Author Topic: The Orville: New Horizons (Season 3) (Read 50324 times)

sanman · « **on:** 02/09/2022 07:25 am »

A small teaser trailer is out for The Orville: New Horizons, which is the 3rd season of the show

hektor · « **Reply #1 on:** 02/09/2022 08:00 am »

I suspect that the first sequence falls into the "It was a nightmare" category, given the final seconds.

Blackstar · « **Reply #2 on:** 02/09/2022 11:58 am »

The release has been delayed several times due to covid. Supposed to be March 2022, now scheduled for June.

CameronD · « **Reply #3 on:** 02/14/2022 02:13 am »

As long as the original creators and cast are all there (and it looks like they are) I don't really care that much.. The first two series were brilliant and I'm so looking forward to this!!

1 · « **Reply #4 on:** 02/14/2022 02:25 am »

Quote from: CameronD on 02/14/2022 02:13 am

As long as the original creators and cast are all there (and it looks like they are) I don't really care that much.. The first two series were brilliant and I'm so looking forward to this!!

Yeah. Gonna be a bit bittersweet seeing Yaphit for the last time, though.

CameronD · « **Reply #5 on:** 02/14/2022 10:42 pm »

True that.. but Seth Macfarlane is a creative guy so I'm sure he'll work something out.

sanman · « **Reply #6 on:** 05/22/2022 11:35 pm »

Official Trailer for Season 3 is out:

Blackstar · « **Reply #7 on:** 06/03/2022 01:33 am »

If The Orville is too high-brow for you, there's also this:

Steve G · « **Reply #8 on:** 06/13/2022 12:21 am »

Unfortunately, there are no plans for a season four. They're moving onto other projects.

CameronD · « **Reply #9 on:** 06/26/2022 11:28 pm »

I've watched the first few episodes.. Season 3 basically carries on from where they left off, but it certainly looks more visually stunning this time around so the producers obviously have a bit more money to spend on this one. The sound track isn't bad either. Maybe knowing it's the last, they're giving it all they've got, Captain!

I found the first episode "Electric Sheep" (covering the topic of suicide) quite thought provoking. Loving it!

Blackstar · « **Reply #10 on:** 06/27/2022 01:09 am »

I have now watched the first four episodes (out of a planned ten) and I've been disappointed. I had higher hopes for the show than this. I wanted it to be good, and I thought that in the second season they were really hitting their stride. Unfortunately, I think that the pandemic, and maybe just the disruption that came with changing networks, really demoralized them and sapped their creative energies. The show feels kinda worn out and exhausted, which is not at all what I expected.

Spoilers ahead, so if you haven't watched the episodes, avert your eyes.

Electric Sheep
The season 3 premier episode. This one was long, but it also felt a bit bloated. They chose a serious subject and a rather talky subject, so I get the impression that they decided to throw in some action scenes just to keep the audience awake. It started with a big battle, which as some of us suspected, was a fake out--it was all just a nightmare. Then we had some good scenes that showed that a lot of people are very unhappy/worried about having Isaac around considering that he almost tried to wipe them out last season, and his fellow robots did try to wipe out humanity and killed a lot of people in the process. These scenes were well thought out, although putting the new female character (who just so happens to be Seth McFarlane's new girlfriend) front and center seemed a bit odd. Then Isaac commits suicide, and this was pretty clever. He's a logical being, and a logical robot would conclude to commit suicide by logical reasoning. Then they find a contrived way to revive him, and the doctor uses logic to convince Isaac to not kill himself again. I thought that was all pretty clever.

However, you might have noticed that the ship was in dock the entire time. All those action sequences really amounted to nothing, because they never actually went anywhere. So they were not really in service to the plot, and could have all been deleted without affecting the story one bit. And the weird thing was that Captain Ed seemed to sleepwalk though much of this. It just felt off, like Seth McFarlane did not want to be in the show that he created.

Shadow Realms
This was the monster episode. It had some interesting ideas, but it also had some real weaknesses. For starters, there was nobody on the ship. The Orville is supposed to have several hundred crew members, but we don't see anybody except the main characters and a couple other crewmen. The ship is just devoid of people. It turns out that this was filmed during the pandemic, and they were limited to how many people they could have on set, and the story really hurts because of that. It really feels like the actors are walking around an empty set, not an alien-infested starship.

Also, despite the fact that his crew is being absorbed and his ship is in danger, Captain Ed doesn't seem all that animated. James T. Kirk would take charge and get a bit angry. Captain Ed doesn't seem to care all that much.

But I think the main weakness of the episode is that it ends very abruptly: the aliens--who are Orville crew members converted to aliens--are given a warning to get off the ship or they will be killed, and then the next thing we know, they're gone (How? Did they take some shuttles or something? Did the Orville dock with the alien ship? Never mind.). And then the episode ends with two characters having a romantic get together for drinks in the ship's lounge. There's no mention of all the crew who died at all. How many people did they lose? Dozens? A hundred? Who cares? Let's just drink some wine.

Mortality Paradox
This was a rather shallow imitation of a Star Trek: The Next Generation story. Some characters go down to a planet, are cut off from the ship, and then start to experience what they consider to be hallucinations. During each hallucination, one of the characters briefly dies. In the end, it's revealed that the whole thing was a hallucination brought on by an immortal alien woman who wanted to experience death through their eyes. She's awfully perky as she tells them this. But TNG did this 30 years ago and you'd think it would be possible to come up with a better story after all that time.

Captain Ed also isn't really leading the episode. He's there, but he gets less screen time than some of the other characters. It's just weird.

Did you happen to notice all the students in the hallway in the high school sequence? Big contrast to the second episode, where there was nobody on the ship. Turns out that this episode was filmed in 2019, before the pandemic, so crowd scenes were still possible. But it's a shame that they wasted all those extras on a high school scene that felt like something we'd see on one of The CW's shows filmed outside of Vancouver.

Gently Falling Rain
This should have been their big episode. It had big ambitions. The Union and the Krill are about to sign a cooperation treaty so that they can fight the Kaylons together. But it turns out that Ed's former Krill girlfriend is now a populist political leader who stages a coup and takes over the planet. She tosses Ed and the diplomatic delegation (including the Union President, played by Bruce Boxleitner in a lot of makeup) into jail and announces that they're all going to be executed. Ed escapes and finds out that he has a daughter, the result of the last time that he knocked boots with his Krill girlfriend. Then there's some escapy stuff, and a zippy car chase through the wet alien streets on the Krill city, and they escape. But of course the treaty is now dead, and presumably the Kaylons are going to attack and wipe a lot of people out.

Alas, although this episode aimed high, a lot of it was very predictable. Right from the start we could see that the friendly Krill leader was naive and the bad Krill lady was going to take over. They telegraphed a lot of the beats long before they happened. And again, a lot of it felt like warmed-over Next Generation or Deep Space Nine. Science fiction television has evolved a lot since then, and in fact it has evolved a lot because of those shows (Ronald D. Moore made Battlestar Galactica to be the anti-Star Trek in many ways). But The Orville really feels a lot like it was filmed in 1994. It hasn't evolved.

The first season (especially the pilot episode) had a lot of comedy. Surprisingly, that was forced upon Seth McFarlane. He wanted a serious show, but Fox decided that people expected comedy from the guy who created Family Guy, so they demanded that a certain amount of gross-out and sexual humor be in the show. The second season really dialed back the comedy, and the third season seems to have dialed it back even further. But a great comment I read (not my own idea) is that now the actors feel like comedic characters who are not allowed to be funny. And that's really true--a lot of them were established to be funny. Ed was supposed to be uncomfortable around his ex-wife. Isaac and Bortus were supposed to be the butt of jokes from the rest of the crew, and the gooey slime alien was supposed to be a gooey slime alien. But all of that is missing. Bortus was barely in the first four episodes, and Ed and his ex-wife barely interact, they just sit next to each other. It all feels a bit weird.

Maybe most of this is due to the pandemic. (I know that the pandemic not only hurt main production, but also stopped their special effects departments at several points.) Maybe they really had to figure out how to film with fewer people and lots of social distancing. Maybe having the writing staff only meet over Zoom really hurt the writing. And maybe by the second half of the season they figured it all out and did a better job. But so far the first four episodes don't feel like anything new and interesting and original, and don't even show the promise of the last season, which last aired over three years ago.

Blackstar · « **Reply #11 on:** 07/05/2022 12:54 pm »

A recap/review of the fourth episode:

https://www.space.com/the-orville-season-3-episode-5-review

The episode demonstrated that the writers really know the characters. All the characters were true to themselves, and Isaac's justification for what he did was totally logical, perfect for his character.

Although I thought the writing for this episode was solid, whenever a sci-fi show does a social or culturally-themed episode it runs the risk of being too on-the-nose and/or too preachy. I'm not sure if this episode did that, but they definitely filled the entire hour with their issue.

By the way, there was an excellent example of special effects where they merged their characters into a scene from an old episode. Sorta like the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Trials and Tribble-ations" where the new cast was put into an original series episode. That is explained here:

https://twitter.com/TomCostantino/status/1542638308630470656

And in case you don't know it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trials_and_Tribble-ations

Blackstar · « **Reply #12 on:** 07/07/2022 03:56 pm »

Episode 6, "Twice in a Lifetime," just went live today. There's a summary here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orville_(season_3)

I thought it was a solid episode, with a real emotional core. The Orville is really just an extra season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. This totally felt like a TNG episode from three decades ago. That's both good and bad. It's comfort food. It's easy and doesn't demand a lot from the viewer. But that doesn't mean that it's simplistic. The best episodes can be solid and thought-provoking, but in some ways the format is limiting them. They're still a crew on a spaceship with specific rules that guide the scripts. They're not going to break the format or do something wild. And they're not going to have their characters do things that are bold or unexpected. Captain Ed is not going to get killed and the ship is not going to blow up. It's not going to get really dark. This isn't Battlestar Galactica questioning the invasion of Iraq or the war on terror.

I may go into this a bit more later. I don't want to post any spoilers here yet.

Blackstar · « **Reply #13 on:** 07/08/2022 01:37 pm »

Some commentary on episode 6. Because this is spoilery, I am putting in some breaks. Skip this message if you do not want to be spoiled.

Warning spoilers ahead.

You have been warned.

"Twice in a Lifetime" is a time travel episode. There have been lots and lots of time travel sci-fi episodes, so it's not easy to do something original. But I think that this episode did take on a minor aspect of that subject and explored the emotional costs of time travel and how they clash with the moral costs.

So timey-wimey stuff happens and Gordo gets sent back to 2015 Earth. The Orville crew goes back to rescue him, but they end up in 2025 Earth. When they meet up with Gordo, he has a wife, a son, and twins on the way. This is a major violation of Union regulations which require anybody who ends up in the past to essentially disappear and not interact with anybody, lest they affect the time stream.

Captain Ed is upset and mad at Gordo, and is going to take him back to their present where he will be arrested. Gordo makes it clear that he's not going. He's happy, he has a family, he has a new life. Captain Ed is going to take him by force, but then decides that they don't have to--they can simply jump the Orville back to 2015 and rescue Ed before any of that stuff happened. Seth McFarlane isn't a great actor, but he puts on his concerned friend/unhappy captain look for much of the episode, and it works. Gordo has put them in a real bind, and they need to fix it.

A lot of this is done with dialogue rather than action, which is less than ideal (the rule is "show, don't tell"), but it is still an interesting conundrum: what exactly does "disappear, do not interact with anybody, do not affect the timeline" mean? How can that be implemented? As Gordon explains, he spent the first three years of his time in the past living in a cabin in the woods and killing animals for food, which is actually a violation of Union ethics and laws (apparently nobody eats meat anymore, they just synthesize their food). He was lonely, isolated. What was he supposed to do, die? Apparently yes, he was supposed to die in the past.

This is a great conundrum, but it's also a contrived one. Presumably they had to be given some guidance about what to do, and anybody who would have drafted that guidance would have also faced the same tough questions about it. It's just not clear how this was a realistic or practical policy. You'd think there might be better and more specific guidance like "Take a menial job, do not get married, do not reproduce," because living in a cabin in the woods is not really going to be an option for most people--there are not many abandoned cabins in the woods to use.

Anyway, they jump back to 2015, rescue Gordon, and then use time dilation to head back to their time, essentially traveling close to the speed of light without their quantum drive protection turned on to keep time from slowing down.

There are still a bunch of loose ends in the episode, like somebody building another time machine to go back in the past and wipe out humanity, but they'll ignore that stuff.

The episode probably could have used another writing pass. It had a good emotional core, but it still had some holes in it. Once again I was reminded of how this show is basically warmed over Star Trek: The Next Generation. I know that to large extent it is supposed to be that--they are not hiding it--but that is still rather limiting. They have a ready room, food replicators, shuttlecraft, a shuttlebay, color-coded uniforms, phasers, a United Federation of Planets. They don't have transporters, but it would not surprise me if somebody invents them for future seasons, if the show is renewed.

The fact that it's so much a copy of 30-year-old Star Trek is a bit disappointing. There is a lot of talent involved in the show, and a lot of money. It's just a shame that they are not applying it to something more original.

Jarnis · « **Reply #14 on:** 07/09/2022 09:11 pm »

My biggest disappointment on Orville this season is that they seem to have had a fat budget handed to them and it almost feels like they didn't quite know how to use it. It all feels somehow... rough, unpolished... it is like they lost some of their "mojo" during the long break between second and third season. And apparently they no longer had a mandate to add some comedy stuff (unlike in first two seasons) and that unfortunately has made the show maybe just slightly too serious. It is still best Star Trek currently running, but that is mostly due to the garbage CBS is putting out. Competititon has not set the bar very high.

jcm · « **Reply #15 on:** 07/09/2022 09:30 pm »

Quote from: Blackstar on 07/08/2022 01:37 pm

Some commentary on episode 6. Because this is spoilery, I am putting in some breaks. Skip this message if you do not want to be spoiled.

Warning spoilers ahead.

You have been warned.

"Twice in a Lifetime" is a time travel episode. There have been lots and lots of time travel sci-fi episodes, so it's not easy to do something original. But I think that this episode did take on a minor aspect of that subject and explored the emotional costs of time travel and how they clash with the moral costs.

So timey-wimey stuff happens and Gordo gets sent back to 2015 Earth. The Orville crew goes back to rescue him, but they end up in 2025 Earth. When they meet up with Gordo, he has a wife, a son, and twins on the way. This is a major violation of Union regulations which require anybody who ends up in the past to essentially disappear and not interact with anybody, lest they affect the time stream.

Captain Ed it upset and mad at Gordo, and is going to take him back to their present where he will be arrested. Gordo makes it clear that he's not going. He's happy, he has a family, he has a new life. Captain Ed is going to take him by force, but then decides that they don't have to--they can simply jump the Orville back to 2015 and rescue Ed before any of that stuff happened. Seth McFarlane isn't a great actor, but he puts on his concerned friend/angry captain look for much of the episode, and it works. Gordo has put them in a real bind, and they need to fix it.

A lot of this is done with dialogue rather than action, which is less than ideal (the rule is "show, don't tell"), but it is still an interesting conundrum: what exactly does "disappear, do not interact with anybody, do not affect the timeline" mean? How can that be implemented? As Gordon explains, he spent the first three years of his time in the past living in a cabin in the woods and killing animals for food, which is actually a violation of Union ethics and laws (apparently nobody eats meat anymore, they just synthesize their food). He was lonely, isolated. What was he supposed to do, die? Apparently yes, he was supposed to die in the past.

This is a great conundrum, but it's also a contrived one. Presumably they had to be given some guidance about what to do, and anybody who would have drafted that guidance would have also faced the same tough questions about it. It's just not clear how this was a realistic or practical policy. You'd think there might be better and more specific guidance like "Take a menial job, do not get married, do not reproduce," because living in a cabin in the woods is not really going to be an option for most people--there are not many abandoned cabins in the woods to use.

Anyway, they jump back to 2015, rescue Gordon, and then use time dilation to head back to their time, essentially traveling close to the speed of light without their quantum drive protection turned on to keep time from slowing down.

There are still a bunch of loose ends in the episode, like somebody building another time machine to go back in the past and wipe out humanity, but they'll ignore that stuff.

The episode probably could have used another writing pass. It had a good emotional core, but it still had some holes in it. Once again I was reminded of how this show is basically warmed over Star Trek: The Next Generation. I know that to large extent it is supposed to be that--they are not hiding it--but that is still rather limiting. They have a ready room, food replicators, shuttlecraft, a shuttlebay, color-coded uniforms, phasers, a United Federation of Planets. They don't have transporters, but it would not surprise me if somebody invents them for future seasons, if the show is renewed.

The fact that it's so much a copy of 30-year-old Star Trek is a bit disappointing. There is a lot of talent involved in the show, and a lot of money. It's just a shame that they are not applying it to something more original.

My takeaway is that there are *some* cabins in the woods, but they are ALL occupied by all the stranded time travellers

Blackstar · « **Reply #16 on:** 07/09/2022 09:39 pm »

Quote from: Jarnis on 07/09/2022 09:11 pm

My biggest disappointment on Orville this season is that they seem to have had a fat budget handed to them and it almost feels like they didn't quite know how to use it. It all feels somehow... rough, unpolished... it is like they lost some of their "mojo" during the long break between second and third season. And apparently they no longer had a mandate to add some comedy stuff (unlike in first two seasons) and that unfortunately has made the show maybe just slightly too serious. It is still best Star Trek currently running, but that is mostly due to the garbage CBS is putting out. Competititon has not set the bar very high.

The special effects are excellent, probably better than Strange New Worlds. The writing is just decent, not truly outstanding. They could have used an extra punch up on some of the scripts. But I think that a big problem is that they're constrained by their premise, that limits what they can do with their writing.

As for the comedy, people involved in the show actually talked about this a few years ago, and one of the writers discussed it recently in a podcast--for the first season, Fox wanted a comedy, so every script went through an extra "comedy pass" where they added in jokes. That stopped by the second season. As I noted above, somebody (not me) made the great observation that the characters were created to be funny, and they're not allowed to be funny now. So it just feels wrong.

Blackstar · « **Reply #17 on:** 07/09/2022 09:41 pm »

Quote from: jcm on 07/09/2022 09:30 pm

My takeaway is that there are *some* cabins in the woods, but they are ALL occupied by all the stranded time travellers

You know, it could be the same cabin, just occupied in different time periods.

Plus Deadpool heading off to kill Baby Hitler.

CameronD · « **Reply #18 on:** 07/10/2022 11:29 pm »

Quote from: Blackstar on 07/08/2022 01:37 pm

"Twice in a Lifetime" is a time travel episode. There have been lots and lots of time travel sci-fi episodes, so it's not easy to do something original. But I think that this episode did take on a minor aspect of that subject and explored the emotional costs of time travel and how they clash with the moral costs.

Personally, I think the way they did that was quite cleverly written and thought-provoking. I, for one, didn't miss the mention from Laura about the "pandemic" and the following dialogue about how it will all be okay..

Blackstar · « **Reply #19 on:** 07/16/2022 09:59 pm »

A bunch of spoilers for episode 7.

Spoilers

Episode 7 was titled "From Unknown Graves" and had four stories: a main story on the ship involving negotiations with a female-centric society, a flashback story that explained the origins of the Kaylon, a relationship story involving the doctor and Isaac, and a relationship story involving the engineer and the security officer. The latter story was played for humor, the relationship story involving Claire and Isaac was played seriously. The negotiations with the alien race story was mediocre, although there was some humor mixed in (not all of it clever, although I found some of it funny--this episode had more laughs than most of the others this season and I realized I had missed the humor). You could really add in a fifth sub-story, involving the alien scientist and her Kaylon, but that was part of the Claire/Isaac story in many ways.

The episode demonstrated that "The Orville" often plays everything straight down the middle; even when it has intelligent things to say, it isn't groundbreaking. There's nothing here that is completely new or original. That doesn't mean it's bad, and it doesn't mean that they have not done their work, it just means that none of these episodes is ever going to blow you away like episodes of "Battlestar Galactica" or "The Expanse" did (at least in part because they were trying to be anti-Star Trek, whereas "The Orville" is trying to be "The Next Generation").

"The Orville" has had some clever world-building. The Moclans are a patriarchal society the eliminates all females. So when they introduced the Janisi in this episode, it's clearly a dilemma: the Union allowed in the Moclans despite their discrimination towards females, so should they now allow in another culture that discriminates against males? Bortus is oblivious to the irony.

The story involving the flashbacks to the Kaylons was good, but not ground-breaking. They were created as servants for an alien race. But they were given substantial intelligence and almost immediately they began asking questions. All the aliens wanted was servants, not sentient servants. So to keep them in line, the company that created them upgraded them to feel pain, and gave their owners the ability to inflict pain to enforce discipline. This then led to cruel treatment and contempt for them. Soon the Kaylons developed the ability to communicate with each other, and then they (somehow) developed weapons. Then they rebelled and killed their masters, all of them.

As a story about AI developing sentience and rebelling, there was nothing original here. It was a by-the-numbers story. It would have been more horrifying if the Kaylons, rather than developing weapons in their heads, had simply used their strength to kill their masters. But seeing a bunch of robots bludgeon and stab humanoid aliens to death (including children) would have set a much darker tone. Ray-gun violence is acceptable for a show like this, but blood is not.

Watching this, I was reminded how much better the movie "Ex Machina" did with the development of AI sentience. In that story, the sentient robot doesn't hate humans, she/it is simply indifferent to them. Once the human has helped her escape, she has no further need for him, and no sympathy or empathy. She just leaves him in a locked room where he is likely to either suffocate or starve to death. I think that the best AI stories have taken that approach, where the sentient computer doesn't even concern itself with humanity and doesn't have any concept of life or death, simply a threat or no threat.

There are only three more episodes left in this season and Hulu has not announced if it is being renewed. However, "The Orville" does have a panel at next week's San Diego Comic Con, and I don't think they would do that if they are going to cancel the series in three weeks. My guess is that they will announce its renewal next week.