesn't make much sense they have encyclopedic knowledge of US pop culture from the 1990s and early 2000s; that Gordon Molloy knows what 'American Idol' is but not what the USA was.

That was so disappointing. And the kid I wanted to get eaten by a dinosaur never got eaten by a dinosaur.

Oh my mistake.

Yeah, this show's exposition is terrible, characters often don't know things that should be common facts - the entire precise of Rob Lowe's appearance was predicated on the idea nobody knew about the effect his species had on people, and he wasn't aware it was a problem, in spite of the fact he's worked for the Union and on Earth for at least a year and his species name is familiar enough to be mentioned in casual conversation.

When Star Trek needed Kirk not to know the details of Vulcan reproduction, it did a huge song and dance about how secretive Vulcans are about the subject matter - contrast to here, where Rob Lowe's Derulio literally tells anyone when asked.

Dumb show which was also executively produced by Brannon Braga.

Season 2 is being extended to 14 episodes, and Macfarlane's said recently that they are doubling down on the sci-fi side of things next time around, which is exactly what I'd hoped they'd do.

I'll be curious to see how the show evolves.

It’s interesting, but in production terms, they’re not making any more episodes - thirteen episodes were made for the first season, but for scheduling reasons one of them was moved to season two, which is also producing thirteen episodes.

NicoNicoRose Oh yes it will have fourteen episodes. They will just only shoot thirteen episodes, the fourteenth is the holdover from season one, apologies if that is not clear. It’s not unheard of - both Voyager’s second and third seasons included episodes held over from the previous season’s production schedule.

haysoos I guess it depends whether or not the episode was made before or after Lamarr’s promotion.