It occurs to me then the episode should have ended with them finding a Moclan female and discovering she’s built like a 350lb linebacker with a voice deeper than Paul Robeson on Xanax. This would require a trivial rewrite, doing away with that “females are weaker” guff and the cube-crushing by the pixie security officer (shouldn’t that sphere have been red-hot after being reshaped like that?)
The female could still be the famous author. Maybe females - or who the Moclans call “female”; the analogy to human females would be far more tenuous - are (or at least believed to be) more hormone-driven to artistic creation than what we’d call STEM fields and current Moclan culture values the latter more than the former.
It’s still not a great situation, but at least it puts a spin on it beyond the superficial knee-jerkery.
But then it’s just Star Trek again. It’s a deux ex machina to prove the silly, backwards aliens were wrong all along! Females are even more male than males! Change of heart happens! Good guys win!
This episode chose instead to actually have the case to the way such a thing would; they try their best but a whole species of people said “yeah, well, we’re sticking with the way we do things.”
No, it would prove the humans are wrong in assuming what they think of as “male” and “female” (and how persons of these genders should be treated) was universal. It was deliberately vague what exactly the differences were between a “male” and “female” Moclan (and muddied somewhat by having the “females” played by what looked like a female human infant and a female human adult) especially since it was made obvious that female Moclans aren’t needed for reproduction. Having the female Moclan turn out to be (superficially, to our eyes) hyper-masculine also challenges the assumptions made so far, where we’ve been led to believe male Moclans are tough and strong and combative because they kind of look and sound like it, and we just assume that a Xelayan female boxing a Moclan male would be some clash of titans, when it’s just as likely that Lt. Commander Bortus doesn’t actually care for fighting and isn’t good at it and vaguely resents the assumption otherwise, like a tall black human man being tired of people assuming he’s good at basketball.
Already, we’ve been spoonfed the “assumption-challenge” in which Halston Sage plays a character with more physical power than a bulldozer (I expect any episode in which she has to perform an unlikely feat will contain a handy expositional reminder that she’s from a high-gee planet) and which so far has been played mostly for laughs. The series should have gone further - we’re told not to assume Xelayan females are weak, why not discover that Moclan “females” aren’t what we typically think of as female, but there happen to be two common descriptors in English for anatomical configuration and the Moclans, for convenience, adopted “male” and “female” as labels even though the match isn’t really that good?
Oh, I wouldn’t have changed the ending. I might have had the Moclan female look at the humans with contempt and tell them to stop being so provincial.
Interacting with a different species from a different planet is completely different from interacting with different humans from the same planet (i.e. Earth). We know the context and history of different cultures on Earth; we have absolutely no idea the history and context of why the Moclan have only one gender, and the show chose to have a heavy-handed morality play about girls are just as good as boys instead of doing the interesting thing and examining a completely different planet and how they got to be the way they are.
As for the conflict-resolution process, I still don’t think it should have gotten that far. I think it would have been a perfectly valid response from the parents of the female baby to just take their baby and go (although that does bring up the question of why they were trying to have a family on a ship that obviously doesn’t understand or respect their species).
I was a little surprised that Bortus didn’t threaten to resign.
Then again, I was vaguely expecting the effect of the Rudolph movie not to be convincing Bortus to give his daughter a chance, but rather that Bortus would instantly convert to fundamentalist Christianity.
I found this to be a thoughtful episode, and I liked that they didn’t say damn the torpedoes, she’s staying a girl.
I’m finding the pop references a bit wearing. The show is set in 2428 or something, right? That would be like us referencing something that happened in the 1600s. Bortus being awestruck by Rudolph was funny, though.
How is it different? First of all, to assert that we don’t know the context and history of how the Moclans reached their decision is silly; they are members of a Union of species; we would certainly know a considerable amount of their history, including why they are gender-specific in their culture. Second of all, the underlying idea remains the same. And you pointedly did NOT address the issues I brought up in my answer, cleverly trying to side-step them with your attempt to dismiss the situation as non-analogous. So I repeat them: Would you argue that we should ignore slavery in a culture that uses slaves (chattel slavery)? Or, as someone else asked you, should we ignore genital mutilation done to baby girls in order to reduce their sexual pleasure as adults, simply because of differences of cultural backgrounds?
Your theory would ONLY apply at best in situations where we first contact a new species, and even THEN, arguing for our own moral viewpoints would never be wrong, though one should, of course, seek understanding of the rationale for a different species’ mores.
I finally got caught up, and I have to say: Where did this show come from? It’s better Star Trek than the current Star Trek. I would never have expected it from MacFarlane, or Fox.
Was it perfect? No. But it was better than an average TNG or TOS, and better than 90% of Voyager. I can get behind this show.
Where did it come from? My impression is that it came from a true fan of the franchise. The Star Trek: Discovery show, on the other hand, is from a bunch of suits.
We still stage plays written in the 1600s, and make allusions to them all the time. Who’s to say the collected works of Cindi Lauper won’t be a bestseller in the 25th century.
Reminds me of a Time article about Star Trek which I think came out around 1994 and Star Trek: Generations. They included a timeline starting from around 1965 and Roddenberry’s early efforts to get the series off the ground and ran until the then-recent film, with an ellipses skipping ahead to the 23rd Century where Star Trek is long-forgotten but a cult following has risen around T. J. Hooker.
Because no one in the human sphere knew there was such a thing as a female Moclan, and the Moclans didn’t think that there would be any issue with converting the baby. They presented the request to the doctor as some routine request (the male circumcision comparison in the trial was apt for how they looked at it (but of course not how human culture looks at it (that being more female circumcision/FGM))). They were very surprised the doctor didn’t just do it, so this was the first time the question apparently ever arose.
And staying on the ship post-crisis - he’s an officer in the Union navy. The spouse could potentially decide to leave (I’m unclear as to if he is in the service or just along as a spouse), but they are still in a committed relationship and decided to stay together.
Both parents wanted the operation until the humans on the Orville refused to honor Moclan society and engaged in a targeted campaign of harassment and propaganda against their own crewmate. Mallory even admitted to the other bridge crew that Bortas would be socially punished by the crew if he had continued to support the operation against human beliefs.