Why? Did it involve couches? :dubious: 
As mentioned up thread, Mercer was on track to captaincy before his marriage fell apart and took his career with it. Malloy is repeatedly referred to as the best pilot in the fleet, just having impulse and/or drinking issues. Grayson and Bortus are experienced.
The other three mains are relatively fresh, sure, but the Orville is hardly a dumping ground for incompetents.
Ladies and gentlemen, may I present the winner of the thread, Bryan Ekers.
Ladies and gentlemen, may I present the loser of the thread, Hoatius.
Now I remember why I hate metaphors :mad:
Having just watched Discovery, I must say that I like Orville better. I think a bit too much telling and trying to do too much in the first episode. Orville came across as more relatable, maybe because of there issues, like drinking problems or wanting to drink on the bridge.
@Horatius - I am still laughing at that post about Humans in the Federation!
Question to people who are wondering about the “tits” and “penis” references. In referring to the biological process of the female and the male, wouldn’t those particular concepts be generic? What should they have said? I agree that pop culture should go over other culture’s heads but biology?
I think there’s three reasons her arguments had to be weak, all from different angles.
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MacFarlane had already gone to the trouble of establishing that Grayson has just a year of legal training. Mercer specifically asks her to do it because she is the closest thing to a lawyer there is on Orville, but she’s not supposed to be good at it. If he wanted her to be a real lawyer he could have written it that way. But he didn’t so it would have made no sense if she’d turned out to be Johnnie Cochran.
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If Grayson starts pulling out arguments that Union law has supremacy over Moclin law in some circumstances, that’s the cheapest deux ex machina I can imagine in the history of these sorts of shows. “Well, there’s Rule 167.3.” “Oh, right, case closed.” It would simply end the plot without any sort of dramatic structure.
For that to work we’d have to be in Season 8, episode 14, where we’ve had years to understand how the Union works and come to understand that conflicts between the Union and its constituent planets are a thing that deep space starships have to deal with (and if that were the case there’s be legal counsel on every ship.)
- MacFarlane wanted her to lose. It simply makes for a more interesting show.
Paul Ruebens. When the lights came on and the cops showed up.
Generic to the point of including an alien species? “Tits” and “penises” aren’t even universal among the species of Earth.
Personally, I think the Moclans (if such a species existed) would have a significantly different view on what is “female” than a human would. Them being presented as egg-layers should have indicated significant differences right off the bat. Heck, saying a species is “all-male” is absurd, by the conventional human definition of “male”. This was a pretty simplistic handling of an ill-defined issue, but the saving grace is that it’s less preachy about it than any of the Star Trek shows would be with the same material.
That’s a switch. Someone laughed at something I said, and it was SUPPOSED to be funny. 
It’s corny and cheap, but I’ll take it.
@Bryan - Okay. I see what you are saying. Perhaps they could have used better terms. Maybe they were trying to use it to show how this crew does it, which isn’t the flagship.
@RickJay - Also good points. It could have been done as you said but then as you also imply, it would lose us for making stuff up for this.
Thanks for the discussion!
Late to the discussion, but I feel so strongly about the third episode (“About A Girl”) that I’m jumping in anyway - I hated it very much. This has always been a weakness of Star Trek shows (using Earth standards to judge other cultures from other planets), and I was really disappointed to see this show making the same stupid mistake. It’s another goddamned planet, with their own goddamned culture and history and society and everything! The episode was ridiculous and patronizing from beginning to end. :mad:
Well, assuming we treat “Encounter at Farpoint” as a single episode, the third episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation was… “Code of Honor” ?! Blech! That episode was culturally insensitive and kinda racist, too. Orville’s still ahead, though not by as much.
“Code of Honor” is insanely racist.
No, the characters were ridiculous and patronizing. The alien culture upheld its traditions despite human morality. In TNG, Picard or Riker would have made an impassioned speech following the reveal of the writer and the episode would’ve ended with the entire Moclin culture undergoing a seismic change towards more ‘enlightened’ human social mores.
I liked it.
Well at least it ended with those “other” guys winning…which is more than what almost always happened in the Trek universe.
True enough. I still hated the way the writers of the show still don’t seem to get something that is common and standard in real science fiction and has been for decades - aliens are alien.
The future is an idiocracy where everyone’s devolved into an idiot yet inexplicably, someone somewhere is still building high tech toys for them to play with.
“I’M GOING TO THE BATHROOM TO READ!”
“…Excuse me?”
“Elvis Presley’s last words. It was all I could think of.”
What was the NG episode where Riker was enamored of a “female” of a unisex culture?