When I first started this show I found it to be a really awkward mix of comedy and seriousness. It had some jokes thrown it at the most inopportune times as some kind of comic relief from a really serious situation. Perhaps the first half of the first season was actually a bit rough or maybe the show just grew on me, but by season 2 I found myself loving this show.
To me it seems as every bit as comfy, intellectually interesting and even funny as some classic Star Treks while still clearly being its own thing. I wish more comfy space shows like this would get made.
What are your thoughts on The Orville? Also I miss Alara.
I loved it. I thought the actors did a great job with some of the more sensitive content. It was pretty generic in general, but I didn’t mind that. I like shows that don’t take themselves too seriously.
I expected the Orville to be a funny homage to Star Trek. For a short time it was just that. Actually a randy one with too much toilet humor. But then suddenly they became serious SciFi. Which I consider a bold move and mostly but not utterly a successful one. And in hindsight, it would have been hard to deliver good SciFi-Humor for more than one Season except if they went the Futurama-Path.
The part of the funny homage to Star Trek nowadays has been taken by Lower Decks. Humorwise it beats everything Orville had ever offered.
Orville is good. Not great but worth watching. They had some AMAZING episodes with depth and ideas among the best ST-Episodes. But they also had a lot of mediocre episodes. Still Better than ST-Discovery for sure. Even surpassing ST-Picard. Which is something Seth can be proud of.
Orville started when there was no Startrek and no serious Soap-SiFi at all (The Expanse is something different).
For me it is “Startrek when Startrek wasn’t” and basically revived the Franchise it wanted to make fun of.
I like it.
I literally shed tears while watching the first episode because I didn’t realize how badly I needed new star trek that doesn’t suck. I just hit me right where I needed it to scratch that itch, and I was so overwhelmed. Also it made me hate even more what “real” trek has become. Huge fan, I didn’t realize season 3 is already on, gotta check it out.
That actually sounds appealing when you describe it like that. I tried to watch it when it came out but it never delivered on the “funny”. It was just Star Trek but a little off.
Maybe I’ll try again or at least get past the first few episodes
The one with the porn virus on their holodeck was fantastic. But yeah, you sum it up very nice.
Excellent review
It felt way more like Star Trek than the Star Trek being made at the time (primarily Discovery). Though I do like Strange New Worlds and think it’s more in the right direction, The Orville still feels way more like TNG-era Trek.
Now we just need a Galaxy Quest / Orville crossover to really confuse everyone.
Now we just need a Galaxy Quest / Orville crossover to really confuse everyone.
Sokath, his eyes uncovered!
The river in winter and temba his arms wide my money!
Always thought the whole parody aspect was just a means to get funding to just make a regular star trek series in disguise. If someone would just give the man money for exactly that we would have an awesome star trek series.
I really liked it.
The early seasons were less serious than later ones. But overall, it did well with serious social issues and addresses some very relevant topics.
The storyline with Topah was absolutely amazing. At every step, each character was portrayed well, and respectfully. It’s rare that there is a story like that that still has conflict without having a clear villain.
The time travel episode with Gordon was also especially brutal with some great performances from everyone on screen.
There were a few misses. I found the Isaac / Doctor relationship… forced, even if it did bring us the best line in decades (“As I am incapable of stuttering, I must conclude that you heard me.”). I also don’t think I’m alone with disliking the Charlie character in season 3.
I loved how Klyden grew through that story line, realizing what his prejudice was costing him and growing!
The Klyden storyline has so many nuanced to it. It’s not just that Klyden is a bigot. “He” was also re-gendered so he knows what Topa is going through and feeling far better than anyone else. A big part of his intransigence comes from a place of, “If I had to deal with this trauma, so should everyone else.” It helps explain his extreme position without letting him off the hook and I really liked that.
For sure. I’m calling him “he”, because thats what he appears to identify with.
Hes undeniably a bigiot at the beginning, but i think a lot of that comes from… a gamblers fallacy, worrying what hes already invested in his identity, and knowing he might have been wrong, and it reaches a crescendo, before Klyden is forced to realize hes made the wrong decision, and rejoins his husband and daughter.
so good.
I think it’s deeper than that. Klyden exists to represent Moclan society as a whole. He is the stand-in for their traditions, world, history, and culture.
We, the audience, are presented at the onset with a society that is male-only. The ship’s crew, along with us, are sort of hand-waved away when asking questions about how things work in the bedroom, but on the whole, no one seems to have a problem with their culture. In fact, we even see this male-only species reproduce successfully before we learn that there are the potential for female infants.
In Moclan society, being born female is an aberration. It’s not a biological necessity, and, for whatever reason, the Moclan culture views “being female” as a birth defect, one that can be easily corrected. It’s sort of how, today, we view children born with a clef palette. There’s no good reason to keep it around, and lots of reasons to repair it as soon as possible. Klyden represents this mindset and viewpoint perfectly.
Imagine someone fighting tooth-and-nail to not repair a cleft palette, or some other easily-fixable birth defect. Imagine them standing up in court and declaring that this obvious flaw is something that no one has the right to fix. Klyden is, from his own experience, outraged, and furious. Put yourself in his shoes, and his actions have nothing to do with bigotry, or hate. He’s not angry at his child for being female, or at his husband for supporting her decision to become female. He’s mad at the world because his entire world-view is challenged by his family.
In fact, he sees his culture, history, society, and even legal system saying that he is right, that the child should be male, and then he sees his husband and child, serving on a Union starship, talking nonsense about a “choice.” That line where he says he wishes she’d never been born wasn’t anger at her. It was anger that he is being forced to choose, and no matter which thing he chooses, he will loose a huge part of himself – either his family, or his history.
And if he chooses his family, he has to confront the fact that what was done to him was just as wrong as what he did to his daughter.
Few people, even space aliens, have the emotional maturity to handle that kind of revelation in the moment without doing something regrettable.
But fuck, this kind of novel is why I love this show so much. When was the last time you had a long talk about that time Riker killed all his clones?
Well put!
It’s the best Star Trek show since Next Generation.
Kidding. I actually liked DS9 and Voyager
It’s on par though.
This was basically the way I would describe the show.
Microwave reheated Star Trek. I feel like it started out being too humorous, hit the perfect balance, and then veered into trying too hard to be Star Trek. If your Star Trek parody isn’t a parody anymore I’ll just…watch actual Star Trek. Lower Decks filled the Star Trek comedy hole much better.
I loved the jar of pickles joke. It somehow got me every time. Then they seemed to just drop it out of nowhere. Well I guess once she left, but still.
Bingo. It was kinda cute at first when it was still trying to be funny, but as the parody pretense slowly fell away it just got boring.
The strangest part about it is how each episode is a remix of a Trek episode and yet the remix makes it very clear that the writers just don’t get it. For example, season 2’s “Blood of Patriots” is a rearrangement of “The Wounded,” but the subplot about Mercer and Malloy being best friends forever trivializes what TNG successfully depicted as a nuanced dilemma.
There’s no accounting for taste, but it genuinely surprises me that there seems to be so many Star Trek fans who think it’s any good. On the other hand, it seems pretty safe to say that season 3 was the last, so clearly the actual numbers were unremarkable.
The Orville is my favorite Star Trek franchise. It’s canon - you can’t deny it. The Orville revived the Star Trek Franchise and gave it a pulse. It’s like blockchain. You can say it doesn’t belong, but it will always be there and nothing can change that. It has great attention to detail and decent story writing with that original “there’s a moral in this episode” that endeared ST in our hearts, something the newer ST franchises lack.
And Galaxy Quest is the best Star Trek movie since the Undiscovered Country.
After the first season, which was an obligatory “Star Trek Type Show Finds Its Feet” season, it really hit its stride to become the best Star Trek since DS9. Not in name, but certainly in spirit. So earnest, with a great message throughout. Sure it had some mediocre jokes here and there but so did TNG, let’s not forget. I was sitting around just the other day thinking how I missed watching The Orville
what star trek should be
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I thought it was a parody at first, and it certainly treated itself as such in the beginning, but in the later seasons, it took itself more seriously, and I found it a more “realistic” take than star trek.
Star trek is awesome, don’t get me wrong. But the captains were kind of “perfect”, basically. Captain Mercer and his crew are all flawed people, in their own way. They make poor decisions sometimes, out of selfishness, pride, or whatever, and it’s fun to see them deal with the consequences.
Interesting. I always thought “perfect” characters like Jean Luc Picard where supposed to symbolize the advanced social evolution of humanity in the Star Trek universe. The inherent believe in evolutionary humanism is one of the main reasons I fell in love with Star Trek.
It is the best Star trek show on right now even though it is not Star trek. Loved it. It reminds me of Firefly
on right now
It’s kind of in (potentially permanent) limbo now though. Which is also a like Firefly.
Strange new worlds is better
I loved it. Reminded me of my beloved farscape
I didn’t think the Star Trek formula would work with silly jokes instead of everyone taking themselves super seriously.
I was wrong.
Love it, way better than Spores-are-actually-the-Force-now-all-of-a-sudden-Space-Jesuswe need a new season!
