Maybe in the 25th century they’ll have autocorrect that can detect context. 
In the original Battlestar Galactica, Starbuck smoked huge phallic-symbol cigars pretty much wherever he wanted to.
Have never watched the reboot, so I don’t know if the same was true there.
Scotty is cutting through the door, the guy is about to destroy the Enterprise somehow or other.
Crewman “I’ll sing I’ll Take You Home Kathleen one…more…time!”
Kirk: “For God’s sake get that door open!”
The “crewman” was Riley. Lt Kevin Thomas Riley.
It doesn’t have a penis?
Perhaps his species USED to have females, some sort of calamitous disease hit them, and they came up with a way to reproduce anyway.
We could fanwank a lot of things, but I didn’t like Episode 2 as much as Episode 1, for a few reasons:
-
The episode just seemed kind of light.
-
You can’t present the audience with characters and have character-altering events happen to them in the SECOND EPISODE. We barely know Alara and Bortus, and within the first half of the second episode, Alara’s youth is running up against her rank in a hugely important way, and Bortus is presented with a literally race-altering bit of news.
I mean, I don’t really know either of these people yet. The fact Alara lacks moral courage isn’t something that was built up. The backstory of Bortus’s species we don’t know at all; I had to fanwank why he’d know his baby was a female. We don’t really know anything about Bortus individually except that he’s very stern and has a shitty sense of humor.
Putting those together, I guess my complaint is that MacFarlane needs to establish the group dynamic before he can twist it for dramatic effect. Alara taking command of Orville would have had more dramatic weight if I’d spend ten episodes learning that she is unsure of herself, and has been promoted too quickly. I actually didn’t even know she was the ship’s fourth-ranked officer. Maybe we could have has a scene in Episode 7 where the fact she outranks the much more skilled and experienced John Lamarr is played for a laugh or a moment of tension, and she wilts under his influence. Then, when she’s asked to take command of the ship, you’d have a sense of tension as to what was going to happen.
Same with Bortus. (Bortis?) For 47 minutes of this show he was tough and unflappable and now he’s married and hatching an egg. Wait, what? I barely know the guy.
I think they would have been better off allowing the show to gestate a little more over 4-6 episodes where Ed’s the captain of the ship, we see what he’d good and bad at and how he commands, and his chain of command does their jobs and we see what they’re good and bad at and how much they like each other, or not. This episode at least did give us some good scenes between MacFarlane and Palicki, who really have chemistry, but it didn’t have to happen in the context of this plot. It didn’t even have to happen in Episode 2. If you’re hoping for a multi season run, you can’t blow the entire arc of their relationship in a month and a half.
One of the many good parts of "Star Trek: The Next Generation, the show The Orville is trying to be, was the relationship, such as it was, between Picard and the Crushers. The relationship had a natural source of conflict which was, as we found out, later complicated by the fact Picard and Dr. Crusher loved each other, but could not quite admit it (in the standard timeline) because it was too emotionally hard. This was especially important in the image of Jean-Luc Picard, a man of great strength in many areas but who was, in this one way, frightened and walled off. The story was actually very poignant, and they didn’t mention it at all more than twice a season, tops. His relatiopnship with her son was more depicted (And added to the complex nature of it.) Ninety-eight percent of the time he was the Captain of the ship and she was the doctor, and that was it, and they let the characters’ interactions speak for themselves.
The Orville would be well served by trying this.
In point of fact, Orville IS following in TNG’s footsteps here.
In the original series we got “The Naked Time” as the fourth episode, which had impact because by then we knew about Vulcans and their logic and control of emotion and how much Spock’s sense of self was invested by his need to be VULCAN (in all caps.)
So then we got TNG, and the SECOND episode was “The Naked Now” which had no real impact except for some amusing lines. We knew barely anything about the characters and weren’t invested in them yet.
Either this episode was a deliberate homage to TNG screwing up that way… or they learned the wrong episode from TNG’s experience.
Or at least Vulcanian.
Aside from the cliché of “Screw the Admiral’s orders, we’re going anyway” and there (probably) being no repercussions, I thought the second episode was okay, even if it relied pretty heavily on the 1960-2010 pop-culture window which, given the show’s creator, I have no business being surprised by.
That’s an interesting span you mention. Quite large, but pointedly missing the last seven years. What would be in there if it were more like 1960-2015 or so?
Millennials in SPACE!
:dubious:
There’s no attempt in there to pointedly miss anything. I figure if something’s a pop-culture product of just the last seven years, I probably wouldn’t recognize it. Heck, there have been whole South Park episodes relying heavily on references to such-and-such singer and such-and-such reality-show star and such-and-such internet sensation, and I have no fucking clue who any of these people are.
I figured roughly the range from “Ensign Parker” (McHale’s Navy, first aired 1962) to Duck Dynasty (first aired 2012) meant I was pretty close, rounded off to the nearest decades.
On reflection, Kermit the Frog is older than I thought, making his debut in 1955, though the early version of the character only somewhat resembled the stuffed-animal version on the Captain’s desk, which I figure is from the 1970s or later.
So we’ve had an Admiral Halsey and an Ensign Parker. Can a Captain Crunch be far behind?
More potential names for starships (all vessels prefixed with USS):
*Curtiss
Richtofen
Rickenbacker
Mitchell
Lindbergh
Earhart
Wiley* (or Post)
*Hughes
O’Hare
Yeager*
Care to add any more? 
I’m expecting the Orville’s sister ship to be the Redenbacher. Or maybe the Wilbur, but that would be a brother ship.
Already been used, but Grissom, Armstrong, Gagarin, or any other of a number of aviators-turned-astronauts.
Wright (duh)
Montgolfier (eh, that’s a stretch)
Sukhoi
Hughes
Arnold (commander of the USAAF)
Symington (first Secretary of the Air Force)
Bush (the first and only combat-aviator President)
Oops, missed the duplication…
I’m really enjoying this.
It’s much better than I imagined it would be.
Or the Robin, followed by the Frank Lloyd and the Little Joe Cart.
Continuing with WWI aces, I’ll add
*Ball
Bishop
Barker
Boelcke* (or Oswald)
Immelmann (or Max)
*Fonck
Guynemer
Nungesser*
Luke
Another one I’m partial to is a real rocket scientist:
Goddard.
*Tsyolkovskii *was used on TNG, so I’ll also add
Oberth.
*Robin *should be paired with Olds. 
Can’t forget *Bader *or *Gibson *either.