Rumors swirl about all of those and more. She was quoted as saying she didn’t like her makeup process. That bought out bad fan reaction™ because we don’t want to lose this actress, and the actor who plays Bortus endures way more.
But yeah, I think she does have a movie coming out soon. Then again, so did Denise Crosby. Hence, evil tar attack. Then again, Alara is still alive, maybe she’ll run a security agency on her home planet, solve mysteries, go to community college for other “slow” Xelayans. So guest spots are a possibility, and maybe even a spin-off – CSI:Xelaya. Or out of spite, they put her in a Krill costume. Boy, Denise Crosby got off easy with the Romulan ears.
Over on reddit, they can’t stop mentioning the actress and Seth used to date. They insist that that’s the entire problem. Its seems kinda wierd to me that grownups can’t be grownups. I kinda only mention it her before it becomes a multi response thread on what a horrible boyfriend Seth McFarlane is. Obviously. Look at the humor of Family Guy. Obviously. * “Saw Your Boobs”* Oscar song. Its all so obvious.
Does it niggle at anyone else that the Bortus/Klyden relationship seems to map so closely to 50s-type middle class hetero couples? One partner earns the income, the other partner is a stay-at-home housekeeper/parent?
For that matter, what in the world does Klyden do all day? They’re living in a smallish apartment in what is undoubtedly highly automated circumstances. Little housework, no yardwork, maintenance type things taken care of by, er, the maintenance department.
Okay, child care is a full time job with infants and toddlers, but the kid looked to be mature enough to be school aged, so unless he’s being home-schooled for some reason, Klyden must have an awful lot of spare hours to fill.
Doesn’t bother me at all. Having one parent (at least) give full time attention to child rearing seems like an objective ideal for the minimum level of care a child should receive. I don’t think it’s some sort of antiquated quirk of old timey values, it just makes sense.
I mean, if they wanted to go way more sci-fi about it, and the baby was raised by an intelligent tub of goo that the species shoots out of its ass, that’s fine too, but there’s nothing that bothers me about a traditional bread earner/child rearer situation.
It’s also kinda normal in TV land that if you have a somewhat atypical relationship that everything else about it has to be conservative possibly to the point of being old-fashioned.
Either to make some point, or, in this case, for humor.
(The atypical thing here being that they are a gay couple but averting most of the tropes of what a gay couple in fiction looks like)
I would be happier if he got a job but it also doesn’t bother me.
That’s true, I guess. The “don’t be afraid, they’re really just like you” trope. But it seems kind of a waste: you’ve got an alien species to play with, why do they have to be so mundanely human?
Or a hobby. Or a goal. Something to be more than “Of Bortus”
Minor thing: Malloy has had a couple of observational lines which I like: the thing about “seeing this planet makes me realize my family are trash” in this ep and saying that “women pick him” and his insecurities in the first ep.
Not really jokes, but I just like these things because I can relate to them, yet they are things TV characters don’t normally say.
I would say neither label particularly makes sense for a species with (practically) only one gender.
What matters is how we 21st century humans perceive them. For us, society has still only recently, and not everywhere in the world, come to accept same-sex relationships. This is relevant for understanding why the relationship is written the way it has been: same-sex relationship, two huge guys from a warrior (or at least: super strong, stoic) culture…it’s unusual for us. So they play against that with Klyden watching black and white movies while eating rocky road.
Oh but you made me remember the best line of the episode: the one about “we can’t legally ask if he’s planning on dividing in 2”
I’m upset Alara is gone. It was nice to see two Star Trek doctors (I think that was Phlox, wasn’t it?) Nice play that the villain’s son was basically Andrew Wakefield. The whole home intruder scene was horrifyingly tense.
I hope Halston Sage leaving is a temporary thing; she had an interesting character. My 8-year old granddaughter thought it was hilarious when she saw (part of) an episode and I told her this “smallest” crew member was actually the strongest.
IMDB doesn’t show a whole lot of new projects for her, but I can see her career taking off. She was in Goosebumps but I didn’t recognize her until I saw her name in the credits. She looked a bit different as a normal person.
Yeah, there’s always some Wha? moments when you analyze any show. My take: the murderous people had been stalking Ildis, looking for a chance. When the family left town they kept looking and found out – beach house? On the off-season? And no-one else is around? Hun – this is exactly what we need. Let’s get that sonbitch now.
That’s not their beach house that was “broken” into – they somehow intercepted the caretaker, and took all his stuff. When Alara saw it, at their beach house, she didn’t know what to make of it either. Was their caretaker squatting at some random people’s house? Why? I’m guessing, it was all to make their story plausible.
My question is, how did Mercer know Alara and her family went to their other family house? Did Alara list all the possible places she might be while recuperating? Can a Union Captain demand help from Xelanian police? Can even the planetary security find it quickly? And will they just hand such information over? Is that correct for a government to do, and are all Xelanians as bigoted as Ildis, and thus even less likely to help? I guess, they just did the ST:NG thing, and scanned for her com-badge, that little wrist thingy?
I really was not expecting Alara to leave the show. Also I really wonder what the police & security services are like on Xelaya if her parents are representative of Xelayans in general (they seemed members of the elite).
DS9 had a guest character with the opposite problem; she came from a very low-gravity world and needed the gravity turned down in her quarters (otherwise she was in a wheelchair). When the show was in the planning stages she was supposed to be a main character, but the producers quickly realized the special effects would be way to expensive (the character could fly around her quarters).
Well it does seem like Klyden’s suffering from boredom. There’s no indication he had any kind of job even before the baby hatched. I wonder what life is like for the other dependent spouses on the ship? Do most of them civilian jobs? Is there any support system at all?
The resolution of this episode was poorly plotted from a character position.
Alara’s family has always looked down on her as being mentally slow, and the resentment of that is a significant part of her character. And now she’s back on her planet, but she’s also weakened so that her physical abilities are rendered moot. But the show starts hinting early on that the savvy she has gained as a security officer has her more suspicious of the situation.
So when it turns out they’re in danger, the obvious thing would be that she saw some solution her parents didn’t, and it turns out that while slow for her species, her experiences have given her a certain savvy in which she can come up with solutions that her parents couldn’t, thereby giving her parents a reason to have a respect for her mentally.
… Except… the actual resolution we got was a fist fight. Crippled, can’t-get-out-of-her-chair Alara has her big redeeming moment which is a fist fight with the woman holding a gun to her.
This show doesn’t work without the humor. The episode was light on humor, and the plots and character development on their own aren’t compelling. The writing in that way is often quite bad. The sci-fi stories themselves aren’t interesting - they’d range from mediocre to okay episodes of TNG from 30 years ago. But we expect a lot more out of our sci-fi now than something that would’ve been generic and predictable 30 years ago.
The humor is what gives it its charm and makes it work, but the episodes in which they only even attempt humor maybe 3 times really shows the weaknesses of the writing when playing it straight.
This is why show like this succeed – Family Guy, and other shows with irreverent humor, everything from Beavis and Butthead, to Bob’s Burgers, to Curb Your Enthusiasm. This is just the sort of slightly jarring, "just “off” comments that people make all the time. It just makes television real, even though the biggest situations, for example FTL space travel in giant manned spacecraft is inherently implausible. Dunno why TV critics refuse to “get” it – have they never known anyone like Gordon who says dumb things all the time? Don’t they feel like Ed Mercer – on the surface, competent and cool, but inside, conflicted and unsure?
I tell ya, SenorBeef:, now that you mention it seems like almost every episode is light on humor. Oh yes, there’s some jokes, mostly Ed and XO one-liners back and forth. And Gordon’s a goofball who just says the first inappropriate thing that enters his head. But wacky situations that go on for the whole episode – that doesn’t happen. It almost seems like, although Seth MacFarlane may have sold it to Fox as a comedy, they’re really doing a straight up, old school lighting, NextGen-type space opera. Just occasional lapsing into humor during their workday of flying through space.
I thought the first season had a much better balance of humor and drama. There were the episode-long gags you mentioned. All of the “Avis” remarks on the Krill ship. The escalating pranks resulting in the missing leg for example. Nothing like that this season.
It feels a lot better when it’s a comedy with sci-fi trappings rather than a mediocre sci-fi show that has a joke or two per episode.
Bortus looks more like someone who could be the security chief, but perhaps he looks a bit too much like Worf. Perhaps Klyden will be the new security chief? Because I don’t see Lt Tharl lasting very long.
And a physics question. Gordon tossed what looked like an empty, uncapped aluminum bottle on the driveway of Alara’s family’s house and the bottle immediately crushed. If the bottle was empty and uncapped, would it have crushed, or would the atmospheric pressure maintained it intact?
