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!!
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 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.
My takeaway is that there are *some* cabins in the woods, but they are ALL occupied by all the stranded time travellers
"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.
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.
Orville could be much better if they cut a lot of the touchy-feely stuff out and did some space exploration.
Space exploration has been done before by everyone else (Star Trek).
We watched the latest episode "Midnight Blue" last night. Unlike previous episodes, it seemed a little pointless to me. Perhaps just a gap filler to bring the under-current storyline back on course??
So, the season (and maybe series?) finale appeared on Hulu today. A short commentary, maybe followed by a longer one later.
Thanks for posting, Blackstar. It's a shame it's all coming to an end (most likely) although Seth Macfarlane was quoted as saying they'd all be open to doing a "movie length feature" if there was enough interest, so we'll see what happens.
I’ve been following this thread but not watching the show…I watched the first three episodes of season 1 when the show started and did not like it. It seemed like a non cartoon Family Guy in Space to me….lots of low brow humour, goofy characters , poor special effects and Seth MacFarlane who cracks me up but SF ??…nah…But in reading this thread it’s almost like it’s a different show…gotten more serious (?), and better if you like less comedic, more SF oriented TV ??Am I right ..??
The show is essentially the eighth season of "Star Trek: The Next Generation." Clearly that's what it is trying to be in its intent, and it mostly achieves that. So if that's what you want with your science fiction, intelligent but not mentally, morally, or emotionally challenging, then it delivers. The problem is that sci-fi has evolved beyond that in the past three decades. Other shows have really pushed into new boundaries. They added serialized storytelling ("Babylon 5," "Deep Space Nine"), anti-hero characters ("Firefly"), and tough social issues and moral dilemmas ("Battlestar Galactica"). So "The Orville" is in many ways a big step backward, but with very high production values.
Quote from: Blackstar on 08/05/2022 01:25 amThe show is essentially the eighth season of "Star Trek: The Next Generation." Clearly that's what it is trying to be in its intent, and it mostly achieves that. So if that's what you want with your science fiction, intelligent but not mentally, morally, or emotionally challenging, then it delivers. The problem is that sci-fi has evolved beyond that in the past three decades. Other shows have really pushed into new boundaries. They added serialized storytelling ("Babylon 5," "Deep Space Nine"), anti-hero characters ("Firefly"), and tough social issues and moral dilemmas ("Battlestar Galactica"). So "The Orville" is in many ways a big step backward, but with very high production values...and a fanbase that, finding it mentally, morally, or emotionally challenging simply walking out their front door every morning, actually likes watching sci-fi the way it used to be.
So she gets on the ship and asks for asylum and they grant it to her. Then over time she sees how much great stuff they have and she thinks it would be great if her own planet had this stuff. She then decides to go back to her planet. They are about to take her back and then they discover that she's brought a tricorder with her and it has all kinds of technology data, like how to build replicators and stuff. She wanted to help her people. This is a bad thing.Her mentor on the Orville decides to show her why the Union does not share its technology with unready civilizations. She explains that a civilization has to be ready to use the technology and that the technology does not help them to become better. And that's about it. The woman decides to stay on the Orville.This was basically a Prime Directive story--taking the Prime Directive from Star Trek and using it on The Orville and explaining why it is. It was a pretty good discussion of it, but I think there's more to be written on that, so I'll probably write it later.
The Orville has their version of the Prime Directive and this episode sought to explain that better. It was a bit ham-fisted, shoving a character from the second season into the episode rather suddenly so that one of the characters on the ship could then spend a number of scenes explaining stuff to her. But I thought that what they did was intelligent, at least in terms of dialogue. We were told that the technology doesn't make things better, the people have to be better before they are ready for the technology. And we're shown an example where the Union did share their technology with a society that was not ready and it went very badly. So they have their reasons.However, there is something that they didn't really explain, which is sort of key to their whole non-interference directive: when and how do they determine it is okay to make contact? Star Trek had a shortcut to this: if a race had created warp technology, then it was okay to contact them. That makes sense, because if they have warp drive, they're going to travel around the galaxy and eventually run into you, so it's okay for you to contact them. If the Union had that same rule, I did not hear it.And if you think about it too much (I think about stuff too much), the logic starts to fall apart. Look at the Krill: they have advanced technology, and yet they're brutal and a threat. So it's not like a society evolves to a point where they can handle their technology responsibly. The premise is rather wobbly.The other obvious problem--and Star Trek faced this too--is that other advanced races may not have the same attitude. So the Union won't interfere with a primitive planet, but somebody else might. What happens is the Krill go to a planet and give them all kinds of tech and really mess things up, and the Union has its hands-off policy? That planet could be even more messed-up, and it could become an ally (or slaves) to the Krill.Yeah, it's just a TV show. But there's a risk when you start coming up with a premise like this and then stating it in an episode. It creates restrictions and contradictions that can cause problems for later episodes and for the logic of the created universe.
1-For all the reasons you outline, I think it's just as well they left this one until the last episode. Now the writers have a choice - either (a) address it properly next time around or (b) forget about it entirely.2-FWIW, I did enjoy the way they handled the Kaylon fleet turning up to the wedding (tiny little Orville was rather out-numbered!), plus the way the Kaylon acted during the service... Clever. Just very clever.
This has to move the needle somehow!
Now that it has been a year since the show premiered on Hulu with no news, I think it's fair to say that it is dead. Nothing in the streaming industry provides hope, and the writers' and actors' strikes don't help. The one surprise is that Disney has not formally canceled it yet. Maybe that's so they don't annoy Seth McFarlane or something.
If they keep Seth McFarlane around, they might want a showrunner to try and salvage Star Wars. Moving either Dave Filoni or John Favreau up the ranks at Lucasfilm (or firing them) would create some holes.
Quote from: Lampyridae on 07/27/2023 04:55 pmIf they keep Seth McFarlane around, they might want a showrunner to try and salvage Star Wars. Moving either Dave Filoni or John Favreau up the ranks at Lucasfilm (or firing them) would create some holes.I don't think that's it. McFarlane has his hands in a lot of shows, and Disney may not want to annoy him, and keeping The Orville in limbo rather than canceling it might be how they do that.I forget what giant corporate entity owns what other giant corporate entities, but doesn't Disney own Fox? And Fox has some of McFarlane's legacy shows like Family Guy. So maybe they are trying to play nice with a moneymaking producer so they don't drive him elsewhere.
I post this with an eye roll and a face palm. There are a few Orville super fans who keep pushing the claim that the show is coming back. And it seems like one of the things they do is re-post older comments hinting that maybe, just maybe, it is coming back. I've been involved in hopeless fandoms before (Firefly), so I'm sympathetic. But it's hard to see how this one comes back. Maybe as an animated show or something with much lower production costs.
