I love Galaxy Quest, but this is actually a little more serious than that.
Not by much it isn’t.
I’m not talking about the movie but the fictional TV series featured in it. Pity we never got to see much of that. 
(Grayson reminds me of Sigourney Weaver’s hot character. :o )
One upvote for tonight’s episode.
Make it two. Yeah, the setup to the premise was rather hokey (If you know nothing about the cultural mores of the society, send the blandest people you have so that they are not likely to screw up before they learn the rules–no, send your loudest, most flamboyant officer and an Alien down there) but it made me think about how close we are to that society here on Earth…and I’m not really liking the self-opinion I’m getting.
And that is what SF should do…make you think.
One might think they’d do more observation before going to live amongst the locals. Plus, once they learned the vote system, why not simply hack the damn votes rather than rigging it to change public opinion.
Lastly, I don’t care how much of a hotshot pilot that douchebag is, that’s a demotion. Maybe even brig time. But I guess when one crew member can dismember another with no repercussions, this is minor. I want to like this show, but everyone has got to stop being such an idiot. People can be funny without being idiots. Whether McFarlane can capture that dynamic remains to be seen.
It’s probably easier to get into the feed than the vote system. But you’d think not that much harder with an approximate five century advantage.
Anyway, the latest episode reminded me of all the episodes of Star Trek over the years I’ve never really liked. Same reason I could never really get into Sliders. All the subtlety of a brick.
This. And I could stand a few episodes that don’t telegraph a lesson to the audience.
@Asterion. This episode actually did remind me of a “Sliders” episode.
I’m only 10 minutes in, but as soon as they landed on the planet, I was reminded of this episode of Black Mirror.
I definitely never made it all the way to season three.
I can’t figure out the population either. You’d assume a likely similar global population in the billions with all possible habitable landmass occupied. There’s no evidence that there is more than one country with this system. With any reasonably-sized developed country on Earth right now (say the G20), 10 million is at best a third of the population (Canada) to slightly under half (Australia), with the numbers slightly higher when removing all minors. When you get to say, the US, that’s about 3.3%, and by the time you’re talking China or India it’s around 1%. So without an adult population of at under 20 million, 10 million votes isn’t even a majority but a plurality of people that actually bothered to vote. Possibly a very small absolute percentage. You can’t even assume that you can just add the two numbers displayed on the screen to guess at population because the count is presumably cumulative over time. At least, there was no evidence that they reset the number before the apology tour or even that you got to vote only once during the whole thing.
So either write off dealing with the entire planet if this system has spread to be the majority form of government throughout various countries the way representative democracy has on Earth or go find a far more reasonable country to investigate. Or find a way to do it all from orbit or other hiding. My guess is that other countries would probably think that country is nuts if it’s an outlier form of government.
Brings up lots of other questions as well if it’s an isolated country. How do they deal with tourists? Would you even want to be a tourist in a country with that kind of judicial system? What’s the rest of the economy look like? Does the populace vote bread and circuses all the time and allow unsexy or unpopular but very necessary spending and infrastructure?
Personally, I think it was cowardly of them to set the story on an alien planet and not have it be just business as usual on 25th-century Earth.
Among other elements I didn’t like (the biggest being LaMarr’s grossly unprofessional behaviour in the first place):
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If the two researchers hadn’t recently been in the public eye, searching for them by showing their pictures to random people would take years.
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“What if they try to corroborate this?” / “Don’t worry, they won’t”. Mildly amusing, but it would have been more appropriate for the local woman to be baffled by the very concept of corroboration. “…Corroba-what?”
-What about the people walking around with hundreds of thousands of downvotes from youthful offenses? If their original transgressions didn’t get them to 10 million, shouldn’t their numbers be reset? Otherwise, what’s the point of being “acquitted”? LaMarr says “y’all suck ass!” on his way out of the correction chamber. What if four of the guards take offense to that and give him four downvotes, putting him at 10 million? Does that put him back in for correction?
- The computerized clothing stores present numerous “traditional” clothing items, but doesn’t have a vote badge (or at least something that looks like one)? That should be the most common clothing accessory of all time on this planet.
At the very least, I thought there’d be some kind of “buck the system” moment where LaMarr just takes his badge off and tosses it away, causing the entire process to abruptly halt, because even though there’s a longstanding threat to arrest someone who isn’t badged, it’s really just a bluff.
Alien: What if they try to corroborate this?
Girl: Don’t worry, they won’t
Ed: Really?
Girl: Look. We all took Junior High civics. We’re all taught that we’re supposed to vet everything before voting. Then, we all grew up and learned how to get on with our lives.
Did you read every policy, by every candidate, in the last election, before making a decision?
They needed the special abilities of the alien for every away mission. That;s why they’re on the ship. That’s why Tuvok and Spock have to put on headbands, and Work has to wear a hoodie for the DS9 Tribbles adventure. At some point, someone was going to have to grab and throw a 500 lb weight, and that’s Alara.
I do suspect the government will figure out they were hacked. The reason Ed did this was because even if he has to cheat, he’s going to do it ethically – expose them to their own shortcomings. Really – dress up Lamar as a soldier and have him meat his dog. When the hack comes out, they’re going to be – “and we all fell for that? Really? What’s wrong with that Lamar guy … manipulating … us … Dang. We fall for that often IRL, don’t we?”
Well, that’s just going to make it worse for the Union someday.
Yep. Par for the course. Captain Ed Mercer – picking the painful, ethical, screw us over later course of action. As sure as Picard would develop an anti-Borg program and then not use it.
Meat his dog? Even Work wouldn’t stoop to that level!
Well, them KingKongs do eat heart of targ.
The rip-off of that Black Mirror episode was blatantly obvious. Too ham-fisted to be an homage.
Gah. I really shouldn’t type on the SDMB before coffee. It ruined any point I could have hoped to make-- regarding Worf, and the video of soldier John Lamar meeting and playing with his dog is a direct assault on our contemporary culture – those are really our buttons. Notice - millions of people were going to let his grinding slide because he was fat as a kid. So if you care for your grandma, and were fat as a kid, and are a veteran who owns a dog, I dare you to go video yourself grinding the bronze girl facing off the Wall street bull. Even Seth MacFarlane won’t be able to save you.
I really hate the “they’re just like humans except with one twist!” storytelling out of Trek shows. It’s just so wildly implausible that it’s hard to suspend disbelief. And it’s usually anvilicious moralizing on top of that. Good sci-fi examines “what if society were like it was, but with a twist”, but it needs to be a new story, not shoehorning another show into finding 99.999% Identical Earth number 14.
That said, it did a pretty solid job with the premise (not as good as MeowMeowBeanz, of course) and was entertaining enough. At least they actually justified a character’s ignorance, sort of, by having him tell his publicist “pretend I’m the dumbest motherfucker on the planet” instead of just asking questions that would be so basic over and over again that the aliens should be incredulous that you would ask such a thing. Here, the aliens were indeed incredulous, and they solved that issue, I appreciate that.
Dude, that’s like a daily occurrence.
Or that the two observers would have mentioned their popular-vote-based legal system in their regular reports, before they went silent.
If this were an actual Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, I’d call 'em out for their stupidity. But as this is The Orville, I just shrug my shoulders and say, “Meh, it’s a Seth McFarlane quasi-comedy, he’s just trying to operate by the Rule of Funny.”
MacFarlane clearly took this from the Black Mirror episodes “Nosedive” and “Hated in the Nation.” There was absolutely no way it could have been anywhere near as good. And it wasn’t.
Still, it wasn’t bad overall.