To be fair, the Captain or someone in the crew doing something stupid is a key factor in many, many, many episodes in every one of the real Star Trek series. It goes all the way back to Capt. Pike going down to the surface of Talos IV to meet the survivors, rather than just telling Dr. Boyce and Spock to find out what’s going on.
Oh, I agree. That’s what I meant when I said:
That wasn’t terribly clear, was it? Oh well. Yeah, plot-necessary stupidity was part of TOS, but I was hoping they’d take the BEST parts of TOS, and improve on the lesser parts.
There were some really good episodes. And they had to be extremely good to overcome the incredible unlikableness of Seth MacFarlane.
Abso-freaking-lutely.
What I liked about it was when they had an episode which was intended to parallel an important topic in our time it never ended with a trite solution wrapped up in a little bow. It was always more, “it’s complicated. Fuck it we did the best we could under the circumstances.”
The problem with Seth McFarlane isn’t that he’s irredeemable; it’s that he’s the sort of person who needs someone sensible in charge to rein in his worst excesses, and unfortunately the person in charge is…him. All of his worst bits from both seasons - and there weren’t really that many, although some of them were pretty bad - could have easily been nipped in the bud by someone with veto power going “Nope - this is dumb. Edit it out or do something else.”
That’s a good point; the show is… dirtier. Not necessarily in a smutty kind of way, but in an unresolved problems kind of way. Unlike ST:TNG where every episode or short story arc always neatly wrapped everything up and put us back to the status quo, or permanently changed everything, stuff on The Orville just sort of gets backburnered or forgotten about as more important stuff comes up, more like real life.
Also, the characters aren’t nearly as morally relativist as the ST:TNG crew was- they take clear stances on things and disagree severely. And it’s shown that the Captain is the guy making the hard decisions forced on him by Union regulations, as opposed to things sort of resolving themselves outside of JLP making hard choices, as seemed to happen often in ST:TNG.
Overall, it’s better Star Trek than the real thing in most respects. The only place I think I’d change it if I were in charge, is that I’d tone down the 20th/21st century pop culture references- it’s fine every now and again to refer to “classical” music, but this is the 25th century- they could make the same arrangement and play something from the 23rd century just as easily.
But getting the performance rights to 23rd Century music is a real bitch.
It’s uneven and I could nitpick it to death, but I’ve kept watching and haven’t missed one yet. When it’s good it’s pretty damn good.
Play a 33 1/3 RPM LP of Electric Light Orchestra at 78.