I will give the humour this - they haven’t done anything as excruciatingly overplayed as the ‘leg injury’ running gag from the early seasons of Family Guy.
I guess our point of disagreement is just I don’t think the humor falls consistently flat. Yes it swings and misses a lot, but every episode has had a couple good lines in there IMO, and I can forgive the misses given that the plotlines and setting have been very good, and definitely Trek.
Interesting to note that Episode 6 was the first one neither written nor directed by Seth. So the overly jokey tone and overdone Avis joke was less likely to have been his input.
Indeed; it’s why I never really got into “Family Guy.”
In reference to Malloy being over the top in his attempted infiltration - remember that he has already been held up as an idiot who happens to be extremely good at piloting spaceships.
So you can argue about if he should have been sent on the mission at all, but once he was there I didn’t find much of what he did out of his (still developing) character.
I don’t think MacFarlane has directed an episode yet? I know he’s been the primary writer on most of them.
so far a couple of directors have had Trek history (Brannon Braga, Jonathan Frakes.)
Why just tell a joke when you can run it into the ground.
Watched “Pria”. The Krill ep is still on my DVR, might catch up tonight. But I read through the comments up to that point and was shocked to see no one mention the funniest part: Malloy’s dangly half-regenerated leg. (Funnier than the leg falling out of the ceiling, IMHO. My wife and I just about fell on the floor laughing.) Don’t know if it was CG or prosthetic, but well done.
You realize that, during a religious service, they took a severed human head and stabbed it dozens of times with a huge dagger.
Despite the lady Krill’s final line, it’s not like those kids weren’t already going to wind up being just fine with genociding the entire human race.
Yep.
Yeah, that was great.
Okay, but the descendants of Salem “witch” burners aren’t still insane religious zealots. The change in one generation may be subtle (or as we have seen at times, like in the '60s, it may not be), but change is still possible. That kid Mercer bonded with was curious and not yet fully corrupted. If we took your point at full face value, there would never be any hope for any culture to move away from toxic, xenophobic hate. And I just don’t believe that.
So Gordon is nice to the young Krill and points out Earth’s star to him. Now the Krill can know exactly where to head next.
The show so far…
What strikes me first about the series is what Star Trek first brought - a sense of hope for the future. I don’t want the majority of a series universe to be a dark and gritty place. I want that to be the exception. I’m still getting the feel of the series just as the cast and writers are. I liked the humor and at first couldn’t put my finger on why it felt different. It doesn’t feel like setting up some implausible scene and then letting characters flounder in it, and it’s not creating a joke and making a scene so it can be told. It’s akin to what Mercer said, “Hey, why do you think I’m tryin’ to lighten the mood here. I’m scared off my ass.” It’s what a lot of regular sarcastic people (like myself) do. We make jokes out of the ordinary to have fun or hide insecurities. Mercer asks the alien to move more into the center of the screen in an attempt to put the alien off guard and delay him. They watch Seinfeld on the bridge. They talk about an anti-banana ray and if it works on salads too. - It’s making fun of the scene at hand and not making the scene funny. I think the writers are feeling their way through this and I’m enjoying the attempt.
The science is bad, but that’s not what I’m most interested in (A tree growing from a seed with no nutrients. Holographic disguising as a Krill but speaking in non-Krill cultural colloquialisms that should have made the Krill suspicious or jail them as lunatics.) I like the hope it returns to a depiction of the future.
Does the universal translator make literal translations, or does it pick the correct colorful metaphor? For example, would it translate the Spanish “son of a whore” to English “son of a bitch”?
I had that same thought - but it seems unlikely that the Krill aren’t aware of Earth’s location, and the Union probably knows the Krill home planet location also. Short of Puppeteer paranoia, I’d think it would be hard to keep that a secret if you have a lot of ships zooming around the galaxy.
He directed the as-yet-unaired episode 8 (“Into the Fold”) and 13 (Dunno the title yet.) He has the only writing credit for episodes 1-5; episode 6 was written by David Goodman, who’s worked with MacFarlane a lot.
Pretty well what he claimed to do is impossible, so I guess he was just bullshitting as usual.
Why impossible?
People keep saying this, but I don’t think it’s so. Go back and look at the hopping around scenes. I’m pretty sure it was mid-thigh. (Going by memory, as I’ve deleted it from my Tvio, but I’m pretty sure…)
Just above the knee, not as much as is shown falling from the ceiling.
It would have been hilarious if Mercer had paused for a few beats after the leg fell and then said, “Wait, that’s not Malloy’s leg…”
I imagine someone found the prop leg while looking around one day and they then decided to write a story around it, despite the fact that the prop leg was much bigger.
Sol is so nondescript, it would be extremely difficult to just pick it out from among the background of the Milky Way’s stars. Unless, of course you either had a good quality star chart or were very familiar with the constellations as seen from different points in the Galaxy.
At a distance of one parsec, it would be only 1/300 the brightness of Sirius, the brightest star in our nighttime sky.
http://www.suntrek.org/sun-as-a-star/suns-vital-statistics/how-bright-sun.shtml