Indeed, she and Bortus are two of the most competent senior members of the crew.
I tend to associate intelligence with behavior. Say he is depicted as being a dumb ass.
Agreed, but they were within blocks of the cafe the investigators hung out in.
FWIW, I have always thought Leon Black on Curb Your Enthusiasm crosses a line into minstrelsy (which IMO LaMarr does not), and I find it puzzling that Leon doesn’t seem to be controversial.
Hey, the set was only so large.
Maybe it’s because JB Smoove carries a large part of that same persona into his interviews.
Our evidence for his being intelligent is that his qualifications have been spoken aloud by a white guy. He ACTED like an idiot, and so far his idiocy in this episode constitutes half the meaningful screen time they’ve given him.
That would be the evidence for his being significantly above average in intelligence. I said he came across as average or slightly above average in intelligence. Like the guy who rings you up at the paint store, or the 17th-smartest person at a showing of Boo 2! A Medea Halloween.
One more observation about the upvote planet’s culture - convictions for public outrage seem to be relatively rare: although there are enough apology tours to keep an industry of PR flacks and talk shows busy, everybody remembers a conviction that occurred a month earlier (admittedly that’s was a local case, but still, I suspect that most natives who get into this kind of trouble manage to avoid “correction”)
By being shot?
I would not make a good starship Captain.
“You killed one of our anthropologists, brain damaged the other, and are planning to burn the brain of one of my crewmen. Evacuate the studio. It will be destroyed in half and hour. We will land a shuttle and expect our people to be aboard, or I will begin destroying buildings still occupied.”
By a convincing apology.
Well, there does seem to be a thriving counterfeit vote-badge market, which is so casually commonplace that news vendors are willing to publicly sell fakes to complete (and oddly-behaving) strangers for not-seemingly-huge amounts of cash. That negative-500,000 woman wandering around trying to buy a cup of coffee should just get herself a fake and then get on with her life.
I’m not sure how seriously we’re supposed to take this whole badge thing. It kinda looks like the society just practices a mild form of human sacrifice, picking some random slob who does something everyone can cluck their tongues at and “correcting” them. No doubt there’s a small energetic segment of the population who lives just to find and record and upload public displays of “tsk-tsk” behavour, like the people who compulsively make trivial wikipedia edits.
Back one episode, I wanted to comment on the final scene with the Krill. When the Krill surviving adult tells Mercer that the children “will…be” his enemies, I wanted him to follow up with a good Picard-like speech - “They already ARE my enemies. I’m working for the future. Maybe they’ll grow up with an open mind, and then they and our children can maybe make peace between our races. We can always go back to just shooting each other.”
I see your point, but one big part of the show is Mercer’s inexperience as a captain. The Enterprise was not Picard’s first command.
Yeah, and he’s not really one for dramatic, anvilicious speeches, either.
I agree. I liked the ending as it was - I guess I was imagining the ending if I were the captain. In real life, there’s no “ending point”, no last word moment - life just keeps going on.
If it were real life, Mercer probably had a stairway wit moment in his quarters. 
I have to admit some curiosity where that spiral staircase goes. I guess he might have his own private entrance to the bridge or one of the rooms adjoining the bridge. It’d be a tad extravagant from him to just have a second floor for living quarters.
Mercer strikes me as having an excellent technical handle on running a starship, but managing personnel and speechifying will have to come with experience, plus his career and confidence were kind of derailed when his marriage broke up.
Also, didn’t Mercer formally reprimand Bortus a few episodes back for doing something that was potentially embarrassing to Mercer and the Orville, over what turned out to be an extremely significant cultural matter to Bortus’s people? Compared that that, what LaMarr did was way worse and for an infinitely stupider reason and got Mercer chewed out by Admiral Tucker. Either Bortus’s reprimand should be lifted or LaMarr should be court-martialed, possibly demoted.
Mercer has some sort of command experience; we don’t know the details of his background, but it’s been noted that his career was going gangbusters until a year prior to taking command of Orville, when his marriage fell apart and him with it. He was top of his class and a fast-tracked officer; it seems pretty likely he has served in high ranks on ships before.
Which reminds me, the actor who plays Tucker is a three-time ST alum himself (scroll down): Ron Canada | Memory Alpha | Fandom
Nice!