Well, yes, that’s part of why we perceive him as male. But there’s no reason to suppose he, or another of his species, might not fall in love with a male human, or other male-seeming alien. It wouldn’t be “sexual” in nature so much as simply “pleasure seeking”. They’d go for whatever they personally found attractive, just as we choose one woman or man over another based on looks and/or personality.
Think of it like the relationship between a human and a cat. There’s (hopefully!) nothing sexual about it, but we like petting them, they like being petted, and we love hearing them purr. There’s definitely a give-and-take of pleasurable experiences, even if we end up looking to our own species for reproduction.
Yes, Moclan divorce is kind of all-or-nothing. If they haven’t pissed you off enough to kill them, then you might as well stay together.
Maybe not the healthiest way to run things, but it does kind of cast some of our petty squabbles in a new light.
If they were approaching this a little more realistically, the Moclan divorce should actually be a huge civil rights issue for the Union, arguably more so than the issue that has gotten all the attention on the show (the treatment of females in Moclan society, and of males who are attracted to them).
The moment his brought in his kid my wife and I said “well, that’s what will screw all this up.”
This thing is that the kid telling on his father turned out to be essentially an irrelevance. The ship they subsequently took vanished from its stated flight plan. That right there could have been the moment of crisis; there was no narrative purpose for Bortus’s stupidity and dishonesty. The fact they had a baby wasn’t even something they had to hide; they could have simply claimed it was male, and no one would have known. Then the ship makes a run for it and the story proceeds as planned.
My other nitpick would be that the fight on the planet surface was a chaotic jumble of nonsense. Greater dramatic tension would have been achieved had no one ever fired a weapon, but if there had simply been a really tense standoff where the stakes are that someone might get killed.
I nitpick only because I love the show and want it to get better.
So, the unanswered question - are those deadly weapons? Was everyone shot killed? Somehow I don’t see Moclan weapons having a stun setting, especially not in that situation.
I have enough trouble with badass Kelly and SuperWorf Bortus just standing perfectly still and upright there in a firefight against trained soldiers and not getting a scratch, but if all those Moclans are dead, that’s kind of a permanent mark on the issue.
I’m not sure I see it that way. Getting married is a choice they make, in the full knowledge of what divorce requires. Being born female or being attracted to females isn’t a choice.
During the shout-out I started thinking about the ethics of combat when your weapons can effectively and reliably stun. During a normal earth gunfight, if I sneak up behind an enemy and cut his throat, that’s a justified use of force. Hell, I literally brought a knife to a gunfight; go me!
But what if it were a phaser shoot-out? You can’t sneak up behind someone and kill them in a stun fight, can you? Seems to me the limit of justified force level might be just punching and some light grappling. (Lower your shoulder and slam them into a wall, etc…) And even punching seems like it would be an “Oh, it’s like that?” moment for whomever you punched. As in, punching would somehow escalate a shoot-out when it’s a shoot-out with phasers instead of guns.
I’ve said before about The Orville and the various Trek franchises - it’s remarkably easy to “respect all life” when you’ve got a weapon which can reliably but harmlessly incapacitate an enemy from a distance.
Kelly and Bortus killed a bunch of guards in a prison breakout they started, so they don’t seem to really care about killing people. I mean, that’s just plain murder, and it’s been forgotten already.
But I didn’t see any bodies remaining on the ground so I guess it was a stun fight.
One admittedly nitpicky thing about the use of the Dolly Parton song was the bit in which the admiral recognized the lyrics as the origin of the speech give by the Moclan woman. This is supposedly more than 400 years in the future, so that song isn’t likely to be familiar to anyone. (Who knows, though? Maybe Dolly Parton made a comeback centuries after her death.)
But the divorce is not a choice on the part of the person getting killed!
Some people go into marriage with a clear-eyed or even cynical attitude that it may well end up in divorce. But most people think that’s not in the cards for them. That’s for “other people”. People who aren’t as decent, or at least not as deeply in love.
I’m reminded of a scene on “The Sopranos”:
Adriana shows up in public with a black eye, clearly given to her by her boyfriend Christopher, Tony’s nephew and a capo in the crime family. Tony upbraids him, but not on a general principle of opposition to domestic violence. He tells Christopher if he’s going to beat her, he’s got to “put a ring on her finger first”. That’s the custom among this clan of Italian-Americans. She does still become his fiancee. Do we just shrug and say that she knew what she was getting into when she accepted his proposal? If there were a country where this custom was legally tolerated (either de jure or de facto), would it not be an issue for human rights organizations to raise?
Given the amount of plastic surgery she’s had, she may elude death entirely.
Yeesh, that was one preachy-speechy episode; at least when Picard started moralizing, his delivery was better.
There’s lots of choices we make in life that stick us with potential consequences if we want to change our minds later. In human marriage, in lots of jurisdictions, it’s accepted that you’ll have to give half your stuff to your ex-spouse if you get divorced. Would you accept “I didn’t choose to give them all that!” as a reason to not fulfill the legal requirements of divorce?
Their version is just more extreme than ours, which is pretty much true of their entire culture.
Is this how jurisdictions work in the future; no matter how far you get from your home planet, its laws still apply to you? If a human is in interstellar space, is he or she still bound by Earth laws? Can members of the Earth military detain or arrest that person at will? Does Moclan jurisdiction extend to literally everywhere there are Moclans?
“Next time I’m just gonna find a woman I hate and give her half of everything I own.” - Merle Haggard (attrib.), after a divorce
I don’t think we know yet, or that the scriptwriters have thought it through. Certainly the Moclan government appears to believe that all Moclans everywhere are subject to its authority. I doubt that the Earth government could do that legally, or would be that overreaching.