I actually count both shows among my favorites, but to argue that Community is “relatively obscure” is preposterous. Just being on a major broadcast TV network in prime time for several years gave it a significant profile. And in addition to that, its Internet fandom is legendary. Vulture ranked it as the 13th most dedicated fanbase (with Star Trek #14 and Oprah #15) and noted that at the time (after the show’s third season), the most recent AV Club episode review had over 100,000 comments. :eek:
This is the dorkest timeline.
I like the way they addressed it in the Time Machine film from several years ago:
“You built your time machine because of Emma’s death. If she had lived, it would never have existed. So how could you use your machine to go back in time and save her?”
I didn’t like this episode at all. Aside from the inescapable fact that it totally pales in comparison to the Black Mirror treatment,
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Just not a lot happened, really. There was no secondary story. John got in trouble and then he got out of it because they gamed the system. Oh well.
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The character of John LaMarr is just too far into “black clown” for my comfort level. Was it really necessary to have the black guy be a jive-talking, irrelevant jokester? If he’s such a skilled navigator why does he never do anything smart? For a guy who logically must be both educated and skilled, he sure acted stupid. He’s insulting people on his way out the door; he could have gotten downvotes on his badge and gotten to 10,000,000 right there. His character borders on offensively racist.
The thing is that the misunderstanding and subsequent problem would much more logically have come from the Orville’s crew just being uncomfortable with what’s going on, and accidentally making offense. Have them screw up with money, or the cultural appropriation thing with Alara’s hat, or use an Earth phrase that’s offensive to the locals, or something that seems like no big deal to use but would be offensive to other people. Having John act the fool is just over the top. Later in the show he gives audience members high fives and the TV host is offended that he hit people - it could have been something like that.
- They brushed against some of the thing that would be interesting about such a society, and again I like the fact that one way of doing things did not win out over the other; note that for its weirdness the society they visit was a functioning, peaceful one. But they spend 44 minutes of screen time on it and hardly touched some of the cool and funny implications such a society would have. You could think of a thousand things about such a place that would be off or weird or the opportunity for a joke, but it just looked like they felt like shooting an episode out on the street.
Oh well, they got to get off set and shoot in Westlake Village, good for them.
And hope they don’t have to pee anytime soon.
Wow, maybe starships weren’t the only thing Charlize Theron’s character was stealing…
That’s right: The Lorelei Signal (episode) | Memory Alpha | Fandom. Sulu seemed to outrank her throughout TOS.
And be sure to tear your shirt.
I’ve had a similar reaction to the character (and half-expected the guards to reach out to tap his red down-arrow as his court-appointed PR advisor dragged him away before he could hit 10 million). But both he and the (white) helmsman have been shown to be different varieties of dumbass, good at some things but laughably not at others.
I wonder that no one began screaming “Racism!”
Just wondering why John didn’t get in any trouble with his captain for doing something so dumb when he wasn’t supposed to draw attention to the landing party.
I’m just thinking about how poorly that landing crew did to pass as locals. Obviously, there was LaMarr humping the statue of their national hero, but also another character wore a hat that was reserved for a particular nationality or ethnic group.
In the real world here on Earth, travelers have offended locals by using gestures that, while harmless in their home country, are offensive to the residents of the country being visited. And there were even stories of Allied spies in World War II who were caught by their use of obviously foreign table manners. (We discussed these stories here.)
So it seemed an obviously bad idea for the landing party just to put on some local clothes, land and hope to pass as natives. (Of course, this was a one-hour episode, and they couldn’t devote time to the necessary training one would need to go through, but the writers could at least not have written the story around one character’s offensive behavior.)
I think they deserve some slack cut for them on the clothing issue. I believe they had a few photos of large groups of people to work with, and that’s about it. They didn’t notice the badges (yes, you could argue if they were looking closely they should have), and they had no idea that certain hats were reserved for certain ethnic groups.
In fairness though, this kind of scifi always requires us to suspend disbelief on that.
The heroes always just rock up at some major city and make significant observations about the local culture there and then. In some ways you could say Orville is being more realistic by the fact it bites them in the ass.
Of course in real life it would be a very carefully planned exercise. You’d have a dedicated team gathering information for weeks at least (and that’s assuming the premises of the show: FTL travel, and civilizations being commonplace).
Heck, I don’t get why the original two-man research team had a permanent residence (and it looked like a pretty nice one, at that), and for some reason the address wasn’t in their file and the investigating team’s first stop.
What makes LaMarr a ‘black clown’ other than the fact that he’s a clown who is also black? My main complaint about that character is that he and Malloy are pretty much interchangeable at this point - they’re both irreverent, inappropriate jokesters who, when not sitting at the front of the bridge together, are generally doing incredibly stupid shit.
Malloy has a slightly more developed background of the two, pretty much boiling down to “Mercer’s best friend” and “knows 20th centry pop culture,” so I suppose you could argue that LaMarr’s identity is more wholly tied up in the clowning. But we’re still early on - Bortus is the only member of the bridge crew that we’ve really learned much about.
If the show progresses and LaMarr ends up being the only bridge crew officer with no character development, then sure.
I also don’t buy the “jive talking” thing. He’s not a caricature just because he doesn’t talk like a white dude. Come to think of it, has there ever been a major black character in science fiction television who didn’t speak with a pretty neutral accent? Just in Star Trek, you’ve got Ben Sisko, Uhura, Worf, and Geordi.
I don’t know if LaMarr’s accent is completely unprecedented, but it’s certainly unexpected, and perhaps that’s what’s making you uncomfortable.
Bryan and Johnny both make great points.
They definitely should have known the anthropologists’ address.
And to expect black characters to have nothing culturally black about their speech patterns is a kind of whitewashing. Maybe this was important in the Cosby Show era, to counteract previous stereotyping. And I would never want there to be no black characters on TV who don’t use African-American vernacular, because those people do exist and deserve to be represented. But by completely avoiding the depiction of such characters, we are failing to provide realistic role models to kids, black characters they can recognize; and we are implicitly saying there’s something bad about the way the vast majority of African-Americans talk.
But he is also depicted as being stupid. Will that cause kids to believe that Black people should act stupidly?
Or Sliders. Or STtNG, or the Jon Ronson book…
And altho I am a big SF fan, I don’t watch Black Mirror nor do I know anyone who does.
They apparently knew the close location from where reports came.
Only to the extent of knowing which city, it seems. These records are damn sloppy - were the anthropologists hired by some kinda mining company?
Do you think he is depicted as being below average in intelligence? I don’t. He’s not that cautious, obviously; but I would say he comes across as having average or slightly above-average intelligence. Which is therefore not “stupid”.
Furthermore, we have a black doctor on the show who is clearly very intelligent. Is it your position that if there are stupid characters on a show, they can never be black?
LOL!
Thank you for that.