Seems I’m a bit late to the party. I just wanted to agree with this:
Yeah, I thought the first episode was awful.
Firstly it is a jarring change of tone from previous series; no-one would accept a serious drama suddenly shifting to slapstick comedy, and I feel the same way about the other direction. There were jokes a plenty during the actual war, but now in the aftermath it’s deadly serious?
The CG shots were very much overdone. Beautiful, but just felt like filler.
Finally, it has made the crew unlikeable from the get-go. Not only for the treatment of isaac but how meh they were regarding his suicide. It’s a shame because I like the idea at least of showing the after-effects of a war; it’s something that’s often just skipped over in sci-fi. But it didn’t need everyone to behave this badly.
Anyway, glad to hear it gets better from later episodes onwards. But I genuinely need to psyche myself up to watch another episode right now.
Sure, but did he need to go darker than star trek? I thought the balance was about right in most of the second season.
A lot of the appeal of shows like TNG was that they were inspirational, when just about nothing else on TV is. Orville used to belong to that set, and doesn’t any more. I don’t care if humans have better toys if they act as bad as, or worse than the fuckers in the world today.
(and if humans still act this badly, why isn’t there still lots of war between humans?)
Yeah, that’s exactly where I’m at as well. Especially with another very good Strange New Worlds coming out last night, I’m wondering… do I need to watch The Orville? Hopefully Ep 2 grabs me again.
The Orville for me was a mildly amusing stopgap while waiting for Trek to make a real comeback. But with Strange New Worlds looking competent I can’t see this show lasting.
First, everything is obviously derivative of Star Trek. You could call it “barely not Star Trek.” As a result, though, it can never really be good as Star Trek. It can’t attract the best writers and actors and directors on a consistent basis.
And every visual element looks like Star Trek except cheesy.
Also, while the was Seth MacFarlane’s will that brought it to the screen, he is the biggest thing that will always weigh it down. He is ultimately just a parodist, a pastiche artist. He can’t play a role with range, and usually not with sincerity. He certainly isn’t a dramatic actor. His humor will always be on the playground level. He doesn’t have the range as an actor or writer to continue improving the character.
All the efforts to bring serious themes and ethical and moral problems to the table have a problem … it always looks like he’s doing a pastiche. He doesn’t bring anything new to the conversation. He doesn’t have any way of retelling a story in a way that looks like anything other than a parody. And if he is trying to go dark, then it’s a parody without jokes which is, not anything at all really.
All the conflicts that each character brought with me to the premiere have all been pretty much resolved.
Mercer and Grayson have settled into comfortable colleagues and I’m part they now know their marital troubles were partly based on incompatibility and partly based on a pheromone issue that wasn’t their fault.
Finn’s “romance” with Isaac just isn’t believable, not after we have seen Data or Cylons on Battlestar Galactica, or even Her.
Malloy has never been anything but a B story.
Bortus’s storyline has reached a dead end too. At this point either the Moclan ways have to be endorsed or refuted. There’s no more room to play around with that topic.
I am still holding out hope for Season 3. Strange New Worlds has taken the place of The Orville in my heart for the “fun and funny but still well-written Star Trek” show. I haven’t had any episode in Season 3 yet that I dislike, though Episode 2 did annoy me at times. First of all, it revolved around Dr. Finn again, and while I like her well enough it seems weird to make her the focus of the show. (Episode 3 went back to other characters so they fixed that at least.) But the biggest problem was the same thing that was mentioned earlier… Okay, they visit an alien space station without EV suits, but I figured, maybe that’s just not a thing on this show. (I don’t recall them ever wearing them on the original Star Trek series, they just beamed down to every strange planet wearing solid-colored sweatshirts and slacks, which is the PPE of the future apparently.) But then after one of them gets infected, they go back in full protective gear.
Who runs their freaking safety program? They are warned not to go to an area of space because of its extreme danger, they run into a foreign technology that just screams “evil”, and they just go on board hoping for the best, with absolutely zero precautions.
Episode 3 wasn’t anything spectacular but at least there weren’t any “you idiot” moments.
I really liked the show for 2 seasons, and the third season isn’t a giant overhaul of the show, just different changes in tone. They haven’t jumped the space shark. I’m still watching it because they can still right the ship, so to speak.
Security officer pushing a random ‘push here’ button in the moclan morgue.
The Captain, First Officer, Security Cheif, Best Pilot and Bortus all go to a strange planet that shouldn’t be. When they disappear - they then send down the Chief Medical officer and Smartest Android (plus a security team that consists of 2 red shirts) to check on them.
Also very tired of the “Isaac Sucks Redux” routine
This is an indictment of the entire Star Trek franchise.
It’s an opinion I happen to share, too. Why do the most important folks take on all the risk?!
I understand that you have the stars of the show that you need to feature, and those are the bridge officers.
The in-universe explanation would be that you always put your best people in key situations. So those highly-skilled and experienced people, the best of the best, they are the ones encountering new technologies, uncovering mysteries, and especially making first contact.
And that’s valid. But it still seems wrong. You should have a “scouting party” followed by your key folks. But that’s just not what this genre does.
I disagree.
I think the problem is that Seth has tried too hard to deal with serious issues here. For example, suicide seems a lot more serious than anything ST typically dealt with, and does not seem to me to be a parody of anything.
The thing people sometimes forget with ST, is that it always had humor. It always was light-hearted even as it dealt with significant social issues. Obviously apart from the tribbles episode, which was clearly psychological horror
It’s just the humor was always a bit clunky, so few people really thought of it as a comedy.
That’s why I really enjoyed the first couple series of The Orville, because it was essentially TNG but with jokes that landed. You can consider it playground humor if you like, but I was impressed, I feel Family Guy is very hit and miss but Orville was a lot more hits.
Unfortunately, I think he’s listened to too many people saying “You can’t do serious drama” and is now trying too hard.
I find the attitudes that everyone thinks it suddenly went from a parody show for the first 2 seasons to trying to be serious in the third to be very strange. It was never a parody, it was a loving recreation of TNG-era trek that tried to also work in some humor. And season 2 tackled plenty of serious issues in its episode, including a genocide of an entire race by their creations. Some episodes tackled their issue of the week better than Star Trek has/would have.
Season 3 feels different because it’s de-emphasizing the humor, not because it’s suddenly starting serious plots. Season 2 had a much better balance of both.
I mean, let’s put it this way: The whole thing of a star “trek” doesn’t make sense if they are encountering existential threats on a weekly basis. You’d want to send a fleet of ships, a planet at a time, to cautiously proceed through a series of steps over months or years.
I mean there’s episodes where a child is doing a piano recital one minute, and the ship barely survives being blown up the next.
If we’re going to swallow that for the sake of a story then I think we can accept the first officer or whatever being among the first to beam down. It’s actually easier to rationalize.
That’s the real main reason they do this. And I agree, it’s necessary. Unless you have a show like Lower Decks that features the lower ranks, this is how it will be.
