Adrianne Palicki is pretty, but the mole between her eyebrows can be a bit distracting.
Sigh People won’t stop talking about it. You wouldn’t do that to a real-life person. It seems to me, in the latest episode, to have been diminished, either by makeup, lighting, camera angle or natural (or surgical) progression. Let’s all try to let it go.
Yeah, Alara’s makeup went from weird cat alien to very enhancingly pretty. Bizarre seeing the blonde actress, her half a brunette wig seems more “normal” to me now.
Like Data (or to a lesser extent, Spock,) there’s nothing he can’t figure out faster, perform faster, nor is there any obscure fact they can’t pull up faster than even the ship’s computer. However, all the shows have to be written with plausible limitations applied to the characters.
I do hope they write ISSAC to shine as an individual better than the others. Not because they didn’t write Data and Spock plausibly, or because Spiner and Nimoy aren’t great at revealing the character behind the superpowers. Its just that I hope the Orville’s writers are up to the task of really writing the android condition into scripts. Because they have the previous cases to work off of.
I do hope ISSAC and Marcus spend more time together. As I said, they’re both outsiders to human emotional communication at this point.
ISSAC: Marcus, perhaps you would like to tell ME what the problem is?
Marcus: Ugh. ISSAC. You’re just like mom, you think you understand everything.
I: That is not correct. It is true that I do have the processing power to exceed even this vessels capabilities, and my personal internal database of my people’s knowledge, limited as it is, far exceeds the entire collection of Union knowledge. Yet, despite my best efforts, I frequently fail to predict the behavior of any crew member at any given time. Yet you continually anticipate Dr. Finn’s behavior and adapt to it. How do you do that?
M: …
that’s actually pretty funny if you visualize the hand motions the ISSAC would be making during that speech. Or heck, even Brett Spiner’s blank stare with slight head cocking that he would do. Remembering Nimoy’s facial expressions during long speeches gives me a sad 'tho.
I think Marcus is acting out because Isaac is always around and Marcus sees him as taking on more and more of a “dad” role. At the end of the scene where Dr. Finn uses the f-word (ineffectively/wastefully, IMHO), it looks like Marcus is on the verge of opening up but then he looks around and sees Isaac and clams up again. I don’t think Marcus hates Isaac – I mean, Isaac *did *save his and his family’s lives – but Dr. Finn keeps gleefully asking Isaac to be more and more involved with the parenting and it wouldn’t surprise me if Marcus is bucking against that a little. It also wouldn’t surprise me if Isaac were to notice/figure it out before Dr. Finn does.
I don’t remember why Dr. Finn is single: divorce? death? …? 
According to the wiki, she has never been married, and both Marcus & Ty were conceived by artificial insemination. They cite episode 8 for those facts, which was the episode where the Finns & Isaac were stranded on a planet together. This would explain why she bridled when Jimmy’s insufferably smug mother commented on how when being a single mother “it’s easy to make mistakes.”
And I think Marcus doesn’t like that Isaac is using the Finns as part of his research project on humanoids.
Thanks! I had a feeling it might have come up during that episode, but I couldn’t remember the backstory.
I’ll third this.
I was commenting to my wife that I suspect to some degree that a real ship would probably be somewhat more similar to the Orville than the TNG Enterprise , in that everyone’s not all business, all the time. They all know their stuff and are good at it, but they still joke around, mess around with each other, etc… which is never shown on any ***Trek ***show.
I actually was pretty amused by Gordon and John’s storyline- the whole zippers and simulation thing was funny.
My Navy experience was much closer to TNG than The Orville, though there are many significant differences. I like The Orville as a show, but most of the crew are unprofessional enough that they would have been drummed out years before they made any senior officer/department head level on a ship, much less the commanding or executive officer. The best Navy-ish TNG episode is “Lower Decks”, IMO. Far from perfect, but gives a somewhat “realistic” picture about how the crew might interact day-to-day on a ship like the Enterprise.
“Drummed out” hell, they’d be in the stockade!
Yeah, it’s surprising how often celebrities don’t have those kinds of things fixed. Another example who comes to mind is Keri Russell.
Yes, I was thinking of that episode when people were saying we never saw that kind of thing on TNG. I do wish they would have done it more often.
I don’t understand the plot lines where the super intelligent robot is put in some subservient role despite showing better problem solving capabilities.
How many times did Data outsmart the entire crew on the enterprise? Yet he was 4th in command I think.
It doesn’t seem that surprising that they would be a little leery of putting the superintelligent robot in charge, even if that would be the correct thing to do in some sense.
Remember the episode from last season in which the zookeeper would only talk to Isaac (and maybe Alara?) because he thought of the others as too unevolved to be taken seriously? From that perspective, Isaac is basically Jane Goodall or Dian Fossey.
Well, on a ship of several thousand, 4th in command is still pretty darn high on the chain.
<continuing the tangent…>
Problem-solving is just one part of the job of leading a starship. I would agree on star trek someone like Data is basically a fucking wizard because he can just macGiver up some tech to make him have whatever superpower he needs today (and then never use that tech again), but I still wouldn’t put him in charge. For a start if he doesn’t understand emotions how can he do the diplomacy and people management stuff?
And TNG is maybe not the best example of this kind of thing. I think they did a good job on that series of depicting a crew of exceptional people. Data vs Geordi is a tough call right away, let alone Data vs whole crew.
On Orville, Isaac is not evenly matched at all, but that’s largely because it’s a comedy show. Isaac is smart funny and most of the other characters are dumb funny, so the difference is huge.
I wasn’t meaning in terms of the unprofessionalism, but the fact that the crewmen relate to each other as people, and are actually human outside of major plot development points. There’s something… sterile about most of the Star Trek shows- character development is almost entirely within the context of plot drivers- there are very few throwaway lines or side stories that develop the characters. Subsequent series did a little bit better- the whole Harry Kim/Tom Paris bromance is an example. But they weren’t consistent- Mayweather, Reed and Sato were essentially placeholders, while Archer, T’Pol and Tucker got most of the development, and even there, we never really knew what say… Trip did off duty.
The Orville does a much better job of that- it makes the characters more relatable, even if it’s in the context of being unprofessional, and I suspect a lot of that is more in the context of it being something of a hybrid between a somewhat zany comedy and a serious science fiction/military show.
Loved the episode.
Digging the character development and the “office gossip”. It’s the most endearing part of the show.
Isaac isn’t a member of the Union. He’s an exchange officer from the independent robot planet so he’s obviously not getting put in charge of everything.
He’s also studying human behavior and has asked to be in some of the situations he’s in, like attending the parents’ meeting with the teacher. I like his relationship with Finn’s boys, and how he listens to her when she explains why she doesn’t do things how he thinks they should be done.
Yup, like I said: Jane Goodall, but with a blunter edge (to mix metaphors).
Regarding Ep 2.02: Don’t run porn in the simulator if you CAN’T LOCK THE EFFING DOOR!