Dr. Claire Finn, the Orville’s chief medical officer. Played by Penny Johnson Jerald, who also played Cassidy Yates, Sherry Palmer, and, yes, Capt. Victoria Gates on Castle. (She was also Condoleeza Rice in some 9/11 movie or another.)
Enjoyed more than I thought I would. I am a Seth MacFarlane hater. His I Saw Your Boobs song at the Oscars pretty much sums up how I view his crass douchiness.
It’s clear he’s a Star Trek fanboy. How this ever was allowed to be made with the ST franchise getting a HUGE piece of the action (I see what I did there) is beyond me.
The bits of stupid humor - drunk driving and such - kinda didn’t fit, although they helped to make it clear that this is always going to be a Tribbles episode driven Star Trek clone.
The bad guys look reasonably bad. Why where there SO many of them and not one hit a Human (okay - a flesh wound) or our shuttle? Frickin’ plot armor was too strong, unless that was meant to be part of the spoofy aspects of this? Oy.
I want to have Adrienne Palicki’s babies ;). Seriously, I haven’t seen her in a thing I haven’t loved and where she wasn’t excellent. Why isn’t she a major star? I love me some Cobie Smulders, but what can she do that AP can’t at least as well?
Brannon Braga, who was one of the showrunners for TNG/Voyager/Enterprise, is credited as an executive producer on this show.
That might have something to do with it.
Yep, I have heard of the affiliation. All the more reason to know that there is a HUGE iceberg of a story below the surface of this.
The show is, oh, 95% Star Trek?
Okay, SDMB fanboys - what’s your rating? Clearly, I vote 95%. What percent of this show’s DNA is Star Trek??
The “Could you move to your right a bit? The framing was all wrong; it distracted me.” bit sounded like something Shatner would say in the ***TOS ***outtakes (or in some of the later movies). Maybe Seth is channeling Bill. :dubious:
Doesn’t the guy with the beard remind you a lot of the mature Wesley Crusher? Maybe Wil Wheaton was unavailable… 
You know that he voices the son of MacFarlane’s character on AMERICAN DAD, right? They’ve been working together, on one show or another, for over a dozen years.
I’m hoping for something like an American version of Hyperdrive.
I guess I can’t vote. Psst, women like scifi, too. 
Probably, they have such a huge fleet because their current political/military situation calls for a huge fleet. “We need 200 ships guarding this region, 500 on post at Earth, another 150 doing exploratory work…” and then they start building up to those fleet numbers. Crewing the ships - particularly with trained and/or experienced command - has turned out to be more of a bottleneck than building them, but they’ll eventually work through it as more classes graduate from the academies.
Alternatively, they’ve had a ~3000 ship fleet for a while, and are experiencing a dip in recruitment/increase in retirement that’s making it temporarily difficult to fill all the billets. The Orville itself isn’t a new ship - MacFarlane’s a replacement captain. His predecessor either retired, or got promoted up when someone above him retired. (or died.)
I’m not a military guy, but I understand that those are pretty common problems in real-world navies.
Yeah, the Orville’s definitely meant to be a smaller class ship. I suspect they’ve got a big reveal planned for when the real capital ships show up.
You can’t copyright ideas. "Folks in colorful jumpers running around brightly lit starships,’ is to vague to sustain any sort of a copyright infringement, and they haven’t taken anything from ST that could possibly be covered under Trademark law. Brannon Braga’s probably on board as a producer because he has a lot of experience running fx heavy sci-fi shows. Braga doesn’t personally have any ownership in Trek, AFAIK, which is mostly held by Paramount and the Roddenberry estate, so his appearance in the credits likely doesn’t mean much in terms of backroom legal wrangling.
The only Cassie Yates I recognize was played by Tamara Taylor. 
Yeah - I screwed that up. Not meaning gender specificity!
I kept waiting for it to get really funny or really exciting and all it got was really pretty. I guess that’ll do for a few episodes, but having more fart, dick and cupholder jokes is going to wear thin pretty fast.
Well, he is no longer needed for Dark Matter. 
Maybe the large number of ships is due to corruption driven pork. If the show is trying to portray humans more realistically, then that makes sense.
Maybe the jokes protect them from Paramount by making it a parody. I don’t know if Paramount would try to sue or could be successful if they did, but making it a parody probably makes it easier to defend in court.
Saw the pilot this morning and I’m looking forward to tonight’s episode. Yeah, some of the humour is juvenile and it definitely is a nod and a wink to ST. (Geek Alert!)Based on the “year” it’s set in I don’t really see why it couldn’t be a continuation of the ST series itself as Orville is roughly 100 years after TNG, especially with the messed up timelines the movie series have introduced… Personally, I think this series has a lot of potential to be really good.
It would be CBS, not Paramount, but it doesn’t matter. The idea of “space adventure TV show with brightly-colored costumes” is not sufficiently specific to infringe on anyone’s IP. Orville is hardly the first to rip off the Trek aesthetic. (And neither was Star Trek.)
We still have 12.23 to go in the fourth quarter of the game. What does this equate to? An hour of real time?
Good point. The Planetary Union also does things like fast-track or direct commission officers for political reasons; it’s not hard to imagine them doling out pork barrel projects to member worlds too. Good thing this show’s on Hulu.