Though quite a few of us would want that hold job …
IIRC I read somewhere (might even be in this thread, didn’t look) that as far as writing duties he’s pretty much handed off Family Guy to a team, and was never involved that much in American Dad.
I’ve been physically out of commission for a couple of months, and this thread is way to long to read the whole thing, so forgive me if I repeat things that have already been said.
Does anyone else think Mercer is much to lenient on acts that call for a court martial? I realize it’s necessary in order to keep the main characters on the show, but in reality he would be encouraging bad or dangerous behavior.
I think one of funniest moments was when Bortus was about to sing. The anticipation followed by having it yanked away from us worked perfectly
Bortus eating part of Yaffid was also pretty funny. Bortus was the perfect choice.
Yaffid’s sexual attraction to the doctor almost breaks my suspension of disbelief. The species are so completely different that such an attraction makes no sense. But it is at least partly a comedy so I can forgive it.
I loved Issac’s practical joke. He is completely clueless as to the nature of humor and it is something that would be difficult to explain to a species that doesn’t have the concept. I assume the Seinfeld episode with the junior mint gave him the idea that mutilation or physical danger was funny. There’s some truth to that but only in the right circumstances and only if it’s fictional.
The episode with the time traveler had one large problem. When they destroyed the wormhole the traveler dissappeared and it was as if she had never come. Wouldn’t that mean that they would have died when they were supposed to?
“Time travel. Since my first day on the job as a Starfleet captain I swore I’d never let myself get caught in one of these godforsaken paradoxes - the future is the past, the past is the future, it all gives me a headache.” -Admiral Janeway.
Doc Brown of Back to the Future would say that destroying the worm hole caused a branch in the timeline. In one dimension, the Orville was destroyed. In the dimension of the story, it was not.
Great Scott!
I’m bugged by the concept of night on a starship.
When they’ve done it on star trek, it’s been crazy-stupid e.g. lamenting that “Nothing ever happens during the night shift”
Here, it’s not at that level (they imply that they schedule events during the day shift, so the night shift is quieter on average by design). But still, if all the main characters are out at the same time there must be at least a handful of equivalent senior officers (sans captain, xo) to run the show at “night”.
Given how fast the ship moves and how quickly it can get into trouble, it doesn’t make sense to rely on the crew getting " un-jammed".
Apart from that, and how camp the enlightened aliens were at the end, a nice ep.
Night is when it’s dark outside.
Oh yes, more Ensign Turco please (just what was she smoking?). Although Halston Sage is nice to have on the crew too.
Realizing this was the final episode of the season made me sad. I’ve come to like these people, goofy as they are, and look forward to their [del]antics[/del] explorations.
I would have stayed around that planet area for a few more months, gain 5 x 700 years of experiences, and be ready to take over the rest of the galaxy (especially the Krill). It’d be criminal to leave without more investigating. I thought this “time travel” episode was quite interesting, but basing an entire religion on a five-minute encounter with Kelly was pushing it.
Rule of funny, but I do imagine that Yaffid’s people consider him a sexual deviant (like we would consider someone sexually attacked to slime molds). Claire did seem to be having the time of her life though.
It’s almost like he thinks he works at a mining company instead of on a mid-level exploratory vessel.
To be fair she probably did start out as a minor spirit, then the village grew into a city-state with her has it’s a patron deity, and it’s possibly Kellyism didn’t expand beyond that region across the planet after her 2nd visit. All the while she’d just be absorbing traits from other deities, and would have all kind of attributes that would completely baffle the crew of the Orville.
For dramatic purposes though statues & icons of Kelly have to be accurate enough both for the crew to recognize them on site, and for the locals to recognize Kelly on site. And I think they made the right choice sending Isaac down instead of Kelly the 3rd time. All that would’ve accomplished would be her dying in obscurity in a mental institution while the society advanced exactly the same way as it would’ve with Isaac (or w/o Isaac).
Only because of the pheromones.
There are actual, living humans who are attracted to all sorts of non-human creatures and even objects. The idea that some aliens might be attracted to all sorts of stuff isn’t outrageous at all.
That’s the thing about aliens - their thought processes are alien. They don’t necessarily think the way we do.
Or, to flip it: if a race of Yaffids presented themselves to humanity tomorrow, would you place a bet that zero humans would want to do goopy things with one?
The real issue is that it has been established that Yaffid’s species reproduces by binary fission–so there shouldn’t be any kind of sexual attraction to anything.
From a Yaffid’s desires perspective it may not be a sexual attraction at all, but one of wanting companionship and a desire for intimacy. The sex for him could be more the pleasure of giving pleasure.
One can make up all sorts of back stories for his species but an easy one to imagine is that members of his species can do a lot more than the Vulcan mind meld, they can physically meld and by so doing have a closeness and intimacy with others that humans cannot even comprehend. The loneliness he would experience without that intimacy for a prolonged period of time would be deep. Miming human sexual intimacy is the closest substitute potentially available to him. (And on consideration the use of the male gender is only appropriate because the character seems to have chosen to identify as such in-universe but a gelatinous organism does give new meaning to “gender-fluid” …)
And we think about this way too much! 
Well, kind of new. 
So he’s a more easy-going version of Odo. Actually, Odo should have been more like Yaphit, in that there was no particular reason that he’d adopt and maintain a flawed humanoid form that happens to resemble René Auberjonois, except for the production costs of a CGI character in the 1990s.
Anyway, I gather we’re done with the “Isaac wants to learn about humanoids” stuff. He’s had 700 years to observe all he can handle. I can picture him asking specific questions about Earth (or, let’s be blunt given the show’s origin and casting; American) culture, but he’s gotta have the biological basics down by now.
For that matter, why not leave him on the planet a few more cycles and have him upload the planet’s collective knowledge every 11 days? Inside a month, tops, the Orville/Union could get tech that would squish the Krill. This is the problem with the open ending. The planet’s discovery is simply too huge an advantage to ignore.
Of course, every other TOS/TNG episode featured an advance too huge to ignore, yet they managed it handily.
No doubt! I don’t think Yaphit’s sexuality was meant to be any deeper a topic than the answer to life, the universe and everything being 42 (from another “sci-fi” series). Just some food for thought.
Fanwank: The Union try to put Isaac (or some other long-lived entity / AI) on the planet, but the guys on that world are now the far more advanced species and they decide letting us take tech or know-how could give us cultural contamination issues (Something like the “Kelly” problem, but not cause religion; cause some other problem beyond our current comprehension).
The next time the planet phases into our universe, there is an impassable, opaque force wall (that they made us pay for).
Of course this fanwank can’t fix the existing problem that they already had some tech that looked superior to the Union’s, that Isaac should know about.
But then again Issac’s species already has technology superior to the Union’s that they are not sharing.
But I like the cultural contamination the other way idea!
Which again calls back to Dragon’s Egg. The Cheela give humanity a library of information, but the key to the encripton of the chapter on interstellar propulsion is engraved on a pyramid on the third moon of the second planet of Epsilon Eridani.