Well, female nicking as opposed to male genital mutilation. It’s Canada, after all.
I thought they made things pretty damn clear. Male gay race is bad. The doctor drove that point home. “I hate this planet. They’ve destroyed it and blow things up every where.”
The anti-male, and particularly anti gay-male viewpoint of this ep was pretty obvious.
The music when the Orville shuttle was approaching and docking with the giant ship was very similar to the soundtrack of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
I think you’re overreacting more than just a little.
So you interpret the show as saying the Moclan have industrialized and polluted their planet because they’re gay and male? Couldn’t have anything to do with them being an alien race?
Just out of curiosity, did you vote for Trump?
[Moderating]
This question bears no relevance to this thread. Knock it off.
I think you’re reading more into this than there actually is.
The main thread of the plot is the conflict between human morality and the morality of the alien culture. From the human perspective, it’s immoral to force a gender role on an infant that might grow up to regret that decision. From the alien perspective, it’s immoral to allow the infant to grow up with a medical defectivity that’ll make it impossible to co-exist with their peers. Who’s right? Objectively, it’s impossible to prove that anyone is.
To an extent, this episode is an adaptation of “Believers”, a Babylon 5 episode that explored a similar quandary. The lesson, I suppose, is that there are situations in which the things we know to be right aren’t necessarily so, and that to impress your culture’s values on a different culture with different perspectives on things isn’t necessarily going to result in a positive outcome.
The lesson isn’t that “male gay race is bad”. It’s that “alien race is different”, and that progressive human social ideals can’t be projected onto another culture so fundamentally different from our own that such fundamental concepts as “male” and “female” cease to have an understandable meaning.
A couple more observations about Ep 3, as long as it’s still going on:
For some reason, I don’t have a problem envisioning an all-male species that can reproduce. But for some reason, my brain is pushing back on the idea that, while an all-male society can reproduce, a post-sex-change member of that species can fertilize another. A male who becomes female can’t have babies, and a woman who becomes a man can’t impregnate a woman; shouldn’t Bortus’s mate be sterile? Or should I just assume that their future sex-change technology can maintain fertility in someone whose sex is changed?
I also thought that they were going somewhere else with the final reveal: I figured Mercer’s scan was for something else entirely, and that the result would be the discovery that there were a lot more females among the Moclan population than previously known, even though they’d had their sex changed. I thought they were going this way, because the odds of Bortus’s mate being female, and then a female being born to Bortus, made it seem like female-ness was just way more common than previously thought.
Yeah, that’s what I was expecting too http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=20495721&postcount=543
Let’s turn this around with a different analogy; I am truly horrified by the war on women that is happening in the United States right now, but what am I going to do about it? It’s not my country. I don’t like or support slavery of humans by humans; I don’t like or support female genital mutilation of humans by humans. If a completely alien species was doing things that I found morally repugnant, I would not like it, but I would not feel like it was my place to try to change how they do things. Have we learned nothing from colonialism and missionaries trying to impose their opinions on people who never invited them to do so?
My opinion is that it is an extreme show of hubris by humans to try to impose their moralities on completely alien people, and I was disappointed that “The Orville” did this instead of exploring the much more interesting story of how and why the Moclans are the way they are.
Maybe they’re saving that for the fifth episode.
“war on women that is happening in *the United States *”??
:dubious:
Look, sure we have the glass ceiling, and by no means are things perfect. But compared to many other nations, the USA stands tall.
I was also expecting the planetary scan to reveal there were many more Moclan females than previously believed.
My nickel summary of the show after the first two episodes: Star Trek for Dummies, and that’s a bad thing.
After the next two episodes: Star Trek for Dummies, but maybe that’s not such a bad thing?
I mean, the show is far, far from high art. The “science” is cringingly bad. The in-show universe seems lazily put together. The plots are simplistic. The writing lacks much depth or nuance. By pretty much all modern standards for great science fiction or great TV, the show falls short.
But the past couple of episodes, as evidenced by the discussion here, do accomplish what good art and good science fiction does- it gives you something to think about. About the universe. About humanity. About your preconceptions. And it does it in a way that is entertaining and accessible to a wide range of people. Critics pan it but it does seem to be finding an audience with the wider masses.
I don’t love it and wouldn’t watch it (I’m just very picky about TV) except for it’s something my partner and I can watch together, but I do have to admire the act Seth is pulling off, intentionally or not. Hopefully it continues in the same vein.
But the Moclans are not completely alien. They are a part of the Union. Bortus is a Union officer, whose immediate superior is a human.
You’re rather wildly missing the point of the episode; it’s very much about clashes of cultures.
Did you watch all the way to the end?
It’s not entirely accurate to describe the alien race in that episode as “gay males”. Yes, they call themselves men, but they’re capable of impregnating one another and bringing a baby to term. So they’re a little more than just “gay”.
My point using that analogy is that I, a Canadian citizen, see that there is a war on women going in in the US, and I am appalled by it. You, a citizen of the US, do not see things the same way that I do. How would you feel if I came to your country and started dictating how your women should be treated? You would (rightly) be quite indignant.
I’ve noticed that, too - one episode has a bunch of us coming at it from diametrically opposed perspectives, and I don’t think either side is wrong.
Did women in Quebec not receive suffrage until 1940?
One would hope that when they joined the Union, there was some discussion about their cultural practices, including female gender re-assignment surgery at birth. If not, that was a glaring omission.
I think you’re missing MY point - I get that it is a clash of cultures. My point is how disappointed I was by how the writers handled it - assuming from the start that humans (read: US Americans) are absolutely right about their stance, and the Moclans are wrong and should be more like humans.
I did. What do you think I’m missing? If there was an in-depth discussion of why Moclans do what they do, I missed that. All I got was, “We do this because we do this.” There’s obviously more to the story than that.
It also occurs to me that it might be a good idea to have separate threads for separate episodes of this show. 
I agree, and with a new program, this would be a good place to start.
I do hope it runs long enough for more threads.
But why would it occur to either side to have that discussion? The Moclans self-identify as a single-sex species, and there was no reason for the Union to question that. Female births are so rare, that even the Moclans were surprised by it, with Bortus literally saying it was “impossible”. Why would the Moclans bring up what they consider to be an extremely rare birth defect when discussing their membership in the Union?
Imagine if humans were contacted by an alien Union, in which the vast majority of members did not have a single large centralized brain, but instead relied on a more decentralized network of neurons spread throughout their body for their cognition. Would it occur to us to warn them about Anencephaly, just in case they wonder why we’re discontinuing medical treatment for a baby that, to them, appears normal?